Robert Morgan

There are five letters from Robert Morgan to Ruth Borchard, sent from Portsmouth, and dated between 1964-66. In the third, he discusses a recent visit to Ruth in Reigate: 'I enjoyed looking at the portraits. I feel stimulated and eager to go ahead with more painting. Emile Nolde colours are in my head. What a powerful painter he is. Do you like Alexis von Jawlensky? I have one picture by him in an artbook, Modern Painting.'

In the next letter, he writes: 'Thank you for your note and the beautiful reproductions of Emil Nolde paintings. I particularly like his powerful use of colour. It seems his emotional power overflows in his sophisticated use of colour. To me this is the only real way to paint. It is the way I feel about my subject of mining in South Wales.'

A final note to Ruth tells of his achievements: 'Rupert Hart-Davis will be publishing a book of mine in 1967. The book will consist of 45 poems and a poetic play.

'I have also written two novels. My second novel [in fact an autobiography based on his early life] has been accepted for publication. [This was My Lamp Still Burns, published some fifteen years later in 1981 by Gomer Press, Wales].

'I recently had an art exhibition [...] It consisted of 10 years work.'

Born in 1921 in the mining village of Penrhiwceiber, Mid-Glamorgan, South Wales, Robert Morgan was about thirty-seven years old when this 1958 gouache self-portrait was painted. His raw, sorrowful yet gently benign look may bring to mind early twentieth-century portraits by Symbolists, Fauvists and Expressionists.

In a catalogue essay for the 1972 exhibition of his 'painting, sculpture, books and manuscripts' in Winchester, M.H.D. Norman wrote: 'Morgan, distrusting calculation and planning beforehand, plunges into each successive work, proceeding on intuition rather than intellect.' Urgent in tone, his self-portrait is nevertheless intricately composed and full of ingenious painterly effects – such as furrows in the brow etched into the paint perhaps with the wooden brush tip.

With its rugged black verticals with occasional vivid patches of pink, indigo and white, the background resembles some contemporary abstract painting, somewhat in the abstraction lyrique manner of William Gear (q.v.). An untitled 1966 painting by Morgan of a mining environment is audaciously abstracted into angular and orbic segments of plain bright colours bounded by sturdy black binding lines (with an effect somewhat like stained glass); the  picture’s diverse shapes indicate forms of machinery and buildings at the pithead, whilst the black contours seem to allude to the nature of life underground amid the rich coal seams. In the mint green sky above this phantasmagoric scene, shines a mustard yellow sun, and also a smaller, lilac full moon.      

In his poem Shadows, Morgan wrote:

                              I know there are bright places

                              Under the brow of the hill slag

                              But it was in the shadows I

                              Wandered where truth was thickest.

To those acquainted with Morgan's youth as a coal miner, and also with his paintings of mines and dark mining villages (into which sunlight is seen dramatically – yet sparsely – to percolate), his self-portrait's partial coal-black backdrop evokes such 'shadows I / Wandered where truth was thickest'. What M.H.D. Norman has written of Morgan's paintings is pertinent here: 'The thick black lines [...] have a gestural urgency which might reflect the cutting of coal from a face: they certainly recall what they often in paint represent – the strong girders of the wheelhouse. Perhaps also to some degree their existence comes from that of the pit-props that confined and ensured the working space of the miner.'

Morgan's autobiography My Lamp Still Burns deserves to be better known as a poignant yet matter-of-fact account of a sensitive young Welsh miner striving (against all odds) after liberating knowledge. In it, he describes the village collieries (the subject of many future paintings), 'with their tall, black, iron towers and paraphernalia of sheds, cabins, tramshops, blacksmith's shops, screes for coal clearing, winding gears, engine houses [...]' He also recounts following his father into the mines, aged fourteen, for his first, disorientating shift: 'I suppose it is not easy for anyone who has never been employed in such work to visualise the scene of a low-seam coal-face with the doubled-up figure of a collier cutting coal with a mandrel, or to understand precisely the feeling of utter exhaustion of several hours of continuous labour in semi-darkness in such confined spaces.'

There are also some remarkable descriptions here of fellow miners, many of whom coped with the arduous workload with tenacity and humour. Unlike them, Robert soon became deeply discontented. By the time he was sixteen, he says, 'how I envied those who went to work in a  clean suit of clothes and who did not get exhausted by their daily work’. He began to educate himself from borrowed books, for instance pondering algebraic problems in snatched moments – even underground, 'scribbling, with a piece of chalk, on a flat stone.' The result was that 'I had, in about three months, mastered basic algebra.'

He joined the Miners' Library. 'I read the stories of Jack London, Gorki, Coppard, Tchekov, Maupassant and many others. The Russian novelists thrilled me with their amazing characterisations and creativity.' He studied at night school and through correspondence classes, but the war years further delayed his exit from the mines.

From 1949-51, Morgan studied full-time at a college in Birmingham, where he was encouraged for the first time to draw and paint. He thus came to art history relatively late; unencumbered by expectation, he was free to discover for himself and in his own time those 'influences' with which he felt intuitively in tune. He moved to Bognor Regis in 1951 to train as a teacher, then acquiring his own artist’s studio space. For twenty years, he was a schoolmaster in Hampshire, before retiring to paint and write full-time. Prolific as a painter and poet, his verse play Rainbow Valley was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1967. Ruth kept a copy of the 1966 catalogue for Morgan's exhibition at the Plestor Gallery, Selbourne, Hampshire, which listed not only paintings of mining valleys, a sleeping miner and still-lifes but also a number of pictures titled Geometric Composition.

In a May 2019 essay, ‘Robert Morgan: from Welsh mines to West Sussex’ (for the ARTUK website), Ferren Gipson wrote: ‘His life buzzed with creativity – from his work to his friendships. Artists and writers were regular visitors in the Morgan home, including Ted Walker, Glyn Jones, Leslie Norris, John Alwyn and Sandy Cunningham, amongst others. Morgan’s daughters [Alison Macklin and Marion Evans] recall an occasion when Poet Laureate Ted Hughes paid a visit and fell into a neighbour’s garden after a few too many drinks with their dad at the local pub. The Morgans cultivated a creative environment for their family […]

‘[Macklin] and her sister have vivid memories of his painting-lined studio walls and the sound of clicking typewriter keys as he wrote into the night.’

In 2000, Miner Artists – a National Library of Wales touring exhibition, originated and curated by John Harvey for the Centre for Studies in the Visual Culture of Religion, Aberystwyth University – was held at Gregynog Hall in Powys; National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea; and National Museum & Gallery of Wales, Cardiff. As publicity for the show noted, 'It celebrate[d] the work of Welsh coal workers who painted, drew, modelled, sculpted and took photographs, or in some other way took a practical interest in visual art. Their art represents one of the most enduring forms of working-class populist visual culture. Most miner-artists were untutored amateurs, in the best sense of that word. Some adapted their work to illustrate political ideas, contributing to mining magazines and newspapers drawings that commented on their social conditions. Others, with a vital Nonconformist faith, made images of the biblical stories, concepts and values that undergirded the religious culture of the coalfields. Prominent among these were Illtyd David (1906-92), John 'Chopper' Davies (b.1922), George B. Evans (b.1925), Nicholas Evans (b.1907), Cyril Ifold (1922-86), and Robert Morgan (1921-94).’

The exhibition contained Mining Landscape (1994; oil and pencil on paper) by Morgan. Here, red-roofed, grey-walled outbuildings and the vast pit wheel under a tall, curving hill – a grass-covered slag heap – are delineated with mesmerising childlike simplicity and directness. There is little trace of the expressionist palette of the artist's earlier days nor are the forms deeply abstracted as in his 1966 pithead painting – but the outbuildings' subtly varying grey tones, and the rows of blank windows appearing like opaque human presences or even gravestones, contribute to this picture's uncanny atmosphere – one of surreal stillness, at once mournful and celebratory.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004