Two Remarkable Calvinistic Methodist Women

Just as remarkable as David Davies were his two grand-daughters, Gwendoline and Margaret, earnest Calvinistic Methodist women whose achievements make contemporary Christian women seem rather monochrome. Their lives and interests shatter the stereotype of uncultured narrow Christians of a century ago. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph on June 26 Andrew Graham-Dixon outlines their accomplishments. Geoff Thomas.]

“The National Gallery of Wales, in Cardiff, contains one of the world’s most remarkable collections of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. These include, among much, else, Renoir’s magnificent portrait of Henriette Henriot, known as La Parisienne; a clutch of exceptionally powerful Cézannes; several Monets, among them three of his most delicate water lily paintings; and one of Vincent Van Gogh’s last, most technically adventurous and emotionally affecting pictures Rain — Auvers.

“The works in question have recently been re-hung in the museum’s elegant, generously proportioned central galleries. Meanwhile, Ann Sumner, Curator and Assistant Keeper in the Department of Art, has been giving a series of lectures about the paintings across Europe and the United States and has also written Colour and Light, a book about the gallery’s late 19th- and early 20th-century French pictures, which provides the fullest account yet of how the collection was formed by two extraordinary women. “At the start of the 20th century, Gwendoline Davies (1882-1951) and Margaret Davies (1884-1963) were the two richest unwed women in the British Isles, with a combined personal fortune of £l,000,000 and an annual income of around £40,000. At a time when paintings by such artists as Cezanne and Van Gogh could be purchased for just hundreds of guineas, this gave them vast purchasing power in the international art market.

“The origins of their fortune lay in trade. Their grandfather was David Davies of Llandinam, popularly known as “Davies the Ocean”, in reference to the hugely profitable Ocean Coal Company, which he founded, owned and ran. Davies was a committed philanthropist, as well as one of the great self-made men of the Victorian era. His grand daughters inherited not only much of his wealth, but also his strongly developed sense of social responsibility.

“The two girls, who never married, were brought up in rural Wales in the family tradition of Calvinistic Methodism. They were steadfast churchgoers, sabbatarians and lifelong teetotallers. They would neither dance nor go to the opera, although Gwendoline played the violin – she owned a Stradivarius – while Margaret sang and played the harp. This may explain the marked absence of Edgar Degas’s paintings of scenes from the Paris Opéra from their collection of Impressionist art. Neither sister enjoyed good health, but they poured their energies into acts of social philanthropy and into collecting art.

“The sisters were introduced to art by their governess’s brother, Hugh Blaker (1873-1936). Blaker was director of the Holburne Museum in Bath as well as an artist in his own right. He campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, whose true greatness, he believed, was insufficiently appreciated in Britain. However, while his influence certainly lay behind the sisters’ eventual decision to collect French avant-garde art in such strength and depth, the extent to which he shaped their actual collection should not be exaggerated. The sisters were even bolder than him in their aesthetic sensibilities.

“Gwendoline and Margaret Davies had unconventional but unerringly good taste. They began buying art in about 1907, and concentrated initially on pre-Impressionist painting. They bought a number of Corot’s late, exquisitely feathery landscapes. They bought numerous poignant depictions of the agrarian poor, by Millet and by Daumjer – works which hint at the depth of their social concern and foreshadow their decision, in later life, to foreswear art for charitable works.

“They bought several works by Turner, too, which might seem a fairly run-of-the-mill thing to have done – Turner was a household name by the early 20th century – but the sort of pictures that they bought show just how enlightened and adventurous they were. They admired Turner at his most experimental, purchasing works so nearly abstract that many of their contemporaries would have had great difficulty in recognising such pictures as finished works of art.

“When they turned their attention to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, the sisters showed a similar, prescient openness to precisely those aspects of modern painting that were most difficult and baffling to mainstream British taste. They made their first serious Impressionist purchases in 1912, buying, among other things, Manet’s daringly sketch-like Effect of Snow at Petit-Montrouge. Against the advice of Blaker, who warned them that the painter’s vision had been impaired by cataracts, they bought no fewer than three of Monet’s water lily paintings direct from his dealer Durand-Ruel, as well as one of the most atmospheric and near-impenetrable of his depictions of Rouen cathedral, Rouen Cathedral: Setting Sun.

“At the height of the First World War, visiting Paris while the city was under heavy bombardment, Gwendoline Davies acquired two stunning Cézannes, Mid-day, L’Estaque and Provençal Landscape. Cezanne was little appreciated in Britain, and it is no exaggeration to say that the subsequent impact of these pictures changed the course both of taste and of art collecting in this country.

“Shipped quickly out of Paris, to save them from German heavy artillery, they were placed on display at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, where the 18-year-old Kenneth Clark travelled to see them. In 1922, the Davies sisters lent their Cézannes once more, this time to Roger Fry’s exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, “The French School of the Last Hundred Years”, where they were admired by the textile magnate Samuel Courtauld. He later recalled the event as one of the formative experiences of his life. “At that moment I felt the magic and I have felt it in Cezanne’s work ever since.” Courtauld proceeded to build his own great collection of paintings by Cezanne, which can be seen at the Courtauld Institute Galleries in Somerset House.

“The visceral, physical and emotional experience of looking at a great painting was something to which the Davies sisters were clearly attuned. If there is one thread running through their collection, it is a preference for works that attack the viewer at the level of what Francis Bacon used to call “the nervous system”. They bought Monet’s least view-like, most physically immediate and optically seductive pictures. They bought Manet’s most sketch-like, vehement works. They bought Cezanne at his most giddyingly, dizzyingly effective. They also bought some of Cezanne’s most figurative works – bathing and diving figures – as well as a group of extremely sensual Rodins, including the bronze version of The Kiss. They bought the sort of art that no one would ever associate with the stereotypical image of rich Calvinistic Methodist Welsh spinsters.

“The sisters’ collecting activities were squeezed into a relatively small compass of time. By the early 1920s, they had decided that art was a luxury they could no longer afford. Gwendoline confided to a friend, in a letter of November 1921, that she had not bought any pictures for over a year – “we simply cannot face it in face of the appalling need everywhere – Russian children, Earl Haig’s ex-soldiers, all so terribly human. After all, it is humanity that needs help and sympathy, isn’t it?” From then on, the main question, for them, seems not to have been how best to add to their collection but what to do with it. In the 1920s, they may briefly have entertained the idea of giving it to the recently built Tate Gallery, but their enthusiasm for that nascent museum of British and international modern art was tempered by its refusal to accept the loan of their Cézannes – the implication being that he was not really an artist of any great worth.

“In the end, they decided that the permanent home of the paintings should be the National Gallery of Wales (a building for which, incidentally, they largely paid). Their hope was to enrich Welsh culture and cure what they saw as a perennial blindness to the visual arts among their fellow countrymen.

“Half a century later, the two women would doubtless have been gratified by the hordes of Welsh schoolchildren and other visitors that throng the galleries hung with the pictures they collected. The principal challenge facing the museum in the years ahead is that of persuading the wider world to take the trouble to get to know one of the most stunning and surprising collections formed in Britain in the 20th century.”