Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio XX

     The Rustiche project continues with arch XX, perhaps one of the most bizarre of all Serlio's designs which, as you can see incorporates both a caryatid and a telemon, both of which appear to have been mummified.  Not quite sure what's going on there.  As you can see the technique is a bit looser than normal.  Time I thought for a little experimentation.

Grongar Hill II

   After lunch we ascended to the parish church, dedicated to St Cathen, to find where Piper had sat and sketched Grongar Hill and Paxton's Tower. The area wasn't that had to find at all - at the bottom of the churchyard or perhaps in the pasture below.  Though looking at my photo now, I think, I was a little too far the north to be entirely accurate.

     The church itself is rather typically Late Medieval Welsh.  A tall unbuttressed tower with small bell openings, built of rubble and perhaps once plastered and limewashed.  The rest of the church in contrast is rather low slung.  The detailing is very simple.  The south chancel chapel is post medieval, built in the early 1600s.  John Dyer's memorial is on the exterior. The graveyard is its usual quota of Victorian polished red- granite memorials. Quite atmospheric in places.

     Inside it is more spacious than expected - much broader rather than it is tall.  Each nave and the south aisle, which must be as wide, are covered with wooden barrel vaults. To the north of the nave is a tall transept separated from the nave by a round arch. In all I was reminded of the architecture of an another two peripheral areas of the Late Gothic World: Cornwall and Scotland.  And then quite unexpectedly in the south chancel chapel a large, extravagant Jacobean memorial to Bishop Rudd of St David's who preferred to be buried here in his home parish (his family then owned Aberglasney) rather than in the cathedral. (The chapel was constructed to take the tomb - though the east window is now Victorian.) Plain now but surely it must have once of been bright with paint? Relatively free of clutter, the church is unhappily much darkened by a Victorian restoration, and by the lack of windows in the s chancel chapel, though judging by the hood mould on the exterior there must once have been a 'gothic survival' window of some description.  Gothic survival too, apparently, is the well detailed arcade between the chapel and the chancel.  A real contrast to the crudely designed nave arcade.

   Really there was nothing now to do but visit Paxton's Tower and its great views up the Towy Valley to the Black Mountain and Brecon Beacons.  The tower, a monument to Lord Nelson, was constructed by Sir William Paxton in 1811.  It was originally lavishly furnished but the windows are now open to the elements.  It is currently owned by the National Trust.

Grongar Hill I

'Grongar Hill invites my song'

John Dyer

'Romantic art is the result of a vision that can see in things something significant beyond ordinary significance; something that for a moment seems to contain the whole world and when the moment is passed carries over some comment on life or experience beside the comment on appearances.'

John Piper

     Last week was spent in south-west Wales staying with the bf in the Infernal City.  Monday was wonderfully spring like, if a little chill at times.  We drove north on a return (3rd) visit to Llandeilo and then down the beautiful valley of the Towy - the ancient heartland of the kingdom of Deheubarth - a sort of literary and artistic pilgrimage for me.  Llandeilo, as I must have said before on this blog, is a wonderful little town, built high above the river at a point where the valley narrows.  A strategic point then.  A place of royal and religious authority, where in the 6th century St Teilo established a clas, a type of monastic settlement, on the site now occupied by the parish church.  It would be nice to think that the large oval graveyard perpetuates the shape of the original monastic enclosure.  Anyway it is always a pleasure to explore Llandeilo with its nest of winding narrow streets and alleyways.  There are fortunately a number of old shop fronts and still proper shops including two butchers. The best streetscape is Kings St where Georgian and Victorian buildings overlook the churchyard.

     Then on, westward, down the Towy valley to the village of Llangathen and Aberglasney, the wonderful old manor house and garden and the goal of my secular pilgrimage. I'm not at all sure how the geology works but the north side of the middle Towy valley is quite complex with a ridge of hills rising up on the edge of the valley side, like a broken palisade.  Aberglasney nestles in a fold between two of those hills, Bryn Castell-Gwrychion to the east and Grongar hill to the west. From the gardens there are delicious glimspses down between trees onto the wide floodplain of the river. The valley sides opposite are thick with woods. The gardens themselves are really delightful with plenty of the sort of formal gardening I like - the Cloister garden is very rare and could be Jacobean - with contrasting areas of informality including a sort of Sacro Bosco limping down the valley side.  All in all pretty much perfect.  A place where sensibility and imagination take wing.  It is not surprising then that the Towy valley and in particular Grongar Hill have inspired a continual stream of artists particularly those associated with the Picturesque and Romantic movements.
     In the 17th century Aberglasney was the home of John Dyer, the poet and artist.  He is particularly remembered for his long lyric poem 'Grongar Hill' (1720).  A minor poem by a minor writer, yes, but not without importance for 'Grongar Hill' marks a turn in English literature towards Romanticism. John Piper, the twentieth century Neo-romantic painter, said it was: 'one of the best purely topographical poems in existence [ ] I have loved the poem ever since I first read it, and I return to it whenever I feel depressed about the countryside getting spoilt.'  In later life Dyer took up Holy Orders and ended up as parish priest in Conningsby, in this my own dear county.  I've wondered what he felt about living amidst the looming flats of the Lincolnshire fens.  William Gilpin visited the Towy valley, and wrote briefly about it in 'Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales. etc. relative to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770'.  Turner, Pocock, Rooker and others followed.
     It continued to attract artists into the 20th century too. I'm lucky enough to own a small lithograph by John Piper. (I think you can guess where this is leading.)  Nothing grand, just a small, open edition illustration using merely four colours that, I think, was made by the Curwen Press to illustrate John Betjeman's anthology 'English, Scottish and Welsh Landscape Verse' (1944). It is, if you haven't already realized, of Grongar Hill, and I love it dearly. Dark, brooding and fraught with significance. Hence my pilgrimage. Piper in fact made four images of Grongar Hill, including an oil painting dating from the early forties, and the last, a present to Albert Hecht the frame maker, dating from the early eighties.

Own work: The Arch of the English Merchants

     Finally a new painting to share with you. And it is the largest work, at 71x52 cms, I have yet attempted.  Mixed media, it is based on the Triumphal arch erected in Antwerp in 1546 by the city's English merchant to celebrate the arrival - the 'adventus' - of prince Philip of Spain.