George Chapman

When George Chapman encountered the Rhondda Valley in 1953, he ‘got a fantastic shock.’ It was ‘quite unlike anything I’d seen in my life before,’ he remarked in a BBC television documentary about his work. Chapman had long struggled to find a meaningful subject or a personal vision. The Rhondda finally gave him an object and a purpose. ‘Here, in these valleys,’ he continued, ‘I would find the material that would perhaps make me a painter at last. I was so excited about the whole place, and so nervous too about the tremendous possibilities of the subject.’ 

About this time, Chapman was reading William Faulkner’s novels. As he recalled, Faulkner ‘deals with a particular locality in America, and I began to wonder whether I couldn’t do a similar thing. Whether I couldn’t paint a sort of visual novel of the mining valleys,’ to concentrate ‘entirely on the life that is going on around there, and describe everything that they are doing.’ Over the next fifteen years, Chapman produced hundreds of paintings, drawings and etchings portraying communities across the south Wales coalfields. It was for him a period of critical acclaim and financial success. He staged solo exhibitions at the Piccadilly Gallery and Zwemmer Gallery in London, the Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford and the King Street Gallery, Cambridge, which garnered widespread media attention.

From his home at Great Bardsfield in Essex, Chapman travelled to the valleys in his Volkswagen T1 campervan. He stayed there for days. When it rained, he remained in the driver’s seat with his drawing board resting on the steering wheel. He returned to Essex each time with ‘20-30 drawings’ that he regarded as ‘notes from which to make paintings.’ Chapman had initially trained as a graphic designer in the 1930s. At Shell Mex, BP and London Transport he worked alongside Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Edward Bawden. In 1937, however, he gave up his prosperous career and a comfortable lifestyle to retrain as a painter at the Royal College of Art and Slade School. Yet the strong sense of design that he developed as a poster artist never left him. In Church and Mine, he delights in the patterns made by the tombstones, architectural details of the church, colliery winding gear, and the slag heaps silhouetted as light breaks and heavy rainclouds clear. The visual drama of dark wet days in the sleep-sided valleys constantly appealed to him.

Speaking of Church and Mine to broadcaster Huw Wheldon in 1961, Chapman explained ‘there’s a lovely old cemetery […] right by the railway. Trains are passing by all the time. In the cemetery there’s a charming old mock-Gothic church. The whole thing has a rather romantic air about it […] and a sense of drama.’ The church featured in the painting is St David’s at Hopkinstown, on the outer edge of Pontypridd. Erected in 1896, it was designed in the Early English style by Cardiff-based ecclesiastical architect E. M. Bruce Vaughan (1856-1919). Rising above the Victorian graveyard is the double-bell gable west elevation of the church. A copper-domed Taff Vale Railway steam engine pulls its heavy convoy of wagons laden with freshly-hewn coal between colliery and washery, and to Cardiff Docks beyond. On the other side of the tracks stand the pithead winding gear of Ty Mawr colliery and the chimney of its coke ovens.

Church and Mine featured in an episode devoted to George Chapman in the seminal BBC TV arts series Monitor. Directed by David Jones and produced by Huw Wheldon, it was showcased at the Venice Film Festival in 1961. The painting was shown alongside location footage of the graveyard and locomotive. Chapman later gifted the painting to his friend Alick Potter (1912-2000) – founder, Head of Department and Professor of Architecture at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, and later Professor of Architecture at Queen’s University, Belfast. It hung in the study of Potter’s home at Pennant near Aberaeron. Their friendship was one of the reasons why the Chapmans relocated from Norfolk to Aberaeron in 1964. Church and Mine was shown at Aberystwyth Arts Centre’s 1989 retrospective exhibition , ‘George Chapman: A Welsh Story.’ On Potter’s death in 2000, it was consigned to Bonham’s, Bath.

Chapman’s paintings are a record of a particular place and time. In 1958, the National Coal Board merged Ty Mawr Colliery with the Lewis Merthyr Colliery. Production ceased in 1983 and the site was razed to the ground. There is now no evidence of the industrial spoilation that once scarred Hopkinstown. The mine buildings have been replaced by a neat housing estate of cul-de-sacs with names such as Ty Mawr Road and Ty Mawr Parc. Close to the Rhondda River, on a narrow piece of land between Gyfeillon Road and the Treherbert-Cardiff passenger railway line, St David’s still stands – encircled now by mature trees. Church and Mine survives as a reminder of a valleys community – once dominated by coal mining and religion – that has long since changed. As such, it is an important historical record of the industrial face of Wales.

Prof Robert Meyrick