: Casgliadau ac Ymchwil

Teclynnau Pren

Mae’n siwr y gallwch restri llawer o’r delweddau sydd o’n cwmpas mewn siopau ac yn y cyfryngau yn ystod adeg y Pasg:  wyau siocled lliwgar, cywion a chwningod bach fflwfflyd, y lili wen a theisennau simnel i enwi rhai ohonynt.

Ond tybed a ydych chi’n gwybod beth yw’r ddau declyn yn y lluniau ar y dde?

 

Arferion y Pasg

Yr wythnos hon bûm yn gwrando ar recordiadau yn yr Archif Sain yn ymwneud ag arferion y Pasg.  Ceir sôn am ystod eang o draddodiadau:  eisteddfota; “creu gwely Crist”; canu carol Basg; torri gwallt a thacluso’r barf ar ddydd Iau Cablyd er mwyn edrych yn daclus dros y Pasg; bwyta pysgod, hongian bwnen a cherdded i’r eglwys yn droednoeth ar ddydd Gwener y Groglith; yfed diod o ddŵr ffynnon a siwgr brown ar y Sadwrn cyn y Pasg; dringo i ben mynydd i weld yr haul yn “dawnsio” gyda’r wawr a gwisgo dillad newydd ar Sul y Pasg; chwarae gêm o gnapan ar Sul y Pasg Bach (sef y dydd Sul wedi’r Pasg).

 

Clapio Wyau

Ond y traddodiad a dynnodd fy sylw fwyaf oedd yr arfer ar Ynys Môn o fynd i glapio wyau.  Byddai mynd i glapio (neu glepio) cyn y Pasg yn arfer poblogaidd gan blant yr ynys flynyddoedd yn ôl, a dyna yw’r ddau declyn y gellir eu gweld ar y dde:  clapwyr pren.

Yn ôl Elen Parry a anwyd yn y Gaerwen yn 1895 ac a recordiwyd gan yr Amgueddfa yn 1965:

Fydda ni fel rheol yn câl awr neu ddwy dudwch o’r ysgol, ella rhyw ddwrnod neu ddau cyn cau’r ysgol er mwyn cael mynd i glapio cyn y Pasg.  Fydda chi bron a neud o ar hyd yr wsnos, ond odd na un dwrnod arbennig yn yr ysgol bydda chi’n câl rhyw awr neu ddwy i fynd i glapio.  Bydda bron pawb yn mynd i glapio.  A wedyn bydda’ch tad wedi gwneud beth fydda ni’n galw yn glapar.  A beth odd hwnnw?  Pishyn o bren a rhyw ddau bishyn bach bob ochor o bren wedyn, a hwnnw’n clapio, a dyna beth odd clapar.

Byddai’r plant yn mynd o amgylch y ffermydd lleol (neu unrhyw dyddyn lle cedwid ieir) yn curo ar ddrysau, yn ysgwyd y clapwyr ac yn adrodd rhigwm bach tebyg i hwn:

Clap, clap, os gwelwch chi’n dda ga’i wŷ

Geneth fychan (neu fachgen bychan) ar y plwy’

A dyma fersiwn arall o’r pennill gan Huw D. Jones o’r Gaerwen:

Clep, Clep dau wŷ

Bachgen bach ar y plwy’

Byddai’r drws yn cael ei agor a’r hwn y tu mewn i’r tŷ yn gofyn “A phlant bach pwy ’dach chi?”  Ar ôl cael ateb, byddai perchennog y tŷ yn rhoi wŷ yr un i’r plant.  Yn ôl Elen Parry:

Fe fydda gyda chi innau pisar bach, fel can bach, ne fasgiad a gwellt ne laswellt at waelod y fasgiad.  Ac wedyn dyna wŷ bob un i bawb.  Wel erbyn diwadd yr amsar fydda gyda chi ella fasgedad o wyau.

Fel arfer, byddai trigolion y tŷ yn adnabod y plant ac os byddai chwaer neu frawd ar goll, byddid yn rhoi wŷ i’r rhai absennol yn un o’r basgeidiau.  Dyma ddywedodd Mary Davies, o Fodorgan a anwyd yn 1894 ac a recordiwyd gan yr Amgueddfa yn 1974:

A wedyn, os bydda teulu’r tŷ yn gwbod am y plant bach ’ma, faint fydda ’na, a rheini ddim yno i gyd, fydda nhw'n rhoed wyau ar gyfer rheini hefyd iddyn nhw.

 

Wyau ar y Dresel

Ar ôl cyrraedd adref byddai’r plant yn rhoi’r wyau i’w mam a hithau yn eu rhoi ar y dresel gydag wyau’r plentyn hynaf ar y silff uchaf, wyau’r ail blentyn ar yr ail silff ac yn y blaen.

Gellid casglu cryn dipyn o wyau gyda digon o egni ac ymroddiad.  Yn ôl Joseph Hughes a anwyd ym Miwmaris yn 1880 ac a recordiwyd gan yr Amgueddfa yn 1959:

Bydda amball un wedi bod dipyn yn haerllug a wedi bod wrthi’n o galad ar hyd yr wythnos.  Fydda ganddo fo chwech ugian.  Dwi’n cofio gofyn i frawd fy ngwraig, “Fuost ti’n clapio Wil?”, “Wel do”, medda fo.  “Faint o hwyl ges ti?”, “O ches i mond cant a hannar”.

 

Math o Gardota?

Er bod pawb fel arfer yn rhoi wyau i’r plant, mae’n debyg y byddai rhai yn gwrthod ac yn ateb y drws gan ddweud “Mae’r ieir yn gori” neu “Dydy’r gath ddim wedi dodwy eto”.  Byddai rhai rhieni hefyd yn gyndyn i’w plant fynd i glapio gan eu bod yn gweld yr arfer fel math o gardota.  Dyma ddywedodd un siaradwr:

Fydda nhad fyth yn fodlon i ni fynd achos oedd pawb yn gwybod pwy oedd nhad.  Wel fydda nhad byth yn licio y byddan ni wedi bod yn y drws yn begio, ond mynd fydda ni.

 

Adfywiad

Mae’n fendigedig gweld fod yr arfer o glapio wedi ei adfywio bellach ar Ynys Môn ac felly, mae’n debyg am un wythnos o'r flwyddyn, unwaith eto yng Nghymru, mae’n ddiogel ac yn dderbyniol i roi eich holl wyau yn yr un fasged!

Dyma rhai o'r tywyswyr Big Pit - Barry Stevenson, Richard Phillips a Len Howells - i rannu atgofion o weithio yn y pyllau glo.

Mae'r ffilmiau yn cynnwyd lluniau o'r Casgliad Cornwell. Fe'u cynhyrchwyd yn wreiddiol i'r arddangosfa 'Bernd a Hilla Becher: Delweddau Diwydiant', ynghyd â'r ffilm yma am yr offer weindio:

On 15 March we launch our new LGBTQ+ tours at National Museum Cardiff. The tours have been developed in partnership with Pride Cymru working with self-confessed Museum queerator Dan Vo and an amazing team of volunteers.

You may already have read Norena Shopland's blog about the Ladies of Llangollen, and Young Heritage Leader Jake’s post, Queer Snakes! There are so many more LGBTQ+ stories in our collection – stories that have been hidden in dusty museum closets for too long. Friends, it’s time for us to let them out!

To whet your appetite, here’s a quick glimpse at one of the works you might spot on the tour…

The Mower, by Sir William Hamo Thornycoft

The Mower is a bronze statuette on display in our Victorian Art gallery. It is about half a metre high and shows a topless young farmworker in a hat and navvy boots resting with his arm on his hip, holding a scythe. This sassy pose, known as contrapposto, was inspired by Donatello’s David - a work with its own queer story to tell.

The Mower was made by William Hamo Thornycroft, one of the most famous sculptors in Britain in the nineteenth century, and was given to the Museum in 1928 by Sir William Goscombe John. An earlier, life-size version is at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and is said to be the first significant free-standing sculpture showing a manual labourer made in Britain.

Thornycroft became fascinated with manual labourers and the working classes after being introduced to socialist ideas by his wife, Agatha Cox. He wrote ‘Every workman’s face I meet in the street interests me, and I feel sympathy with the hard-handed toilers & not with the lazy do nothing selfish ‘upper-ten.’ In The Mower, he presents the body of a young working-class man as though it's a classical hero or god – a brave move for the time.

Queering the Mower

With the rising interest in queer theory, many art historians have drawn attention to the queer in this sculpture. In an article by Michael Hatt the work is described as homoerotic, which he describes as that ambiguous space between the homosocial and homosexual.

One of the main factors is the artist’s relationship with Edmund Gosse, a writer and critic who helped establish Thornycroft’s reputation in the art world. Gosse was married with children, but his letters to Thornycroft give us a touching insight into their relationship.

He describes times they spent together basking in the sun in meadows and swimming naked in rivers; and they are filled with love poems and giddy declarations of affection. ‘Nature, the clouds, the grass, everything takes on new freshness and brightness now I have you to share the world with,’ he wrote. Gosse was so obsessed with Thornycroft that writer Lytton Strachey famously joked he wasn’t homosexual, but Hamo-sexual.

Gosse and Thornycroft were spending time together when the first inspiration for The Mower hit. They were sailing with a group of friends up the Thames when they spotted a real-life mower on the riverbank, resting. Thornycroft made a quick sketch, and the idea for the sculpture was born. A wax model sketch from 1882 is at the Tate.

The real-life mower they saw was wearing a shirt, but for his sculpture Thornycroft stripped him down. He explained to his wife that he wanted to ‘keep his hat on and carry his shirt’ and that a brace over his shoulder will help ‘take off the nude look’.

Brace or no brace, it’s difficult to hide the fact that this is a celebration of the male body designed for erotic appeal. Thornycroft used an Italian model, Orazio Cervi. Cervi was famous in Victorian Britain for his ‘perfectly proportioned physique’ (art historical speak for a hot bod!)

Later in the century, photographs of The Mower and other artworks were collected and exchanged in secret along with photographs of real life nudes, by a network of men mostly in London – a kind of queer subculture, although it wouldn’t have been understood in those terms back then.

This was dangerous ground. The second half of the nineteenth century saw what has been described as a ‘homosexual panic’, with rising anxieties around gender identity, sexuality and same-sex desire. Fanny and Stella, the artist Simeon Solomon and Oscar Wilde were among many who were hounded and publicly prosecuted for ‘indecent’ behaviour.

These tensions showed up in the art world too. Many of the artists associated with the Aesthetic and Decadent movements in particular were under scrutiny for producing works that were described as ‘effeminate’, ‘degenerate’ or ‘decadent’. But works like The Mower suggest that art might have provided a safer space for playing out private desires in a public arena at this time.

 

Book your place on our free volunteer-led LGBTQ+ tours here, and keep an eye on our website and social media for future dates!  

 

The current display Imagine a Castle: Paintings from the National Gallery, London offers a great opportunity to see a selection of European Old Master paintings for the first time in Wales alongside Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales’s own collection.

Comparing European and Welsh castles and the history and legends that come with them plays a vital part in defining Welsh cultural identity. Yet the history of castles in Wales is, for some, contentious.

To find out why we need to go back to the thriteenth century. During this time, there were many disputes between Welsh princes and English kings. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (last Prince of Wales) was involved in many disputes with Edward I, who launched a vicious campaign on the Welsh. This resulted in Llywelyn losing his power, land, titles and ultimately his life.

Following this English victory, Edward began the most ambitious castle-building policy ever seen in Europe. His collection of fortresses became known as the infamous ‘iron ring’ and included those at Harlech, Caernarfon and Conwy. They were intended to intimidate the Welsh and subdue uprisings. Along with these English-built fortresses came new towns that were intentionally populated with English settlers. Welsh people were forbidden to trade or sometimes even enter into the towns’ walls. Yet, while these castles remind us of English power over the Welsh, the strength of their construction underlines that Edward was conscious of the formidable and ever-present threat of Welsh resistance.

To acknowledge the histories of castles in Wales, we have included works from two Welsh artists, the ‘father of British landscape painting’, Richard Wilson, whose works offer an eighteenth-century perspective, and contemporary artist Peter Finnemore.

Wilson’s work reflects his travels to Italy and the influence of the hugely important French landscape painter, Claude Lorrain, whose work can also be seen in this exhibition. Wilson painted many Welsh landscapes and is recognised as changing the face of British landscape painting. While his work encouraged artists to come to Wales, many of his later Welsh compositions, such as Caernarfon Castle (Edward’s main seat in Wales) remind us more of the warmer climates of Italy. As such, they also point to his inspirations outside of Wales.

On the other hand, Finnemore’s photographic works, Lesson 56 – Wales and Ancient Ruler Worship (made especially for this display), look at castles in Wales from a more recent Welsh perspective. Finnemore’s work revolves around his Welsh-speaking grandmother’s school textbooks that were written from an English standpoint. Her childhood drawings in these books humorously undermine the didactic English text. Ancient Ruler Worship depicts Castell Carreg Cennen and looks back to World War II. It is taken from a still in Humphry Jennings’s propaganda film, Silent Village, that portrayed this castle as a site of Welsh resistance during an imagined Nazi invasion. The film demonstrated solidarity with Lidice, a mining village in the Czech Republic that was totally destroyed by the Nazis.

Whatever we may feel about their history, many of Edward’s Welsh castles are now designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites. Edward left a unique and internationally important legacy of medieval military architecture that can only be seen in Wales.

What is Ming?

Ming is an Ocean Quahog clam with the scientific name of Arctica islandica. It was nicknamed Ming when scientists discovered that it would have been born in 1499 during the Ming Dynasty of China. Ocean Quahogs grow up to 13 cm long and the oldest one fished off the coast of Iceland was 507 years old, making it the oldest non-colonial animal known to science.

Where do Ocean Quahogs live?

Ocean Quahogs belong to a big group of shells called ‘bivalves’. Most bivalves are filter feeders and suck in water through their tube-like siphons (you can see in the photo, the two holes surrounded by darker pink). While lying on the seabed or buried in the sand or mud bivalves can safely take food particles and oxygen from the water.

Ming was collected from the deep waters around Iceland but we get this species in British and Irish waters too, although it does not live to such a great age here. The waters surrounding our islands are warmer than those surrounding Iceland, which is just south of the Arctic Circle. Warm waters hold less dissolved oxygen than cold water and so around the UK the Ocean Quahog needs to work harder to get oxygen and so has a faster metabolism. A faster metabolism means that it grows quicker but when animals have a fast metabolism they do not live as long. In the colder waters surrounding Iceland the Ocean Quahog has a slower metabolism and so grows slowly and may even live for longer than 507 – scientists just haven’t found an older one yet!

 

How long do animals live?

Some other bivalve molluscs can live for a long time as well. Giant clams can grow to 4 feet long (1.2 m) and live for around 100 years. They have tiny plant cells in their tissue that photosynthesize producing energy from the sun to give to the clam. This is why they reach such a large size – talk about plant power!

The Geoduck, which lives in the coastal waters of western Canada and USA, can live for 164 years. It is known as Gooey duck and has large meaty siphons that are a popular food for humans!

Come to our Insight gallery at Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd - National Museum Cardiff to to find out more about how long animals can live for and much more...

 

An introduction to Ming the clam can be found here:

https://museum.wales/blog/2020-02-11/Meet-Ming-the-clam---the-oldest-animal-in-the-world/