E is for John Elwyn

Fractured landscapes and tessellated clusters of barns observed through hawthorn hedgerows; sunlight and cloud-cast shadows over a meadow; clusters of farm buildings with flaking, white-washed barns and dry-stone walls; and patterned fields of grazing piebald cattle or windswept corn. Throughout his seven-decade career, John Elwyn’s fond nostalgia for his homeland manifested itself in a remarkable corpus of works that drew on his wide experience of the working life of the farmyards and cattle pastures of the Teifi and Ceri valleys.

In his 1877 poem Pied Beauty, which opens ‘Glory be to God for dappled things,’ Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of just such an admiration for nature’s variety, for ‘skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow’ and a ‘landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough.’ The strong geometrical shapes of the partitioned agricultural landscape of Cardiganshire, its villages dappled with sunlight, nestled in the hill’s elbow, appealed to John Elwyn’s sense of colour, pattern and design.

For seven decades John Elwyn drew on his Welshness – on his knowledge of Wales, its land and its people, their language and traditions. Yet his domesticated landscapes, orange sunlit fields and luscious green meadows, violet storm clouds and farmhouses tucked away behind apple trees – that are the recurrent motifs in his paintings – reveal only one aspect of Wales’ rich topography. From Snowdon summit to valley coal pit, Wales means distinct things to different people. As Raymond Williams observed in 1979:

Those differences are also manifest in the visual arts. With swagger and bombast, Kyffin Williams painted the wilder forces of nature, drawn to the expansive and rugged geography of Snowdonia. While George Chapman and Ernest Zobole hit upon their purpose in the coal mining valleys of south Wales, Gwilym Prichard discovered his on weather-worn Anglesey and along the scenic Pembrokeshire coastline from Y Parog to Tenby.

John Elwyn, meanwhile, found his stimulus in quiet isolated farmyards and the gentle rolling pastures of his native south Cardiganshire.

William John Elwyn Davies (1916-1997) was born in Adpar, Newcastle Emlyn where his father ran a woollen mill on the banks of the river Teifi. He trained at Carmarthen, Bristol and the Royal College of Art. Students at that time were taught the skills of their trade rather than encouraged to develop their own style. Painting their environment from observation and figure compositions were mandatory: views from the window, figures in interiors, still life and flower studies.

John Elwyn’s use of softened rounded forms painted in mellow light, short-dabbed brushstrokes and use of broken planes of colour recall the decorative canvases of French painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, whose work he had emulated as a student in London. As the son of a weaver, he was all too familiar with patternmaking for the loom. Yet it was his study of Bonnard and Vuillard that provided impetus to explore in paint the decorative potential of pattern in textiles.

In September 1948, John Elwyn moved to teach at Portsmouth then, from 1953, at Winchester School of Art. He lived and worked in Hampshire for the rest of his life, painting large decorative landscapes such as Recollections of a Welsh Farm, detailing activities in the countryside at different times of the day and as they vary from season to season.

John Elwyn’s titles signal either a locality or the natural phenomenon that had inspired the painting, or perhaps it was a situation or an imagined narrative. The meandering arabesques of a Cardiganshire lane are central to many of his paintings, rising then disappearing from sight over a hill or behind a hedgerow, only to re-appear horizontally displaced and continuing its journey toward the horizon.

‘Recollections of this kind,’ he wrote, ‘would enable me to keep working away because that is what the artistic bug makes you feel. You can’t stop even if you are not painting. One is always visualising everything on canvas or paper. This is not inspiration, as I understand the term, but is on the way towards it. It is very rare that it can happen as an isolated occurrence, but only by sustained effort and hard work. It is impossible to predict the result. It has to be experienced or lived through and projected before it manifests itself, whether in sound, colour or words.’ 

William Gaunt in The Times praised the ‘incisive pictorial structure’ of paintings he considered to be ‘abstract in the true sense of the word, in drawing out certain visual qualities from landscape which retain and convey something of its essential character.’ Frank Whitford, commenting in Art News, admired John Elwyn’s ‘richly expressive and versatile’ paintings inspired by landscape ‘that is heavy with romantic overtones.’

During the 1970s and 1980s, John Elwyn vacationed in Europe where, alongside watercolour drawings in his sketchbooks, he wrote day-to-day accounts of his activities, observations on the architecture, and peculiarities of the landscape, climate, farm animals, vineyards and olive groves. On the Greek Islands, in particular, he discovered unadorned vernacular architecture nestled into hillsides, peeling white-washed walls, and all things dappled that inspired him at home.

In retirement, John Elwyn returned to gardening, nurturing a well-stocked kitchen garden and flowerbeds. He also resumed still life painting, often incorporating potted plants and vases of flowers.

He painted his Winchester sitting room, the conservatory, and views from the studio looking down on to the walled garden, its trees laden with blossom.

Writing in 1952, the artist John Petts singled out John Elwyn for his ‘quiet sincerity’ and for the feeling conveyed in his paintings of ‘love and compassion for humanity and consciousness of the relations of men and women to nature, buildings, and everyday life in Wales.’

John Elwyn remained true to his convictions. He may have painted landscapes of the mind, but they have a place in reality, based as they are on real places and real situations. The paintings reflect his own experiences and as such are imprinted with his warmth of personality.

Prof Robert Meyrick

View all lots by John Elwyn in April's Welsh Sale