Sir Kyffin Williams; painter
Hyfler/Rosner
02 September 2006
Meic Stephens
Sir Kyffin Williams
Painter of iconic mountain landscapes of North Wales
http://www.momawales.org.uk/collect/kyfwill3.jpg
http://www.gtj.org.uk/en/themeitems/28982
http://www.aber.ac.uk/museum/delweddau/_delweddau/kyffinwilliams_farmer.jpg
If there is a stereotype of North Wales as a land of
mountains, it has much to do with the art of Kyffin Williams
who, for more than half a century, painted the rugged
landscape of Snowdonia and its people in a style
unmistakably his own.
The typical Kyffin picture shows a peak under dark cloud, a
lowering sky and perhaps a shepherd, with hazel stick and
dog, making his way down a rocky slope, or a small
farmhouse, its whitewashed walls a refuge from the sombre
majesty of its setting. The predominant colours are
olive-green, slate-grey, ochre and umber, the paint applied
lusciously with a palette knife in thick, bold swathes of
pigment in which it is possible to take pleasure for its own
sake.
Kyffin Williams never tired of painting his native land, or
at least those upland parts of it he knew and loved - he
rarely ventured into the urban south and never attempted to
tackle the industrial landscape of Glamorgan, that other
stereotype of modern Welsh painting. He was deeply rooted in
Anglesey and Gwynedd, one of the heartlands of the Welsh
language, and, although he spoke only English, became its
representative artist, just as T.H. Parry-Williams and Kate
Roberts were its writers. "I have been extraordinarily
lucky," he wrote in the 1971 symposium Artists in Wales, "to
have been born and reared in such a lovely landscape among
people with whom I have so great an affinity."
He was born in Llangefni, Anglesey's market town, in 1918,
the younger son of a bank manager and into a family who, on
both the spear and the distaff side, had for generations
served the Anglican Church as rectors and vicars in the
county. Reduced to near poverty by a lawsuit brought against
his mother by a malevolent cousin, the family removed in
1925 to Pentre-felin, a village between Cricieth and
Porthmadog on the southern side of the Lleyn peninsula, and
it was there the boy first had his eyes opened to the
grandeur of the Ordovician landscape. "This was a new
world," he wrote, "and I loved the melancholic beauty of the
mountain storms."
It was a matter of regret for him that his mother,
Welsh-speaking but a genteel and highly strung woman, kept
him from the village children, with the result that what he
learned of the language in later life was only enough to
understand the toponymy of the area.
After a spell in a preparatory school at Trearddur in
Anglesey, he went to Shrewsbury School, where at the age of
16 he contracted polioencephalitis which led, two years
later, to epilepsy. Even so, having held a job for three
years with a firm of land agents in Pwllheli, he enlisted in
the Territorial Army with the 6th Battalion of the Royal
Welch Fusiliers and, at the outbreak of war, was sent to
Northern Ireland.
His military career came to an abrupt halt in the barracks
at Wrexham in 1941 when he suffered an epileptic attack. It
was there, with an irony the future painter was to relish,
he was told by a doctor that he would have to relinquish
hopes of returning to land agency because he was "abnormal"
and that, as therapy, he ought to take up art. In October
1941 he enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art under
Randolph Schwabe. "They took me in," he said with typical
self-deprecation, "because everyone else was away at the
war."
At first inept and untutored, and knowing next to nothing
about drawing, he was happy at the Slade, relocated for the
duration to Oxford and going through one of its less
rigorous phases, and found great solace in the use of paint.
He began producing pictures in a rough-hewn style not
dissimilar to that of his more mature work, and based on
what he remembered of his boyhood in North Wales.
The revelation of what art really meant to him came in the
library of the Ashmolean Museum when, while gazing at the
head of Christ in Piero della Francesca's Resurrection, he
felt tears rolling down his cheeks. This incident, movingly
recounted in Horizons Hung in Air and Land against the
Light, the films made by John Ormond in 1966 and 1978, was
to mould his style in that it taught him the vital
importance of mood. "It had an incredible effect on me," he
said, "because up until then, rather stupidly, I had felt
that painting was more or less reproducing the world without
getting to any greater depths."
His first and only job was teaching art at Highgate School
in London, albeit on a part-time basis, for by now he was
set on becoming a professional painter. Living in a dreary
room in Bisham Gardens, he managed to survive on soup and
kippers cooked by a sympathetic landlady, a Miss Mary
Josling, a blind woman who took in lame dogs like him.
"It was in Bisham Gardens," he wrote, "that I first began to
draw on my library of memories until I often ceased to be in
London as the room became peopled with farmers and
sheepdogs, and bounded by stone walls and rocky cliffs." He
had found the landscape and figures which were to be his
proper subjects for the rest of his life, and shortly
afterwards he began painting in Wales.
He gave up teaching altogether in 1973 and returned to
Anglesey, where he found a small cottage on the shore of the
Menai Straits which was renovated for him at the expense of
the Marquess of Anglesey, thereafter his patron and friend,
and from which there were splendid views of the mountains of
Eryri. On blue-sky days he was usually to be found there;
when the weather was overcast, or after snow, he would be
out in the mountains with his sketchbook.
Kyffin Williams held his first one-man exhibition at
Colnaghi's in 1948 and almost immediately began to enjoy a
reputation as the Welsh landscape painter par excellence.
His inclusion in the Arts Council of Great Britain's
"Twenty-five Paintings by Contemporary Welsh Artists", in
the year following, confirmed his standing as a major
presence in Wales. Further exhibitions of his work followed
in quick succession at the Leicester Galleries, the Glynn
Vivian in Swansea, the Tegfryn in Menai Bridge, the Howard
Roberts in Cardiff and the Thackeray in London, and over the
next few years his work was bought by all the major
collections in Wales.
Commissions came his way, too, especially to paint eminent
Welshmen such as Sir Thomas Parry, Dr Huw T. Edwards, Sir
Charles Evans, Lord Flowers and Sir David Hughes Parry, all
stout pillars of the Welsh establishment which took him up
almost as its official portrait painter, so that there is
hardly a public institution in Wales which does not have at
least one Kyffin picture in its boardroom.
Although the artist preferred his portraits of people to his
landscapes, they are not always admired, for it may be that
his painterly skills were better suited to the depiction of
sky, sea and mountain than to reproducing the features of
the great and the good, however distinguished. But some of
his women and children have an attractive poignancy and
tenderness, while his studies of old country people are done
with honesty and sympathy; a selection of them is to be
found in his book Portraits (1996).
Williams was aware of his weaknesses as a painter. Almost as
if to escape the confines of what he knew he could do, in
1968, with the help of a Winston Churchill Fellowship, he
spent several months in Patagonia, where a hundred years
before some 160 Welsh people, fleeing religious, linguistic
and political persecution at home, had settled in the
salt-dry valley of the Chubut and in the foothills of the
Andes, and where several thousand of their descendants are
bilingual in Welsh and Spanish to this day.
What he brought back was very different from his earlier
work in its brighter colours and in its depiction of this
arid region and its gaucho people. Most of the gouaches and
watercolours he made during the trip were donated, as a
valuable pictorial record of the colony, to the National
Library of Wales and shown at the National Eisteddfod of
1971. A brief visit to Venice in 1979 again suggested the
direction in which his work might have developed if only he
had not felt so committed to his native North Wales.
Kyffin Williams was also an accomplished writer. He
published two volumes of autobiography: Across the Straits
(1973), which describes his boyhood and youth, and its
sequel A Wider Sky (1991), which he dedicated to Lord
Anglesey. A superb raconteur, he wrote with panache about
the people and places he had known, often movingly and
always with wit and compassion. A good selection of his
paintings and drawings was reproduced in The Land and the
Sea (1998).
In one of his many anecdotes, he told how, while out
painting one afternoon in Anglesey, he returned to his car
parked in a narrow lane only to find that it was stuck in
the muddy ditch. The noise of the revving engine as he tried
to start it attracted the attention of a farmer in a nearby
field, who promptly helped him to get the car going again.
In gratitude, Williams, the most amiable and generous of
men, then thrust into the man's hands one of the sketches
from which he habitually worked; today it would fetch a
thousand pounds in a Cardiff or London gallery. The farmer
took one blank look at it, pushed back his cap in
bewilderment, roughly folded the paper into eight squares
and stuffed it into his back pocket. "Diolch," he said
curtly, "thank you" - and quickly disappeared through the
hedge.
Curiously, given that Kyffin Williams depended so much on
official and corporate patronage, he was not averse to
expressing acerbic views about such bodies as the Welsh Arts
Council, which neglected him for many years, and the
ill-fated Centre for the Visual Arts in Cardiff, which
during its brief existence in 1999/2000 showed only the work
of what he considered the second-rate avant-garde. He was
passionately in favour of a National Art Gallery for Wales,
which we still do not have, and warmly supportive of the
younger painters of whom he approved.
One of his obiter dicta was "A painter who pursues success
and fashion, chasing after them with the utmost vigour,
will, in fact, always be five minutes late". He was able to
say this more often, moreover, towards the end of his life
when his pictures were fetching high prices and his work had
achieved iconic status in Wales. There was a joke about the
price of his paintings: "They cost a kyffin lot."
John Kyffin Williams, painter: born Llangefni, Anglesey 9
May 1918; Senior Art Master, Highgate School 1944-73;
President, Royal Cambrian Academy 1969-76, 1992-2006; ARA
1970, RA 1974; OBE 1982; Kt 1999; died Llanfair
Pwllgwyngyll, Anglesey 1 September 2006.