The Painting on the Wall
by John Barnie
When I was growing up in Abergavenny, people didn’t have paintings on the walls. What they had was an assemblage of family photographs—the children at various stages; a wedding photo from the ’30s; a faded image of grandparents.
These were usually arranged on top of the china cabinet in the front room, the frames and glass dusted once a week. This was still the days of black-and-white photography, though a special studio portrait might be hand-coloured in pastel tints, somewhat in the spirit of the embalmer’s art.
Paintings never entered our consciousness; we knew nothing about art, never visited an art gallery, knew only the names of a painter or two—Van Gogh, Gainsborough—who were dead. To have spent money on a painting would have seemed extraordinary. Why on earth would you do that?
Only in grammar school did I have a brief contact with art in the form of our art master Huw Davies. In sixth form, we had a weekly hour of art appreciation, and Huw used colour slides to talk about perspective, design, colour and light; and once I saw him in a field at Llanwenarth with easel and brushes, painting a landscape. That lodged in my mind, as something remarkable.
When I moved to Copenhagen, I was introduced to a different culture where it was quite natural to display paintings on the walls, though it never occurred to me that I might buy one myself.
This only changed when I came to work for Planet in Aberystwyth in 1985 and got to know Peter Lord who was beginning to forge a career as an historian of Welsh art. We published some of his first articles and one of his earliest books, Words with Pictures.
As colour printing became cheaper, we began to feature Welsh art on a regular basis—profiles, exhibition reviews, statements by artists, and what you might call the archaeology of Welsh art, the rediscovery of painters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of them lost to sight, or slighted, for generations, until reinterpreted most notably in the pioneering studies of Peter Lord.
In the 1950s and ’60s it was axiomatic that ‘there is no Welsh art’ apart from Augustus John and one or two other painters who had caught the attention of London, and if there was any, it was mediocre, inferior to the grand tradition of the European masters.
Over a thirty-five-year period Peter has given the lie to this in books and essays, television programmes, talks and exhibitions, recovering in the process painters like Hugh Hughes, William Jones Chapman, and William Roos—in some instances recovering them quite literally, finding long forgotten paintings in attics, antique shops, auctions, where neither their significance nor their worth were understood, because their context in Welsh cultural history had been lost.
Part of Peter’s achievement has been to open our eyes both to the variety of Welsh art and more crucially to its meaning. So, for instance, he has unearthed the biographies of nineteenth-century journeyman painters like Hughes and Chapman, who tramped from town to town seeking commissions for portraits, usually among the bourgeoisie and lesser gentry.
These artisan painters were frequently self-taught, exhibiting varying degrees of sophistication in technique. Such painters are highly prized in America but not so in Wales where their achievement has often been dismissed or ignored.
A collector himself, Peter’s house, including a purpose-built extension, is crammed with paintings from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. It is in fact a one-man museum of Welsh art, and for some years now Peter has sought backing for a museum which would house his collection and that of one or two other significant collectors.
Wales being Wales the necessary financial backing has not been forthcoming. ‘A good idea, but…’
This contrasts sharply with the small Danish island of Bornholm. Set apart in the Baltic, Bornholm has a special light which has attracted painters rather like St Ives in Cornwall. There is a purpose-built museum on the island to display the wonderful art produced over the past one hundred years.
It is located by itself on the coast and might seem too remote to attract visitors (an objection raised about many potential sites in Wales), yet when I was there the carpark was full, including several coaches, and the museum bustling. Where there is a will, the money can be found. In Wales so far the will is lacking.
A year ago, it came to me that I had to write about paintings in Peter’s collection, and twenty-two poems wrote themselves in quick succession. The result is a small book, Afterlives, with the paintings and poems facing one another.
It is published Spring, 2021 under Cinnamon Press’s imprint Leaf by Leaf. The same thing happened in 2010 when I got the urge to write a collection of poems about wild flowers and spent the Spring and Summer of that year photographing a couple of hundred species in the Aberystwyth area, writing short accompanying poems as I went. This became A Year of Flowers (Gomer, 2011).
Here is one poem and image from Afterlives.
William Jones Chapman, James Evans, Welshpool, 1841.
SUCH A SUNNY DAY
Do you know about Dead Sea fruit
the skin is glossy but the flesh is ash;
after the painter packed up and left
little master cracked his whip; all
he could see, one day, would be his;
but next year he died; his parents
reached up to harvest the fruit; how
tender the skin, how bitter the taste.