The story
The National Library of Wales is primarily a library, the great national store of Welsh books, manuscripts and archives, but it also keeps a serious art collection, and some of its pictures go on show in its galleries on Penglais Hill above Aberystwyth.
The building, designed by the architect Sidney Greenslade, rose after its foundation stone was laid in 1911. In 1939, with London expecting bombs, part of the National Gallery's collection was sent here for safety, and a tunnel was cut into the hillside beneath the library to shelter treasures from the British Museum.
The best-known painting is a small oil on panel by J. M. W. Turner, the English landscape painter, showing Dolbadarn Castle in Snowdonia. It is a study for the much larger canvas Turner gave the Royal Academy in 1800, and it shows Owain Goch, a Welsh prince, being led to the tower where his brother Llywelyn kept him prisoner. The library bought it in 1998. Beside it the collection holds work by Gwen John, the Pembrokeshire-born painter, among them a still life of a vase of flowers.
