September

  November’s Welsh Sale reminds us again how terrific a colourist John Elwyn was, of his idiosyncratic interpretation of light and texture, and gives us pause to marvel at how his work somehow makes concrete the fugitive intersection between place and memory.

  Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874 – 1956), the foremost Welsh art enthusiast and collector of her day, was certainly impressed by his work. She considered John Elwyn to be one of her discoveries and enthusiastically bought examples of his work both for her own collection and for that of the Glyn Vivian Gallery in Swansea. 

  Like his contemporary (and other Coombe Tenant discovery), Kyffin Williams, John Elwyn lived and worked in England, but unlike Kyffin, he never returned to live permanently in Wales. Although the nation features consistently throughout his work, its geography and people are presented more as a landscape of the imagination and memory. In elevating the countryside and people of his native land, he went as far as to describe himself as a ‘parochial’ artist. It is, I think an unfortunate choice of word: one that suggests a narrowness of vision. But far from being limited, his vision (for want of a better word) was expansive in its graciousness. One only has to compare his serene paintings of chapelgoers congregating on Sunday mornings with Caradoc Evans’s earlier literary evisceration of the same people, to conclude that John Elwyn was fundamentally drawn to the goodness of the world and its inhabitants. 

  His magnanimous outlook is beautifully displayed in September, which is a celebration of harvest and early autumn light. Two people, a woman and a boy pause on what may be a farmyard or the outskirts of a rural village. The woman has a small crop of turnips neatly displayed before her. Behind them, the sun has turned the fields of ripe wheat a vivid gold. It is a bold move to place such a bright, saturated area of colour in the background. It dominates the picture but does not unsettle it. Indeed, the arching gold suggest haloes of ripe satisfaction, lighting up the moment and the scene.

  The woman and the boy seem distracted. They may have noticed something, or it may be just as likely that their conversation has faded into reverie, as they both realise and then acknowledge that this moment is a blessing and that life is good.

by Ruth Richards

'September' is one of twelve lots by John Elwyn in the November Welsh Sale

View all the lots by John Elwyn in November's Welsh Sale