Saturday, December 06, 2025
Too risque for the House of Lords?
As the Glyn Vivian website records the ensuing battle ended with Swansea winning the bid:
The building of the new Guildhall was underway and the city council proposed raising the Assembly Hall ceiling to 13.4 metres to accommodate the Panels. This tipped the scales in Swansea’s favour. With great pomp and excitement, the Assembly Hall was renamed the Brangwyn Hall – in honour of the Panels – and inaugurated with the rest of the building in October 1934 by the Duke of Kent. In 1937, it was visited by King George VI.
Following this purchase, Brangwyn gifted Swansea the preparatory drawings and studies for the Panels – all of which are under the care of Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. These sketches and small paintings, teeming with delicate foliage, flora and fauna are fabulous natural studies of the lands that Brangwyn travelled to (as well as the animals he visited regularly in London Zoo).
For Brangwyn had an enduring Romance with Asia, the Middle East and Moorish Spain that earned him accolades in America and Europe. Art historian Libby Horner argues that he was amongst the most revered artists of the 1900s for his merging of the so-called ‘decorative arts’ with fine art traditions. This holistic approach to art-making was inspired by his voyages. Brangwyn sailed the seas for much of 1880s and 1890s, visiting Spain, Japan, North and South Africa and Istanbul. Influenced by the Continent’s fascination with Orientalist paintings, he made vivid-hued paintings of Egypt, Turkey and Morocco, which he visited in 1893.
The panels are controversial as they are both risque and hark back to an earlier age of empire. The Glyn Vivian site suggests that the House of Lords’ reason for rejecting them in 1930 was because they were teeming with “tits and bananas”:
They hardly sit comfortably with current sensibilities either. How can one help but notice the bare bodies and servile positions ascribed to the ‘native’ females? In the light of BlackLivesMatter and the urgent need to ‘decolonise’ the past, one has to agree with young activist Stevie MacKinnon Smith’s assessment that the Panels’ regressive colonial narrative needs to be addressed; that “their continued display without this acknowledgment is problematic”.
This article on Wales-on-Line says that Brangwyn intended for them to be a memorial to the First World War, and for a gloomy hall to be brought to life with a representation of the British Empire:
The plan was for them to be situated in the Royal Chamber, and Brangwyn made many considerations to the chosen location when painting the work, from the lighting that would enter the room, to allowing for the darkening of his work through the thick smoke from the peers' cigars.
But five years later came an announcement that the artist could not have foreseen.
After years of work and effort, a decision was made for the commission to be rejected, something at the time which was considered a great scandal, and a decision which reportedly left the artist heartbroken.
The Fine Art Commission made the decision as it felt it was not of the Cubist style then in vogue.
Whatever the reason for their rejection by the House of Lords, they remain a colourful addition to Swansea's premier concert hall.
