Curnow Vosper: His Life and Works

by Jolyon Goodman (Y Lolfa, £17.95)

SALEM by the watercolourist Sydney Curnow Vosper has been for the Welsh what Constable’s Hay Wain has been for the English — a remarkable work of nostalgia and, at times, the subject of much debate and even controversy.

Vosper (1866-1942) painted his iconic work in a chapel near Harlech in 1908. At a preview of the Royal Watercolour Society exhibition in 1909 it was bought for more than 100 guineas by William Hesketh Lever, the soap industrialist.

It now hangs in the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Bebington on the Wirral, where it remains the main centre of attraction. The story of how Lever promoted his soap by producing prints of Salem which were framed and hung in homes the length and breadth of Wales is well-known.

What it lacked is the story of the man behind the iconic image and in this book Jolyon Goodman has performed a Herculean labour in tracking down the artist’s considerable yet little known output to shed light on his life and artistic career.

Vosper, from Plymouth, trained at the Academie Colarossi in Paris. It was his wife Constance James from Merthyr Tydfil who took him to the Ardudwy area which inspired the painting Salem, Market Day in Old Wales and several lesser-known works, notably the simple but powerful Grief, one of a number of paintings showing his keen eye for detail.

His Welsh period ended with the premature death of his wife in 1910. But he was already well-known in Brittany as one of a number of artists who spent time in Le Faouet in the Morbihan region.

It is in his portrayals of Breton working men and women that we see both fine works of art and the studied naturalism informing genuine ethnographic documents.

Bretons at Prayer (1898), painted at the chapel of St Fiacre — a hamlet about a mile from Le Faouet —  is on show at the Cyfarthfa Castle Museum in Merthyr and is a particularly fine painting. Un cultivateur mecanique, a work of wit and energy, was for many years the logo of Le Faouet art museum.

The book includes a number of cartoons and sketches, along with another element of the Vosper canon, the 36 watercolours of statues of Breton saints from chapels around Le Faouet which Vosper was commissioned to create for the National Museum of Wales.

The only retrospective exhibition of Vosper’s work, in Le Faouet in 2001 and Merthyr in 2002, provided a spur for Jolyon Goodman’s book.

It’s a revelation which shows it is a time for another — and far more comprehensive — exhibition.