Swansea Council’s Glynn Vivian Art Gallery presents Cliffs, coves and cockles: picturing Gower, on display from May 18, 2024 to January 12, 2025.

It has been programmed to coincide with the Gower Festival of Music and the Arts 2024, which takes place in July. Celebrating Gower as an inspiration for artists adds a special local interest to this year’s festival.

The Gower Peninsula was the first place in Britain to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and its dramatic rocky coastline, beaches, hills and valleys provide outdoor leisure and enjoyment for Swansea residents and visitors alike.

Tourist views of its top attractions, particularly Three Cliffs Bay and Rhossili, are widely publicised. Both local and visiting artists, however, have responded to Gower and its scenery with more personal approaches. These range from industrial subjects in northeast Gower by Ceri Richards and Archie Rhys Griffiths, to summer beach scenes and watercolour landscape sketches by Will Evans and the richly coloured expressive visions of Glenys Cour.

From Cedric Morris, visiting North Gower in the 1930s, painting its hills and farms and looking across the water to the chimneys of industrial Loughor, to Czech émigré painter, Ernest Neuschul, being moved by the strenuous work of the cockle pickers of Penclawdd, the exhibition will explore farmland, moors and commons of the interior of the peninsula, the beautiful marshes of the Loughor Estuary and the spectacular cliffs and coves overlooking the Bristol Channel.

The display features work from the Glynn Vivian permanent collection and selected artworks in this exhibition have been loaned from Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, as part of the National Contemporary Art Gallery for Wales initiative, Celf ar y Cyd.

Kirstine Brander Dunthorne, curator of the exhibition, said: “The Gower Festival of Music and the Arts takes place every year in July, ‘bringing internationally acclaimed musicians to play in the superb acoustic and atmosphere of Gower’s ancient churches’. Other types of performance, talks and poetry readings also appear on the programme and in 2024 it’s the turn of the visual arts. I am delighted that the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery has given me the opportunity to curate Cliffs, Coves and Cockles: Picturing Gower, a selection of work from the permanent collection which celebrates Gower as an inspiration for artists.

"The display ranges from a tiny drawing of Oystermouth Castle by Thomas Rowlandson to views of Gower by Lucien Pissarro, Cedric Morris and Kyffin Williams and features the colourful, abstracted landscapes of Mumbles artist, Glenys Cour, a long-standing Gower Festival supporter, whose 100th birthday we are celebrating this year. During the Festival in July, visitors will also be able to tour Gower Open Studios, and view the work of twenty contemporary artists working in Gower. A leaflet with opening hours and addresses will be available free at the Gallery.”