Imaging the Bible in Wales — Calvary Relocated

Those who would today advance the hypothesis that Wales is a Christian country would constitute only a very small minority even among the membership of the institutional churches. Scholars and commentators of the calibre of D.P.Davies, Robert Pope and Densil Morgan have all discussed the progressive and progressing decline in allegiance to the ‘mainstream’ churches and denominations, the marginalization of their influence, and the widespread indifference to their message.(1) There is general agreement as to the causes of that decline; there is less agreement as to its final outcome.

Nonetheless, “There is no place for pessimism in the divine economy, only hope which is beyond both optimism and pessimism, and vouchsafed by the divine promise and an empty tomb in Jerusalem many centuries ago”, Densil Morgan concluded.(2) The faith communities of the twenty-first century will, almost certainly, be numerically smaller than those of the past; their ecclesial structures may well bear little resemblance to those now familiar to us. They will, however, stand in a continuity, as they will still “be called to incarnate a Christian presence which is both pastoral and prophetic…conform[ing] to biblical revelation and remain[ing] rooted in sound doctrine.”(3) Further, as Pope has written, they must “give a place to the holy in life, to remind people that they live, move and have their being before God, and that this God has reconciled the world to himself in Jesus Christ.”(4)

Arguably, in an age largely indifferent to institutionalized religion, the task of incarnating a Christian presence, of giving a place to the holy in life, or, as Rowan Williams recently put it, showing “what is ‘more than it is’”, is one best performed by the poet, the artist, the dramatist and the musician.(5) The context of Williams’ remark was a discussion of the work of the artist-poet David Jones, who so profoundly explored the idea of what I have called ‘Calvary relocated’, but which the archbishop more elegantly – and accurately – described as “the mobile life of an actual landscape that is being‘re-lit’ by the non-local but utterly concrete presence of the…Word of God.”(6) In this short paper I want to look at three Welsh artists, David Jones among them, whose work, because it was consciously anamnetic, concerned to actualize the events of soteriological history and make them present, could contribute to a revival of Christian faith and hope at a time of major religious and social upheaval.

A convert to Catholicism at the age of 36 in 1921, Jones remained committed to his faith until his death in 1974.(7) He would, however, have rejected the designation ‘religious artist’, and agreed with his one-time friend and mentor, Eric Gill, that “all art properly so-called is religious, because all art properly so-called is an affirmation of absolute values”.(8) Jones discerned the sacred in the ordinary, and, as Caroline Collier perceptively noted, for him “the particular was more than just itself. The capacity of one thing to suggest another delighted and moved him.”(9) As he put it himself, “It is about how everything turns into something else, and how you can never tell when a bonza is cropping up or the Holy Ghost is going to turn something inside out, and how everything is a ballsup and a kind of ‘Praise’ at the same time”.(10)

Everything turning into something else is what we find in Jones’ relatively well-known Y Cyfarchiad i Fair, the Annunciation to Mary placed in a Welsh upland setting, which he painted in 1963.(11) Here we find Mary as an auburn-haired Welsh girl, seated by a stream under a tump of the Daren Llwyd range in the Black Mountains, where Jones frequently walked when staying with Eric Gill at nearby Capel-y-ffin in the mid-1920s. The Annunciation, then, is re-located, to a place and a time which are not those of its occasion, Jones employing a technique familiar to all students of late medieval and renaissance art and devotional practice.

There are, however, further layers to what is a highly complex work. Jones’ Welsh Mary holds not a lily, but a foxglove, as “most typic of the site intended yet sufficiently ‘lily-like’ in form to keep within the iconographic tradition”.(12) Jones perhaps had no need to point out that in Welsh the foxglove is y Gwniadwr Mair – Mary’s thimble – and only one of the many wild and wayside flowers in Wales named after the Virgin.

Another layer of meaning is disclosed by artefacts in the landscape itself. Within his Black Mountain setting for the Annunciation, Jones has also placed references to the history of Wales – the uprights and capstones of the tumuli of the pre-Christian era, a broken column of Roman times, and, most significantly, the wattle fence of the bangor, the enclosure, that which surrounded the religious communities and settlements, the llanau, of early Christian Wales.(13)

In these ways, Jones incarnates the Annunciation, both the biblical event and its significance, in the heart of Wales, but not just in the Wales of the 1920s or the 1960s, but in every age of its past, present and future. His painting is an anamnesis, what he himself defined as an “effectual re-calling”.(14) That is why it takes time to ‘read’, and through the artist’s use of superimposed layers of representation and meaning has been compared by Rowan Williams to an icon. “There is no way of reading the one surface at once. As in the Byzantine icon, visual depth gives way to the time taken to ‘read’ a surface: you cannot construct a single illusion of depth as you look, and so you are obliged to trace and re-trace the intersecting linear patterns.”(15)

We see the same fundamental ideas explored in a much earlier work of Jones, his Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin of 1925.(16) Here it is the figure of the crucified Lord which dominates the landscape of the Llanthony valley and the Black Mountains. The cross is rough-hewn from the timber of the kind of trees which surround it; the flora and fauna are local; the buildings of Capel-y-ffin itself, in simplified form, appear in the middle distance. The two works, Annunciation and Crucifixion, though separated by nearly forty years, should, I believe, be ‘read’ together. And if a third, the Vexilla Regis of 1947-8, is placed with them, then they form a triptych, making ‘visible’ the timeless message of the Incarnation and its soteriological significance.

Although Vexilla Regis takes its title from a seventh century hymn associated with the Good Friday liturgy, the message is that of the Resurrection. The central, foreground and tallest tree is that of the crucifixion, but no body hangs upon it. The nails which held the body of Jesus are hammered into its trunk, the crown of thorns is tangled in the briars at its foot. The tree on the left is that of the penitent thief, that on the right of the unrepentant malefactor. This last is of particular interest. As Jones himself wrote of it, “it is partly tree and partly triumphal column and partly imperial standard – a power symbol, it is not rooted to the ground but is partly supported by wedges.”(17) In contrast to the others, this tree is dead, merely a hewn trunk, requiring artificial support to stand. In this way the artist depicted the transitory nature of all political (and perhaps, by implication, ecclesial) power-blocs, their instability and potential for collapse.

Vexilla Regis proclaims the risen Christ through a tree surely rooted in a recognizable landscape; the only tree which soars up to branches which rake the heavens, and thus organically link the temporal and the eternal. Jones may have given the name of an ancient Latin hymn to his composition, but surely in his mind was the memory of a hymn from his Anglican childhood, no doubt, too, recalled from the ‘drumhead’ services of his time in the trenches in the Great War: “Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane, but the church of Jesus constant will remain”.(18)

I want to turn mow to a painting by a little-known younger contemporary of Jones, the Ruthin-born Mignon Griffith (1903-1971).(19) The Collegiate Church of St Peter, Ruthin contains a memorial to Lt. Baldwin Griffith, RAF, who was killed in action in July 1918. That memorial takes the form of a painting executed some years later by his sister, Mignon, who had been only fifteen at the time of his death.(20) The work takes its inspiration from Matthew chapter 28, the angelic appearance at the empty tomb.(21) The garb of the angel is in accord with the biblical record, but that of the three women is entirely contemporary with the date of the painting. It is impossible to escape some comparison with Stanley Spencer’s celebrated and controversial Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard, which was painted at more or less the same time.

The Cookham Resurrection, however, has a different genesis. Many of the resurrecting figures have been identified, and it is clear that Spencer himself, his fiancée Hilda Carline,(22) and Spencer’s brother Gilbert appear in several guises and at several ages, along with other friends and relatives. Although far from excluding the Christian hope of resurrection, in which the artist shared, Spencer’s painting is more a celebration of his own joy and fulfilment in his relationship with Hilda. He has been given new life through their mutual love.(23) By contrast, Mignon Griffith’s ‘Resurrection’ focuses on the awakening of hope and trust in the face of grief and loss, as shown in the persons of the three women at the empty tomb. In their expressions we can see not the sorrow and love which had brought them there, but the bewilderment and amazement, the beginnings of the “fear and great joy” to which Matthew refers, which shortly afterwards, when they meet with the risen Lord, will turn into conviction and belief.(24)

Griffith’s ‘Resurrection’ in set in her own time, and in a landscape familiar to her, the Clwydian hills around her home at Ruthin. The painting conveys a sense of serenity, but its message is far from serene. In the foreground lie the shattered fragments of the heavy capstone of the grave, witnessing to the “great earthquake” which accompanied the resurrection,(25) and the eye of the beholder is drawn immediately to the dramatic gesture of the angel. “He is not here: for he is risen, as he said.”(26) The irresistible force and power of the resurrection are thus simply but emphatically delineated. Griffith’s painting comes out of a sense of personal loss, but its message is that suffering is transformed and transfigured by faith.

For my third example, I want to turn to the work of another contemporary of Jones and Griffith, Ivor Williams (1908-1982). Williams was a London-born artist who settled in Cardiff and in the middle years of his life produced a remarkable series of paintings inspired by biblical narratives. The two upon which I wish to comment were produced in the early 1950s, after Williams had settled in Llandaff. In the first, The Return of the Prodigal Son,(27) Williams sets the scene in a recognizable cottage interior of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. He makes a dramatic departure from the parable, however, in that his prodigal is received back into the family not by a joyful father, but by a serene and compassionate mother. The son kneels before her, head bowed in repentance, and in her turn the mother bends forward from her chair. He clasps his two hands between her own in the age-old gesture of submission and fealty. In the background, the artist places not an aggrieved elder brother, but a young woman, who hastens forward with a blanket or robe to cover the son’s nakedness.(28) Williams’ composition is wholly successful in conveying the central message of Jesus’ parable: “It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”.(29)

Williams’ best known work, however, is his The Healing of the Sick of the Palsy, which took the artist three years to complete.(30) Unlike the Prodigal Son, this large painting – some seven by nine and a quarter feet – is set in no particular place or time. As Robert Meyrick commented, “The artist attempted to create a painting that was timeless; costumes are ancient and modern, and people of different races and ages are juxtaposed deliberately to emphasise Williams’ belief that Christ speaks to all ages and regardless of the colour of their skin”.(31)

The message of the painting is unequivocal; as Meyrick says, “faith triumphant”.(32) And it is the faith of the believer in all ages – evidenced here by the mixture of costumes. It is also faith in the healing power of divine love, which transcends time and space. There are some thirty individual portraits in this painting, and all of them are drawn from life. The sick and the aged here were just that; these are not only portraits of Williams’ own family and friends, but include patients and residents of Cardiff’s hospitals, hostels for the homeless and old people’s homes.(33) The artist himself appears, top left, holding one end of the “couch” upon which the sick man had been lowered into the presence of Jesus.(34)

All of these works, by Jones, Griffith and Williams, have one thing in common; they involve what Alan Richardson called “an existential encounter with the past, compelling men to make a decision concerning the present, or bringing them to a new self-understanding”.(35) They are ‘sacramentals’; in Aidan Nichols’ words “disclos[ing] what is humanly significant…possess[ing] the character of a sign,..revelatory after their own fashion, vehicles of presence”.(36) And in this period of the Christian history of Wales, they do not stand in isolation. They have to be compared, for example, with the poetry of David James Jones (1899-1968), better known by his bardic name of Gwenallt.(37) Here, too, we find the same “Christian sense of the sacred realities of the world, [that] universally engaged relationship, in which holiness, centred essentially in the person of Jesus Christ and ministered par excellence through the sacraments of the Church, is found in various forms and intensities also in the world outside the formal limits of the Church.”(38) The whole matter of creation, including the land and people of Wales, have “been transfigured by the Incarnation and the paschal mystery,”(39) and that vision applies equally to past, present and future. Dorian Llywelyn encapsulates this idea in the words of Bobi Jones : “The character of Wales has been transformed by the One who is beyond all time and place but he has done this within place and time. The picture we get is one of a country where the gospel has been a penetrating presence and God has shown how he can touch personally the earth here. It is as if God has reminded his creation that it is his locality. In this way, the nation like many other nations, is similar to a sacrament – an object in which God embodies himself.”(40)

Therefore Gwenallt could write in his poem ‘Catholicity’ :
And now Cardiff is as near as Calvary
Bangor every inch as close as Bethlehem.
The storms are calmed in Cardigan Bay
And on every street the madmen may be healed
As they touch the hem of his garment.(41)

If the opening lines of this verse were rewritten to read: “And now Capel-yffin is as near as Calvary, Ruthin every inch as close as Jerusalem, The sick are healed in Llandaff…” it is possible to see how close is the vision of Jones, Griffith and Williams to that of Gwenallt. They share a “sacramentalist understanding…based on an awareness of the potential translucence of human action and the material world to the sphere of the eternal”.(42) In this sense they were prophetic, having much to offer and to say to church and people in the years of political, social and ideological turmoil, and the carnage of war, which characterized the period in which they lived and worked, and which had in no way left them unmarked or untouched. They were prophetic, too, in that they pointed to that necessity to say ‘yes’ to the imperative of the Incarnation and the paschal mystery, to repent, to be open to suffering and to healing, to trust and hope in the power of life over death, all of which lie at the heart of the timeless revelation of the gospel.

The works of David Jones, Mignon Griffith and Ivor Williams all illustrated ways in which faith and hope could be revived and rekindled in the hearts and minds of their contemporaries. Their work can be described as iconic, in the way in which Paul Evdokimov defined it: “The icon is a visible sign of the splendour of invisible presence…The icon has no existence of its own. It simply guides us to what really is.”(43) Visible signs of the splendour of invisible presence, of truth and reality, are sacraments, and they can and do speak “to all sorts and conditions of men” in every age. These artworks are not only expressions of the faith of the artist, but had – and have – the potential to assist the beholder apprehend the fundamental verities of the Christianity which were their inspiration.

1. See, for example, D.P.Davies, Against the Tide. Christianity in Wales on the Threshold of a New Millenium (Llandysul, 1995); Robert Pope, The Flight from the Chapels. The Challenge to Faith in a New Millenium (Wales Synod of the United Reformed Church, 2000); and D.Densil Morgan, The Span of the Cross. Christian Religion and Society in Wales 1914-2000 (Cardiff, 1999).

2. Morgan, Span of the Cross, p.277.

3. Ibid. p.278.

4. Pope, Flight from the Chapels, p.33.

5. Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity. Reflections on Art and Love (London, 2005) p.68.

6. Ibid. Williams was referring specifically to Jones’ painting ‘Y Cyfarchiad i Fair’ (which will be discussed below) but his remark has a wider reference. The Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams explored a related idea in his ‘The Wind of Heaven’, first published in 1945.

7. For useful introductions to Jones, see Merlin James, David Jones 1895-1974. A Map of the Artist’s Mind (London, 1995) and Roland Mathias (ed), David Jones: Eight Essays on his Work as Writer and Artist (Llandysul, 1976).

8. Eric Gill, Art Nonsense and other Essays (London, 1929) p.28. He would also have agreed with his contemporary Paul Klee (1879-1940) that the purpose of art “is not to reflect the visible but to make visible”. Quoted by Aidan Nichols, OP. The Art of God Incarnate. Theology and Image in Christian Tradition (London, 1980) p.12.

9. David Jones. Paintings, Drawings, Inscriptions, Prints (London, 1989) p.32.

10. Rene Hague, Dai Greatcoat: A Self-Portrait of David Jones in his Letters (London, 1980) p.86. By ‘bonza’ Jones meant ‘something remarkable’ or ‘extraordinary’.

11. The painting is now in the national collection. National Museum, Wales, NMWA.2529.

12. Arthur Giardelli, ‘The Artist David Jones’, in Mathias (ed) Eight Essays, p.97.

13. It is also a reference to the hortus conclusus, the enclosure of the garden, the sign of Mary’s virginity. In this painting the two ideas merge.

14. David Jones, ‘Use and Sign’, in Harman Grisewood (ed) The Dying Gaul and other writings (London, repr.1979) p.183.

15. Williams, Grace and Necessity, p.69.

16. Now at the Tate Gallery in London.

17. Hague, Dai Greatcoat, pp.149-50. In the 1925 Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin Jones had ‘anchored’ the crucifix with wedges in the medieval manner. However, here in Vexilla Regis he had a particular point to make.

18. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), Onward, Christian soldiers, v.4.

19. Mignon Griffith is represented in the Welsh national collection only by her late (1964) work, Devotion after childbirth. National Museum Wales, NMWA 745.

20. It is clear from the shape of the painting that it was always intended for the niche which it occupies.

21. Griffith has conflated this account with Mark chapter 16. Matthew mentions only Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (verse 1). Griffith’s picture includes the Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, as recorded by Mark (16: 1).

22. They were married in February 1925, whilst he was working on the painting. Duncan Robinson saw the work as Spencer’s homage to his friends at the Slade, to the Carlene family, and especially to Hilda. Duncan Robinson, Stanley Spencer (Oxford, 1990) pp.36-7.

23. Spencer had explored the subject of the resurrection before, in 1915, with his The Resurrection of the Good and the Bad. He was to return to it, most arrestingly, in his The Resurrection of the Soldiers, 1928-29, the climax of his work at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere.

24. Matt 28: 8-9.

25. Matt 28: 2.

26. Matt 28: 6.

27. Inspired by Lk. 15: 11-32.

28. Echoing the father’s command in Lk 15: 22, to clothe the son in the best robe. The Prodigal Son is a self-portrait by Williams, and the mother was a cousin, Mrs Eira Todd.

29. Lk 15: 32.

30. The painting is based on Lk 5: 17-26.

31. http://www.aber.ac.uk/museum/ivorwilliams/palsy.shtml

32. Ibid.

33. There is a particularly moving portrait of Williams’ mother, Emily, for example. The sick man was a young, hospitalized, epileptic, and Jesus was modelled by the son of a local solicitor.

34. The artist always hoped that the painting would find a home in the restored Llandaff Cathedral, but the Dean and Chapter found the cost prohibitive. It is now at the School of Art, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

35. Alan Richardson, History Sacred and Profane (London, 1964) p.26.

36. Nichols, Art of God Incarnate, p.11.

37. Just as Jones, Griffith and Williams are representative, so to is Gwenallt. He needs to be placed in context, with, for example, Waldo Williams, Pennar Davies, Euros Bowen and R.S.Thomas.

38. Dorian Llywelyn, Sacred place, chosen people. Land and National Identity in Welsh Spirituality (Cardiff,1999) pp 127-8.

39. Ibid. p.128.

40. Ibid p.129, quoting in translation Bobi Jones, ‘Gwenallt’ in Crist a Chenedlaetholdeb (Bridgend, 1994) p.112.

41. Llywelyn, Sacred place, p.133. This translation of the poem is rather more euphonious than that by Patrick Thomas in Donald Allchin and D.Densil Morgan, Sensuous Glory. The Poetic Vision of D.Gwenallt Jones (Norwich, 2000) p.118.

42. Llywelyn, Sacred place, p.144.

43. Paul Evdokimov, L’Orthodoxie (Neuchatel, 1959) p.219, quoted by Nichols, Art pf God Incarnate, p.99.

Calvary Relocated

Expressions Of Renewed Faith And Hope In The Work Of Twentieth Century Welsh Artists