This book is about Welsh pictures painted between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. It mainly concerns how pictures are understood by the people who use them - patrons, museum curators, and the general public - rather than by the painters who paint them. It consists of a series of chapters on different aspects of painting. Reprint; first published in August 2009.

Dyma gyfrol am ddarluniau Cymreig o bwys a beintiwyd rhwng y ddeunawfed a'r ugeinfed ganrif. Mae'r astudiaeth yn edrych ar sut mae'r bobl sy'n eu defnyddio wedi'u dehongli - noddwyr, curaduron amgueddfeydd, a'r cyhoedd - yn hytrach na'r arlunwyr eu hunain. Ceir hefyd gyfres o benodau'n edrych ar wahanol agweddau o arlunio. Adargraffiad; cyhoeddwyd gyntaf Awst 2009.

Peter Lord is nothing if not a controversial figure. Described by the chair of the Welsh Books Council, Professor M Wynn Thomas, as "the one-time enfant terrible" of Welsh visual culture, over the last two decades his writings have changed the understanding of Wales’ place within art history. His latest book, The Meaning of Pictures, continues his thesis, began in his ground-breaking The Visual Culture of Wales, that Welsh art has its own distinctive visual cultural identity.

It is Lord's particular interest in Wales' artisan painters that forms the core of this new book. Unlike in the United States where such work has gained huge recognition, here in Wales these painters had been largely ignored. Concentrating on the work of three artists, eighteenth-century painter John Lewis; Archie Rees Griffiths, a one-time miner turned painter who produced much work throughout the second third of the twentieth century, and Hugh Hughes, Wales' most active nineteenth-century painter, Lord charts his own struggle to have these and other Welsh artists acknowledged by the art world.

The book questions much of how visual culture has been constructed in the past, examining how social class, national aspirations and the vested interests of the established art world have, Lord believes, often distorted Wales' cultural heritage. Illustrated with many works that have not been easily accessible before and some that are reproduced here for the first time, The Meaning of Pictures is readable yet scholarly work that is made all the more interesting by the author's recognisably forthright style.

Michael Nobbs

It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.