A prickly but noble nation
Jan Morris
MEDIEVAL VISION: VOLUME III OF THE VISUAL CULTURE OF WALES by Peter Lord University of Wales Press, .E30, pp. 288, ISBN 0708318010 T. my mind one of the relatively few happy circumstances of our time, as we grope into the 21st century, is the condition of Wales. By no means all Welsh people would agree with me. Those who love the Welsh language above all else must still fight their heroic battle in its defence. Those who think politically are dissatisfied with devolution and the febrile dullness of the National Assembly. The flood of English incomers is a curse on several levels. Many of my countrymen are in sackcloth and ashes over the state of Welsh rugby, and rather fewer, perhaps, are mourning the virtual dissolution of the chapels.
But I prefer to take the big view, the long view, and all in all it seems to me the condition of Wales is on the mend. At a time when the idea of nation states seems to be mercifully waning, the idea of nation communities is perhaps coming into its own: and never in my lifetime has the whole of Wales seemed more recognisably a community — north and south, industry and agriculture, even Cymraeg and monoglot English-speakers all beginning to sense a shared destiny at last, Very, very gradually, in rny view, Wales is genuinely finding itself, as its fierce defensive nationalism, which alone has kept its selfrespect alive down the centuries, matures into noblesse oblige.
One strand in this progression has been a fresh awareness of the national culture, in all its forms. The world knows that Wales is a land of poetry and of music, but even the Welsh have seldom thought of themselves as a people of much visual sensitivity. Nothing has done more to correct this particular self-doubt than Peter Lord's seminal trilogy The Visual Culture of Wales, of which the Medieval Vision is paradoxically the final volume. It is published by the University of Wales, printed at Aberystwyth, in volumes which themselves are. I would think, the most sumptuously beautiful books ever produced by a public press in Wales. They record and assess the whole range of Welsh visual culture from the departure of the Romans to the 1960s, thus excluding both the mistily cosmopolitan Celtic centuries and our own transitional times. They are illustrated with hundreds of pictures, many of them in colour, including sculpture, portrait and landscape painting, book design, photography and a modicum of architecture. It is the remarkable achievement of Peter Lord and his supporting teams of scholars, researchers and designers that this vastly varied mass of material has now been marshalled into a coherent record of a people's optical sensibility.
But the trilogy is more even than that. Lord is an art historian (and a sculptor), and he deals in detail with Welsh visual art in all its aspects — patronage, public appreciation and all. Inevitably, though, his assessments lead him into the wider and more controversial matter of the Welsh identity — what Welshness means to the Welsh themselves, what Welshness has meant to everyone else, and indeed what Welshness is. If we are to go by Lord's examples, specifically Welsh visual evidence was late in coming. In the Catholic Middle Ages influences from England, and even more from Europe, vastly overpowered any native inspiration. Throughout the years of the independent princes, the arrival of the Normans and the Edwardian subjugation, Wales remained au fond a province of Catholic Europe, and in the Medieval Vision not much shows of indigenous creativity. Tombs, manuscripts, even some buildings are based upon foreign modes, sometimes commissioned from foreign artists, and only haunting glimpses of the old Celtic inspiration, pagan or Christian, suggest domestic originality.
So the sense that Wales was a nation, the Welsh a people of their own, seems to found visual expression in fits and starts down later centuries, often retrospectively. Lord's central volume, Imaging the Nation, traced these fluctuations largely through a series of popular icons — images which at once reflected the emotions of the people, and helped to create them. Even foreigners were familiar with some of them, because they also impressed the supposed nature of Wales upon people who had never been to the place.
In Victorian times everyone knew the image of the Last Bard, which fostered the conviction that the Welsh were the original Britons, and at the same time, since it perpetuated a story of English genocide, helped to establish England as the eternal enemy. Then there was Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Llywelyn Our Last Leader, whose great memorial obelisk at Cilmeri is a semi-religious object to this day, and whose heroic statue by Harry Pegram still stands pre-eminent in the Pantheon of National Heroes in Cardiff — or rather
Caerdydd. Snowdon, Y Wyddfa, portrayed in a thousand reverent and slushy canvases, was recognised everywhere as a symbol of Welsh rural pride. The endlessly reproduced painting 'Salem', by Curnow Vosper, represented the simple piety of the Cymru Cymraeg, the Welsh-speaking Welsh. And bringing the iconic history almost into our own times were countless tragi-lusty images of the mining valleys, propagated around the world in novel and film, and culminating in How Green Was My Valley — or perhaps in Tom Jones.
Symbolisms like these provide historical markers throughout Lord's work, but his concerns are at once macrocosmic and microcosmic. He is concerned with national image-making, but he is also out to display to us in minutiae the range of Welsh vision down the ages, and an extraordinary exhibition he produces. Familiar masters like Richard Wilson or Augustus John figure largely, of course, but for my tastes the most telling examples are the remarkable naïf 19th-century paintings, generally from Welsh-speaking country areas, of which most of us have only recently become aware. There are powerful native portraits, too, of the great 19th-century revivalists, and especially in the first volume of the trilogy, The Industrial Society, an astonishing range of imagery reflecting the epic revolution of coal and steel that transformed the nature of Wales two centuries ago.
Not everyone, I know, responds to the insidiously bitter-sweet fascination of Wales, but no open-minded reader could resist the enthusiasm of these books. It is as though the very essence of a prickly but noble little nation has been pressed between their covers, thorns and blossoms too. I hope all three volumes will presently reappear in paperback, to explain to an often sceptical world just what has made Wales what it is, and to persuade doubting Welsh themselves that besides hearing and reading the evidence of their own communal genius, they can see it too, if they care to look.
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