Sir Kyffin Williams RA (1918 - 2006)

In March 2020, his oil Evening Llangwyfan realised £40,000. For the collector, it "ticked several of the Kyffin boxes" - a vivid yellow sunset, an old Anglesey farm and Kyffin's box-shaped cattle. The picture radiated positivity, the custard-yellow sunset shocking against the lush, shadowy green land.

We were delighted to wave it off in the car boot of its new owner, who declared: "It has always been my ambition to own a Kyffin sunset." So what is it about Sir Kyffin Williams that keeps delivering, Welsh Sale to Welsh Sale, year after year?

We have sold many hundreds of Kyffin Williams works over the years. Looking at a representative group of 113 of them gives a clear picture of the market.

Prices have ranged from a few hundred pounds for prints and small works on paper up to £61,000 for a major oil. The average result is around £20,000 and the median £18,000, and, tellingly, 44% of all works sold for £20,000 or more.

His original oils sit firmly at the top of the market, while watercolours, ink wash studies, linocuts and signed prints offer more accessible entry points for newer collectors of Welsh art.

The painterly quality of his work is plain to see. His oils are typically built up with strikes of the palette knife in a bold, efficient manner, and it is the sheer confidence of that technique that appeals.

His watercolours and ink wash pictures, by contrast, have a freedom about them; they are studied, but never constrained by their subject. And throughout runs a keen eye for character: the old farmer's arthritic hand, the concentrated pose of a working sheepdog, the shafts of light and dark storms across his rugged landscapes.

His work and life are exceptionally well documented. There are so many books on Kyffin that there ought to be a sub-section under "K" in every Welsh art enthusiast's library. His own autobiographies, Across the Straits and A Wider Sky, are the best starting points: easy-reading, Roald Dahl-esque, full of self-deprecating humour and told from a wholly original point of view. Kyffin was the consummate raconteur, and that humour, awkwardness, storytelling, his epilepsy and his solitude were every bit as important to his art as the trademark sunsets, farmhouses, cattle and old farmers.

Kyffin's paintings are documentaries. They are nostalgic vignettes of a Wales that is becoming steadily less traditionally Welsh.

The upland farms once bursting with life are crumbling to the ground. The old, stooped farmer on his way to a funeral - soon enough his own - is now just a distant memory and an order of service in the dresser drawer. The small chapels stand among timeless dry-stone walls, but there is a single Audi parked outside and an English house name on the door.

Only Kyffin's Snowdonia peaks are unaffected. They remain resolute above the old stone walls, and it is this meeting of timelessness and nostalgia, both as powerful as the other, that gives his work its grip.

Kyffin connects us to the land, to a simpler time we yearn for, to the fathers and forefathers we miss. In a confusing, materialistic world, he is our earth wire.

He takes us back to the fields we explored as children, to the chapel hymn now scarcely whistled, to a time and place before the fast roads came, taking people out and bringing others in. Ultimately, his work evokes hiraeth: that untranslatable Welsh longing for home.

At this uneasy moment in our history, the reasons his paintings remain the object of such ambition have never been clearer.

We knew Sir Kyffin Williams socially in his later life, and after he died, Rogers Jones & Co were honoured to be asked to value his estate. But it is through our work as auctioneers, handling his paintings and talking to the people who knew him, that we have come to understand him best.

That expertise sits behind every Kyffin we bring to the Welsh Sale and it is at your disposal whether you are considering selling or simply need a valuation for insurance.

If you would like your Kyffin Williams painting assessed and valued, please request a valuation from our fine art specialist, Ben Rogers Jones.