National Museum Cardiff

The Travel Pages visits the National Museum Cardiff, with its remarkable Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections.

 The National Museum Cardiff has the best collection of Impressionist paintings in Britain, and that alone is reason enough to visit. The collection is all the more amazing when you discover that it was amassed by two Welsh spinster sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies (1882-1951 and 1884-1963 respectively), who inherited an enormous fortune from their grandfather, who made his money from coal, the railways, and the docks.

Impressive Impressionists

To give some idea of the collection’s quality, in one room alone we found sculptures by Degas and Rodin, including a copy of The Kiss, three of Monet’s Waterlilies paintings and several more of his works including three Venice paintings which the Davies sisters bought in Paris at an exhibition of Monet’s work in 1912, their first Impressionist purchases.

Monet, Manet, and Renoir

One of Monet’s Rouen Cathedral works is also here, alongside works by Manet and Renoir. One of the gems in the room is Renoir’s La Parisienne, displayed at the 1874 exhibition which gave Impressionism its name.

In other areas of the gallery are works by Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Matisse, Utrillo, Max Ernst, LS Lowry and of course a fine display of works by Welsh artists, right through to the present day.

In the same building there are also geology, archaeology and natural history exhibits, which are also exceptionally good, but the art collection does rather overshadow them. Definitely head for the art collections first.