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Aberglasney Gardens in Carmarthenshire has been inspiring art and poetry for centuries, but now the visionary who led its rescue from dereliction almost three decades ago is about to celebrate that anniversary with a special exhibition.
William Wilkins, one of the most successful contemporary artists working in Wales, will have a collection of his paintings and drawings on display at the gardens in the Towy Valley next month.
The retrospective is a timely celebration of his work spanning more than 60 years, and will be set against the backdrop of the gardens and its Grade II listed mansion, that he was instrumental in saving from the brink of collapse in the late 1990s.
It will be the first of several events over coming months to mark the 25th anniversary of Aberglasney opening to the public.
The estate, near the village of Llangathen, was bought by the Aberglasney Restoration Trust in 1995, thanks to money donated by American financier and horticulturist Frank Cabot. The ensuing restoration project was overseen by Mr Wilkins, who was founder of the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust and also a driving force behind the nearby National Botanic Garden of Wales.
He oversaw the masterplan for the restoration of Aberglasney’s gardens and mansion, and was the first chair of the Aberglasney Restoration Trust, in 2003 he was awarded the CBE for services to the environment.
Thanks to the generosity of individual donors, trust funds, charitable donations and grant money from many statutory bodies a tremendous amount of work was done at Aberglasney in a very short time. The restoration was documented by the BBC television series Aberglasney: A Garden Lost in Time, and it finally opened to the public on July 4, 1999. Since then restoration work has continued, with the completion of the mansion’s ground floor in spring 2013 and the Old Piggeries restoration project in 2016, which is used for workshops and propagating plants.
Today it is one of Wales’s finest gardens, and at its heart lies a fully restored Elizabethan cloister garden that is the only surviving example of its kind in the UK today. Beyond this, visitors can explore 10 acres of over 20 different garden styles from formal to woodland, right through to exotic and modern, along with the fully restored ground floor of the mansion offering a stunning venue for exhibitions and events.
The origin of Aberglasney’s history is uncertain, but there is an early mention of “nine green gardens” in a medieval poem. It wasn’t until the time of the first High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire, Sir William Thomas, who was knighted by King Henry VIII, that Aberglasney’s story is recorded.
Speaking from his home near Llandeilo, Mr Wilkins, 86, looks back to how Aberglasney’s return all began and the celebration of 25 years of being enjoyed by tens of thousands of visitors, said:
“We didn’t save Aberglasney at the eleventh hour, we saved it at the 59th minute of that eleventh hour. Once we were able to create the restoration trust, we really had to move fast and get started with work because there was so much to do, it was a huge project.
“Prior to when we started, the cloisters were buried in soil, there was a mixture of Japanese Knotweed and six-foot brambles growing over almost everything, the gate house and the mansion house were on the point of collapse.”
As the work went on Mr Wilkins said: “It was my belief that we should open it at the earliest possible moment, so people could participate in the story of its restoration. Even before 1999, I encouraged parties of people to come in and see the work in progress because it made a very interesting story, to see a garden be restored and come back to life only comes along once or twice in a lifetime.”
Mr Wilkins’s drive planted a seed at the gardens which has flourished and grown under the leadership of others who succeeded him over the years.
He said: “I think what I’m most proud of is actually saving it, because it has been taken forward by others over the years. It is an absolutely wonderful garden that has been created by my successors. It takes imagination to drive these things forward.”
Turning to his upcoming exhibition at the gardens called Allusion and Luminosity, it will showcase recent paintings not exhibited before, a selection of work from the past six decades and rarely seen private loans.
His work is included in national collections and regional museums as well as private foundations. He is known not only for his painstaking pointillism technique but also for working ‘in-situ’ which means many of his landscapes and studies of light can take several years to complete.
This means that when he decides on painting a certain view in a certain light – such as a field on a sunny autumn morning – he only has a short period of time to capture that scene each year, so has found himself returning to the same spot over time, with the average painting taking up to three to four years to complete, he has one which took 13 years.
The pointillism technique itself also takes time, branching from Impressionism and developed by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in 1886, it sees small, distinctive dots of colour applied in patterns to form an image.
These days he also paints at home in his studio and draws inspiration from his own garden, which he has been restoring.
He explained: “A painting created in my studio can be a few months in the making as opposed to the ‘in situ’ work of travelling to a spot year after year at the same time, in the same weather to continue capturing a scene. I work in my studio or very close to home now, but I still visit Venice for a month every year to paint.”
The great-grandson of the architect of the National Gallery in London, Mr Wilkins was born in Suffolk in 1938, before moving to West Wales two years later where he grew up in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire – he later trained at Swansea College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London.
He then taught and painted for seven years before a radical change of direction in the late 1960s, abandoning the abstract work on which he had been doing and starting a rigorous regime of drawing, in particular figure, still life and landscapes. This lasted for five years before he returned to painting in 1974 and started using pointillism.
He also founded the £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize in 2002, the UK’s largest visual arts award based in Cardiff, which he chaired for 12 years. While Mr Wilkins lives and works in Wales, over the years he has held exhibitions in cities including London and New York.
Talking about his upcoming exhibition at Aberglasney, Mr Wilkins said: “It includes drawings from 1968 to 1974 and then paintings from the mid 70s onwards, there will be around 36 pieces on.
As the founding chairman of the Aberglasney Restoration Trust and project director of the restoration I am very pleased to be exhibiting as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations at Aberglasney. I am proud that it continues to go from strength to strength and continues to be an inspiration.”
The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer described him as “an artist of distinction”, having “an eye that is expert in its analysis of light” and “a delicacy of feeling that elevates a very fastidious technique to the level of poetry”.
Phillip Ratcliffe, chairman of Aberglasney Gardens board of trustees said: “It is a fitting tribute to the work of this internationally successful artist and Aberglasney supporter that we are able to host this exhibition as part of our 25th anniversary celebrations.”
Allusion and Luminosity: A Retrospective Exhibition, opens at Aberglasney Gardens on Saturday, May 4 and runs until Thursday, May 23.
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