Why I wrote Some Miraculous Promised Land

Richard Gwyn

One day, in February 2020, I came upon the work of the Llanelli-born artist James Dickson Innes (1887-1914) and a strange compulsion overtook me. There was an elusive and enchanting quality to his paintings that made me want to find out more about his life, and I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that I had to write about him.

Who was this flamboyantly-dressed yet naïve and unassuming young man, whose life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis in the first month of World War One? And how did he come to paint such unique and astonishing landscapes?

With the onset of the Covid pandemic I had no option but to hunker down, like millions of others, and get on with life as best I could. But I made contact with anyone who knew anything about Innes, and my first port of call was John Hoole, former Director of the Barbican Gallery in London, and co-author of the definitive book about the artist, published to coincide with the centenary exhibition of the artist’s work at the National Museum of Wales, back in 2014. I also contacted the artist Keith Bowen, himself a fine painter, who has followed in Innes’ tracks across the mountain trails of Eryri. 

And once the lockdown was over, I spent time visiting the places, in Wales and south-west France, that Innes had painted.

Despite his illness, Dick Innes was a young man who lived for the outdoors, spending many hours on the mountain, carrying a knapsack filled with the small square boards he used to smear thickly with oils. He was, writes the biographer Michael Holroyd, ‘permanently covered with paint, permanently ill and permanently out of doors, preferring to live rough and sleep under the stars.’

I never intended to write a straightforward biography: most of all, I wanted to make a book that corresponded with Innes’ style of painting, mixing representation with invention. There were periods of Dick Innes’ life about which very little was known, so I was obliged to imagine what he might have done, just as, in his paintings, Innes sometimes inserts fictive scenes, or adjusts reality to suit his greater project. 

I tracked down the places he stayed, including Rhyd-y-fen, once an inn, now a working farm, just off the A4212 from Bala to Trawsfynydd, and met the family who live there, and who have themselves become intrigued by the story of Innes and his fellow Welshman Augustus John.

John Rothenstein, art historian and onetime Director of the Tate Gallery, wrote of this pair: ‘In the course of a few enchanted years, spent now in Wales, now in the south of France, the two artists, who were joined by the Australian Derwent Lees . . . painted a group of small pictures of singular beauty. And when Innes died, and Lees ceased to paint, and the focus of John’s interest changed, something profoundly original and lovely went out of British painting, and left it colder and more prosaic.’

Both Innes and John, Rothenstein adds, were obsessed by a highly personal understanding of the ideal landscape; both of them, working with vivid colours, may have been rediscovering traces of sunlit days as children in Wales. And along with Derwent Lees, the subject of a recent and stunningly illustrated re-appraisal by Lynne Davies, this trio of painters would become known as ‘the wild men of Arenig’, after the mountain of that name.

I also went to Collioure, on the Còte Vermeille of French Catalunya, a part of the world that Innes visited many times between 1908 and 1913, and where some of his finest paintings were done. It is an area I have known since my twenties, and walking the familiar vine-covered hillsides of the region helped bring me closer to an understanding of Innes, and how he responded to the intense, clear light and vibrant colours of the Mediterranean.

It is impossible to write about Innes without mentioning Euphemia Lamb, a famous model of her day, with whom the artist was deeply in love. Euphemia, who came from a modest background in Manchester, was in many ways an icon of sexual liberation, causing Virigina Woolf to comment ‘my head spins with her stories’, and John Maynard Keynes to remark that Euphemia enjoyed ‘more sexual life than the rest of us put together.’ 

In a strange process of association, it would seem that in Innes’ mind Arenig Fawr and Euphemia, the object of his adoration, became somehow merged. We might easily conjecture that Innes took the sparkling and ephemeral Euphemia of London’s bars and dancehalls and re-cast her as a mountain which he could set down before him and paint, and make uniquely his. As far as Innes was concerned, Euphemia was Arenig. 

Remember

Before he died, Dick buried a silver casket of heir letters near the summit of his sacred mountain. However, anyone minded to search for it might be disappointed: in August 1943 an American B17 Flying Fortress crashed into the mountain, after the pilot lost his way during a night-time training mission.

But with uncharacteristic devotion, Euphemia, who outlived Innes by over forty years, spent much of her remaining life building up a superb collection of Dick’s work, much of which has ended up in our National Museum, and in other galleries around the world.  

Innes was best remembered by his friend Augustus John for his prodigious activity when the two of them worked out in the open, below the twin peaks of Arenig. Innes knew that he had TB, and that his life might well be cut short. He roamed the moors, John says, ‘in search of the magical moment.’ ‘Perhaps,’ he adds, ‘he felt he must hasten while there was time to make these votive offerings to the mountains he loved with religious fervour.’

Later, Augustus would write that it seemed to him as if, in these landscapes, Innes was seeking out ‘the reflection of some miraculous promised land.’ 

Bright but brief

My book is an imaginative reconstruction of Innes’ life, a tribute to a man whose light shone brightly but all too briefly in the years just before the cataclysm of World War One.

Living again in times that feel ominously apocalyptic, Innes’ paintings are a timely reminder of the majesty and beauty of the natural world, and of one man’s astonishing response to the mountains that he loved.

Some Miraculous Promised Land by Richard Gwyn is published by The Hmm Foundation and is available to buy from bookshops.