The Tradition: A New History of Welsh Art 1400–1990

The Tradition

A New History of Welsh Art

1400 – 1990

PETER LORD

The Tradition

Parthian

The Old Surgery

Napier Street

Cardigan

SA43 1ED

www.parthianbooks.com

First published in 2016

Reprinted in 2017

© Peter Lord 2016

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-910409-62-6

Editor: Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan

Designed by Olwen Fowler

Printed and bound by Gomer Press

Llandysul SA44 4JL

Published with the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A cataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

FOREWORD

This landmark volume is the summation of Peter Lord’s distinguished career as the premier social historian of Wales’s visual culture. It is a distillation of the dozen and more books he has published over some three decades that have opened our eyes to a valuable native tradition of image-making.

A 1490 alabaster effigy in Tenby commemorates not only the deceased (John White) but also the occasion of a notable service performed by him for the future Henry VII that made possible the financing of such a grand sepulchral statement. History is written as much in visual images and artefacts as in words and deed, but we too often lack the skill to read it. Peter Lord shows us how.

This authoritative study is brimful of intriguing examples. The rise of personal portraits was triggered by the Puritan prohibition on religious images; landscape art evolved out of the display culture of an aristocracy keen to have its lavish holdings in land advertised in the panoramic rural backgrounds of grand family portraits; shifts in social taste facilitated the elevation of humble artisan to the dignity of artist.

As for Wales itself, visual art provides us with a riveting record of its serial transformations of identity. Instructed in his native country’s prestigious antiquity by the scholars, intellectuals and antiquarians of the Cymmrodorion society, Richard Wilson was moved to represent Castell Dinas Brân as the ‘Celtic equivalent of Mount Olympus.’ In the later eighteenth century the ‘opening up’ of Wales by picturesque travellers paralleled the ‘voyages of discovery’ of explorers such as Captain Cook, whose botanist, Joseph Banks, found this seemingly familiar land to be ‘terra incognita’ almost as much as Australia. And awed artists struggling to master a new graphic vocabulary were among the first to register Wales’s dramatic metamorphosis into the fiery furnace of industrial revolution.

The rise of ‘the nonconformist nation’ brought with it the golden age of the artisan painter, whose neglected body of work Peter Lord was the first to uncover, champion and celebrate; and as a national cultural renaissance gathered momentum from the mid-nineteenth-century onwards the new patriotism was imaged in monumental sculpture, public buildings and of course paint.

Different regions of Wales figure large in the story from time to time. Between the two world wars, the Swansea area produced a remarkable crop of talent in the context of which Dylan Thomas’s work might be profitably re-viewed. Immediately following the second world war it was the turn of Cardiff and its feeder valleys to become the cradle of talent, shortly before an increasingly institutionalised and state-sponsored ‘art scene’ turned its face away from representational images and towards the ‘international style’ of abstract expression.

In its affirmation of the tolerant plurality of Welsh artistic practice over the last twenty and more years this timely study reveals itself to be the product of its (post-devolution) era. And in its mode of procedure it is clearly indebted to that revolutionary turn in art history towards the material, social and cultural that we associate with such important figures of the seventies as T. J. Clarke and John Berger.

In his seminal volume, Ways of Seeing, Berger welcomed the decay of the ‘holy authority of art,’ and the arrival in its place of a new literacy – an ability to read ‘the [social] language of images.’ ‘What matters now,’ he added, ‘is who uses that language for what purpose.’ This, he emphasised, was a political issue that could influence the fate of a whole society, because a ‘people...which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people...than one that has been able to situate itself in history.’

Peter Lord’s invaluable New History of Welsh Art should therefore be regarded as his gift to the Welsh people. In teaching us how to read ‘the language of images’ he has enabled us to situate ourselves much more securely in our own distinctive history as a nation.

M. Wynn Thomas

CREW (Centre for Research into the

English Literature and Language of Wales),

Swansea University,

July, 2015

INTRODUCTION

With colleagues at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic studies, twenty years ago I began the work that led to the publication of the three volume history entitled The Visual Culture of Wales. In those volumes I sought to do two things. Firstly, to make available a large selection of the visual images that emerged in Welsh cultures over a period of 1500 years, from the collapse of Roman authority to the mid-twentieth century. Secondly, in the texts, I sought to relate those images to the broader political, economic and social evolution of the Welsh nation.

The three volumes of The Visual Culture of Wales have been out of print for some years. Once again (and perhaps uniquely in Europe), Wales finds itself a nation without a readily accessible book that describes its visual culture to its own people and to the world. This new work seeks to reoccupy that space. I have tried to write in a straightforward way, not just for specialists in the field, but for everyone with an interest in Wales and in art. I have been assisted, since the publication of the third volume of the earlier series in 2003, by the appearance of many studies of individual artists and aspects of Welsh visual culture. I would like to thank all the authors of those studies for their contribution to the deepening of my own understanding and I hope, therefore, to the richness of this text. New images and previously unknown makers of images have emerged during the last decade, and there have been developments both in our understanding of relationships between artists and the wider context within which they worked. Nevertheless, there are many images in this book that are retained from the previous three volumes. Their cultural significance, or simply their visual impact, make it vital that they are presented again, especially for a new generation of readers perhaps unfamiliar with them.

However, since the publication of The Visual Culture of Wales, there has been a huge inflation in the charges, on occasion to prohibitive levels, made by some institutions and holders of copyrights for the right to reproduce paintings. I am particularly grateful, therefore, to the private owners of many works reproduced here who have, without exception, been generous in freely granting permissions. Similarly, images from the two major Welsh collections, at the National Museum and the National Library, have been given without charge. Without the help of these two institutions this book would not have been possible. In particular I wish to acknowledge the enthusiasm and support expressed for this project at the outset by David Anderson, Director General of National Museum Wales, and by Oliver Fairclough, who was, until 2015, Keeper of Art at the National Museum. Oliver also read the text and offered much useful advice, as did other friends and colleagues. Shelagh Hourahane, Jill Piercy, Miles Wynn Cato and Thomas Lloyd all offered advice in fields in which they have specialist knowledge. I am grateful to the former National Librarian, Aled Jones, for his support of this publication, and to members of his staff who assisted with picture acquisition.

John Cyrlas Williams, The Life Studio, Newlyn, c.1920-1 (detail)

I was able to complete much of the text of this book as a research fellow at the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales at Swansea University, and I extend my thanks to the university for its support, and to my colleagues at CREW, Professors Neil Reeve and M. Wynn Thomas. Publication has been assisted further by grant aid from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Marc Fitch Fund, and the Welsh Books Council, where I am indebted to Elwyn Jones. My thanks go to my publisher, Parthian Books, and to Richard Davies and Gillian Griffiths for their continuing enthusiasm for an ambitious project. Claire Houguez worked with commitment on the huge and sometimes frustrating task of securing the 400 images in the book. The text was edited by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, whose expertise extends beyond the technical aspects of editing into a detailed knowledge of visual culture and Welsh history, and I thank her for her invaluable contribution. The book has been designed with equal commitment and finesse by Olwen Fowler.

The constraints of a single volume led to a decision at the outset to confine the story of Welsh visual culture to the modern period. Nevertheless, I have taken the opportunity to correct what I realise now was a misapprehension, built into the earlier publications, of the depth of the roots of that modern period. It has become clear that Renaissance attitudes to visual imagery emerged at a much earlier date among Welsh patrons than I had presumed, when writing twenty years ago. Any starting point for a history is arbitrary to a degree, but it seems to me that the period of reconstruction following the Glyndŵr Revolt at the beginning of the fifteenth century exemplified much that would divide attitudes and belief systems in the middle ages from those prevalent subsequently, at least into the early-twentieth century. I have also taken the opportunity to bring the closing point of this study forward to the beginning of the 1990s. The reasons for this choice are expressed in the text, but the inclusion of the last twenty years of the time span did present particular challenges to me as author, because I myself became directly involved in the Welsh art world during that period. Inevitably, my initial perceptions of the period were influenced by my proximity to particular people, institutions and events, perhaps at the expense of a wider view. With the assistance of colleagues, and in particular the work of Huw David Jones, I hope I have succeeded in broadening my understanding, though without any claim to objectivity – a false notion in history, in my opinion. Histories have always been written to meet the needs of their own present, and to reflect the aspirations of the writers for the future, and this text is no exception.

Peter Lord

October 2015

CHAPTER

11400 – 1660

An age of uncertainty

In 1401, reacting to the defeat by Owain Glyndŵr of a loyalist force at the Battle of Hyddgen, the English King Henry IV despoiled the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in Ceredigion. The following year, the forces of Owain himself ruined the Cathedral Church of St Asaph, where Bishop John Trefor remained – for the moment – a supporter of the king. All ‘was brent [burnt] and utterly destroyed, and in likewys the Byshop’s Palays and all his other three Mannoirs no Styk left ...’1 It was the third year of a revolt against the English crown that would last for a further twelve years. Both sides contributed to the damage or destruction of religious paintings, carvings, manuscripts, glass and textiles, along with the buildings that contained them.2 Over the ensuing hundred years the country would recover, and some fine architecture and artefacts would be produced. The poet Guto’r Glyn reported that Abbot Rhys installed ‘rows of glass windows, flowery ornament of a court, the chancel of Strata Florida’, dating reconstruction there as early as the 1430s.3 However, the recovery did not take place against a background of political and social stability. On the contrary, Welsh people became deeply embroiled in the Wars of the Roses – towns were again burnt and the fortunes of prominent families waxed and waned as dynastic power shifted in England. The struggle for the English throne lasted until the defeat in 1485 of Richard III by Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

1. The Great Seal of Owain Glyndŵr, 1404–5, wax

The victory of this descendant of an Anglesey family, who had invaded England through Wales, had profound psychological and practical implications for the Welsh gentry and intellectuals. Henry’s accession to the English throne came to be understood as the fulfilment of the prophecy, by now deeply rooted in Welsh tradition, that the island of Britain, divided by the Anglo-Saxon creation of England in the early Middle Ages, would ultimately be reunited under a native king – a Welsh king, the spiritual descendant of King Arthur. In the climate created by this powerful myth, the Welsh gentry that were loyal to the Tudors would profit mightily in wealth and offices at home, and in status at court.

The marriage of the Lancastrian Henry to Elizabeth of York, the heir to the claims of the enemy, settled the English succession by uniting the rival camps. Nevertheless, Henry Tudor’s descendants did not reign in peace and security. In the 1530s, his son, Henry VIII, having broken with the Church of Rome by denying the authority of the Pope, dissolved the monasteries, confiscated all their property and turned much of the intrinsic value of their contents into cash. The consequence was, once again, massive material damage, but also an unprecedented redistribution of wealth, as the monastic lands passed into secular ownership. Church dogma and ritual were revised along Protestant lines. The religious upheaval of this Reformation divided the people of Wales deeply. All in all, it was a profoundly disturbed period.

Two complementary tendencies drove the response of the rich and the powerful to the uncertainty of the age, as expressed in their commissions to painters and other craftspeople. The first was the reaffirmation of traditional values through new religious pictures, sculptures, manuscripts and textiles. By the 1530s, many Welsh churches, large and small, had been restored to their earlier condition as galleries of highly coloured painting, sculpture and glass, which provided the backdrop to the dramatic celebration of the sacraments and the many saints’ days. The second response was to advertise visually changes in the balance of power. By encrusting them with heraldry and portraiture, patrons clearly identified themselves on many of the new buildings and artefacts of the period. The second half of the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries would be an age of ostentatious patronage by successive new orders, sometimes short-lived, as if such dynastic displays would, in themselves, affirm their legitimacy and ensure their survival.

2. Portrait Medallion of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, 1485, copper alloy, d. 6

3. Jesse Window, Church of St Dyfnog, Llanrhaeadr-yng-Nghinmeirch, 1533, painted glass, detail of lower section

Restoration

Among the finest expressions of the spirit of restoration that drove the commissioning of religious pictures in the century following the Glyndŵr Revolt was the magnificent Jesse window at the Church of St Dyfnog at Llanrhaeadr-yng-Nghinmeirch, Dyffryn Clwyd. Images of Jesse were found all over Europe, and Welsh examples survive from as early as the first half of the thirteenth century. They serve to demonstrate that, far from being an isolated outpost, after the decline of the Celtic Church in the eleventh century, Wales stood in the mainstream of a biblical iconography that extended from the east of the continent to the very west, disseminated by religious institutions under the ultimate authority of the papacy in Rome. The idea of the Tree of Jesse had originated as a visualisation of a sentence in the Book of Isaiah: ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots’.4 Following the established convention, the Llanrhaeadr window depicted the tree with its roots in the stomach of Jesse, the branches carrying portraits of Jewish prophets who were visualised as the antecedents of Jesus. King David, son of Jesse, holding his symbol of a harp, was set at the centre but below the Virgin Mary, carrying the infant Jesus.

The Jesse window at Llanrhaeadr, and another example at Diserth, were made in about 1533, but by different masters.5 Their styles of drawing were distinct. The Llanrhaeadr master followed what was a common workshop practice in re-using the patterns designed for the drawing of faces. Some of the prophets share the same features, but reversed. It also seems clear that this master had seen a drawing of Jesse reproduced as a woodcut, published in Paris in 1498 and widely distributed. The century of restoration in Wales was also the first century of printing in Europe. The widespread dissemination of pictures printed on paper began even before the adoption of moveable type in about 1439, with its radical implications for the spread of literacy.

Jesse was a popular subject. His carved figure, made in wood on a monumental scale, survives at the Priory Church of St Mary, Abergavenny. Like most of the earlier depictions of the king, it differed from the Llanrhaeadr image by showing him asleep.6 Now stripped of its original painted and gilt surface, the Abergavenny figure once lay at the base of what must have been an enormous and dramatic structure, presumably supported against a wall.

4. Figure of Jesse, 1498, woodcut, printed in Paris by Jean Pigouchet

5. Sleeping Jesse, Priory Church of St Mary, Abergavenny, early 15th century, wood, l. 129.4

6. St Christopher, Church of St Saeran, Llanynys, 15th century, wall painting

The style of its carving links it to a large wall-painting of St Christopher in the Church of St Saeran, Llanynys, in Denbighshire, and both works may be the product of the same workshop.7 Originally there were probably many more paintings on the wall at Llanynys, which are now lost, but some sense of the extent of the painting in churches of the period can be gained from murals that survive at Llancarfan in Glamorgan. The paintings include depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins, Death and the Gallant, and a large and dramatically painted St George and the Dragon. Although of eastern origin, by the late medieval period the legend of St George was known throughout Europe and, no doubt, there were once other paintings of the subject in Wales. Similarly, paintings of the ultimate Christian theme of the Last Judgement were widespread, though only a single example survives. As at the Church of St Giles in Wrexham, the Doom was conventionally painted above the chancel arch, the most effective location for the intimidation of the congregation who stood at services in the medieval period, confined to the nave. Above them they saw the virtuous, grouped to the right hand of God, admitted to heaven. The sinful, to God’s left, were damned and dispatched to burn in hell.8

7. St George and the Dragon, Llancarfan, Glamorgan, late 15th century, wall painting

During the turbulent years of the Glyndŵr Revolt and the Wars of the Roses, woodwork was particularly prone to destruction. Yet, almost as if in defiance of its vulnerability, the use of wood both architecturally and for carving had reached a high degree of sophistication in Wales at the end of the fifteenth century. By 1500, elegant cruck-built hall houses, initially commissioned on a substantial scale for the wealthiest individuals, were also being constructed in smaller versions for tenant farmers.9 In churches, the wooden rood screens that divided nave from chancel in the Middle Ages, provided opportunities for carvers – probably, in many cases, the same individuals responsible for the joinery of the new houses – to create both decorative and narrative schemes of considerable complexity. In 1468, the 1st Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert of Raglan Castle, burned Llanrwst in the Yorkist cause. The woodwork in the church was surely among the casualties, but by the end of the century one of the finest new screens in Wales had been installed. The style of such screens reflected the development of regional workshops as well as of individual artisans, and their imagery sometimes combined the Europe-wide iconography of the faith with devotion to local saints.10

8. The Doom, Church of St Giles, Wrexham, 15th century, wall painting

9. Revd John Parker, Late 15th century screen, Church of St Crwst, Llanrwst, c.1830, pen and wash

As well as dividing the nave from the chancel (and so the laity from the clergy), the screen supported the rood – the image of Jesus on the cross, that was the focus for the contemplation of the faithful. It was often the most elaborate artefact in a church. The celebrity of particularly splendid examples was recorded by contemporary poets:

[Behold] yonder the rood of Brecon and the implements of the Crucifixion, the gilded feet and side of Christ[’s image] all pierced through: [such] a treasure [it is which hangs] above the Choir! The icon is a worthy one; I shall go there, to the lands of the free-flowing Hodni [river]. On the Cross which [grew] from Moses’ staff, [Christ] was of old hung between Dismas and [Gestas]; his two arms outstretched: his very body the means of his sacrifice.11

It was the image of the crucifixion that most attracted the indignation of radical Christians during the Reformation of the Church, begun by Henry VIII and pursued by his son, Edward VI. Roods were taken down, the flanking carvings of the Virgin and St John with them, and destroyed. No fifteenth-century rood figures of Jesus remain, but other images of the Crucifixion, carved, painted and embroidered, have survived.12 They demonstrate an intensification of focus by believers on the bodily suffering of Jesus that is characteristic of the late medieval period. Broadly speaking, early depictions of the Crucifixion tended to present Jesus on the cross as if at peace, his arms outstretched horizontally, suggesting his godliness in overcoming pain. Although there are many exceptions, by the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, crucifixion iconography generally presented a tortured and contorted body on the cross, an image that presented Jesus as a suffering human being. The five wounds made by the nails and the spear that pierced his side, with the blood collected in cups carried by angels, exercised a particular fascination for the pious. The painted glass at the Church of St Ust and St Dyfrig, Llanwrin, Montgomeryshire, is remarkable in this respect. A sixth angel is present, a servant of Satan called Apollyon, who is described in the biblical Book of Revelation and depicted in the glass with a black halo.13 At the Church of St Cadwaladr, Llangadwaladr in Anglesey, the shadowy image of the skeleton of Jesus is visible beneath the flesh, illustrating the fulfilment of the prophecy, quoted in the Gospel of St John, that at the crucifixion ‘A bone of him shall not be broken’.14 Clearly, the patrons or the painters of these windows had sophisticated understandings of Christian theology.

10. The Crucifixion, Church of St Cadwaladr, Llangadwaladr, c.1500, painted glass

11. The Angel of the Abyss, Church of St Ust and St Dyfrig, Llanwrin, c.1461–83, painted glass

The intensification of religious feeling that is suggested by the concentration on the suffering of Jesus in large-scale public images of the Crucifixion was reflected in small, personal artefacts. The most pious among the gentry and the wealthy mercantile class might make space in their houses for an altar on which a depiction of the Virgin or the Crucifixion could stand, along with a devotional book, such as a Book of Hours. An early surviving example is the Llanbeblig Hours, probably made in the late fourteenth century. It appears to have belonged to Isabella Godynogh, whose husband’s family held lands in Conwy, though the book’s calendar of saints’ days included St Deiniol of Bangor and St Peblig of Caernarfon. The main part of the manuscript is English work, but is preceded by four leaves of miniatures, probably added in Wales. These include an image of the Virgin and Child and a sophisticated portrayal of the Annunciation, in which a premonition of the Crucifixion was inserted between the Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin. The cross on which Jesus would die was transformed into a lily, the symbol of purity overcoming human sin. The local associations of the text and other evidence in the Llanbeblig Hours suggest that the miniatures may have been painted by an employee at the Caernarfon treasury.15

In the Llanwrin crucifixion window, at the foot of the cross the painter depicted skulls and other bones. These were among the symbols that featured not only in representations of the Crucifixion itself, but of the other events in the sequence leading up to it, and following it, known collectively as the Passion. The skull and bones were those of Adam and Eve, whose burial place was believed to be Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion of Jesus, and so they represented the completion of the cycle from the fall of mankind to the redemption through his death and resurrection. For the pious, such symbols stimulated the recreation of the events of the Passion in the imagination, and the contemplation of their meaning. The imagery transcended the many different media in which the Passion was represented. Like the glass at Llanwrin, a crucifixion scene, finely embroidered on a chasuble that survives at the Church of Our Lady and St Michael at Abergavenny, depicted both the skull of Adam and angels collecting the blood from the wounds on the hands of Jesus. The chasuble, worn by the priest at mass, was part of a set of elaborate vestments probably given to Elizabeth Herbert of Raglan Castle by the queen, Elizabeth of York, who was her cousin. The queen visited the castle in 1502. Similarly, a life-size carved figure of Jesus, associated with the Mostyn family of Flintshire and perhaps originally located at Maenan Abbey, Llanrwst, also included the skull of Adam. Jesus was depicted seated and bound, prior to the Crucifixion. Though it is not described in the bible, this portrayal of Jesus as ‘the Man of Sorrows’ was a favourite subject. It appears again among the extensive group of wall paintings that survive from the Church of St Teilo at Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, in Glamorgan, where the painter added the symbolic representations of the Crucifixion itself, known as the Instruments of the Passion – the nails driven through the hands and feet of Jesus, the lance that pierced his side, the ladder used to take down his body from the cross, and the pincers used to withdraw the nails.16

12. The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, from the Llanbeblig Book of Hours, late 14th–early 15th century, 17.5x12.0

13. Chasuble, Church of Our Lady and St Michael, Abergavenny, early 16th century, embroidery

14. The Mostyn Christ, Bangor Cathedral, 15th century, wood, ht. 157.5

15. Donor portraits with King Cadwaladr, Church of St Cadwaladr, Llangadwaladr, Anglesey, painted glass fragments c.1490, reassembled c.1850

16. Man of Sorrows, Church of St Teilo, formerly at Llandeilo Tal-y-bont, wall painting, 15th century

Works on the scale of the Mostyn Christ, the Wrexham and Llancarfan murals, and the Jesse windows at Llanrhaeadr and Diserth, were expensive to commission. In general, the most dramatic surviving examples are clustered in what were the richest parts of late-medieval Wales, that is, the north-east counties of Flint and Denbighshire, and Glamorgan. Commissions were usually the benefactions of individual patrons – royalty, in the case of the Raglan embroideries, but more often the gentry and wealthy clergy. The patrons of the murals at Llancarfan, for instance, are likely to have been the local Bawdrip family, since their arms survive among the paintings.17 The Diserth Jesse window was the gift of Archdeacon Peter Conwey, who left money for the project in his will. The desire of patrons to advertise their public spirited generosity alongside their piety was not an innovation of the period, but the increasing number of examples through the fifteenth century, recorded in the form of heraldry, inscriptions or portraits, demonstrated a growing tendency among both laity and clergy to assert individual identity and social status through their commissions. At Llangadwaladr, in Anglesey, two generations of the same family were portrayed kneeling under the images of St John and the Virgin at the Crucifixion. Between them was the enthroned seventh-century King Cadwaladr, a figure of pious association.

The king had died on pilgrimage at Rome, but his depiction in the window also signified the patrons’ secular association with ancient Welsh lineage and their allegiance to the Tudor dynasty. Henry VII claimed direct descent in Anglesey from Cadwaladr. To their contemporary audience, what appear today to be pious representations of patrons in devotion before a favoured saint might also indicate a network of entwined secular and religious associations that legitimised the status of the family.

In the north-east of the country, the Stanley family became involved in church patronage on a lavish scale, though with a strong emphasis on dynastic celebration, alongside devotion. Sir William, his wife Elizabeth Hopton, and his brother, Sir Thomas, all identified themselves in heraldic devices at a group of Flintshire churches and at the shrine of St Winifred at Holywell, with which all three together may have been involved.18 The font at the Church of St Chad at Holt is encrusted with heraldic emblems of Sir William and his association with the Lordship of Bromfield to the exclusion of any Christian imagery. Unfortunately, Sir William did not retain his Lordship for long, since he was executed in 1495 by Henry VII, the king whom he had helped bring to power.

17. Font, Church of St Chad, Holt, c.1493

18. The Raglan Cupboard, oak, late 15th century

Domestic patronage

Among Sir William Stanley’s briefly held gains under Henry VII was Chirk Castle, which he restored, apparently to a high quality and under the influence of continental fashions.19 A few years later, when it was in the hands of a subsequent constable, the poet Tudur Aled noted its French form and the quality of its woodwork.20 Fewer examples of wood carving and painting survive from a domestic context than from churches prior to the mid-sixteenth century, but it is clear that styles and techniques of manufacture spanned the two. A fine screen at the church of St Jerome, Llangwm Uchaf, Monmouthshire, included the carved pattern known as ‘linenfold’ (since it was derived from the imitation of the folds of draped fabrics), as did the remarkable ‘Raglan Cupboard’, made in the same period and, at that time, a new form of artefact. Raglan is just a few miles from Llangwm, and the similarity in the style and quality of the carving from the church screen and the domestic furniture strongly suggest at least the influence of the one upon the other, if not a common origin in a local workshop. Similar parallels existed in many parts of the country. In the north, it is clear that the plentiful supplies of good timber, along with wealthy patrons, made the Conwy Valley a particular focus for the production of high quality furniture and fittings for both ecclesiastical and domestic use.21

Among the most elaborately carved domestic artefacts of the period are the front panels of another cupboard, though its origins are more obscure than the Raglan example. It includes a depiction of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the symbolic representation of the Crucifixion in the form of the Instruments of the Passion, musicians playing the harp and the crwth, and Tudor heraldry. The panels are held in a frame elaborated with hunting scenes and an inscription that includes, in abbreviated form, the name ‘Harri ap Gruffudd’. The inscription may identify the maker or perhaps a patron from the Golden Valley in Monmouthshire, where the style of the work is reflected in elaborate church screens and other figurative carving.22 Harri ap Gruffudd’s cupboard panel subsequently came into the possession of descendants of the family of Sir Rhys ap Thomas of Carew in Pembrokeshire, causing confusion as to its origins, since Sir Rhys was also a patron of skilled local woodworkers. Carved chairs and an extraordinary bedstead made for Sir Rhys both survive as testimony to the elaboration of his court, from which he dominated the administration of south-west Wales in the early sixteenth century. The bedstead decoration took the form of a frieze populated by knights on horseback, pikemen, longbowmen and crossbowmen, who commemorated a tournament organised by Sir Rhys at Carew in 1506. It was an elaborate affair, expressing the growing fascination manifested by the gentry of the period for an imagined past age of chivalry and deeds of arms. It attracted participants and observers from all parts of Wales, and from England. Painters were among those who benefitted by commissions associated with the tournament – ‘images, scutcheons, and coat armours’ being prominently displayed along with a ‘table’ (that is, a painting on board) that celebrated the coming together of two nations under the Tudor monarchy:

19. The Newcourt Cupboard Front (also known as the ‘Cotehele Tester’), c.1515–30, oak

20. Bedstead of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, c.1507, oak

... Sir Rice having reserved a great companie of the better sort for his guests, he leads them to the castle, with drummes, trumpetts, and other warlike musicke. Over the gate, at the entrance, was hung up a goodlie faire table, wherein was represented the species and pourtraiture of St George and St David embracing one another with this mottoe, Nodo plus quam Gordiano.23

Sir Rhys’s bed, and his painted panel of St George and St David, represented a world far removed from that of the common people, in an age when the poor were very poor. Little is known of their visual culture, and it may be that the only pictures with which they were familiar were those they saw in church. Nor were they often depicted in the works commissioned by their social superiors. Above the level of these poor, though below the ranks of the