Thomas Nathaniel Davies
There are two letters from Nathaniel Davies (signed T.N. Davies) to Ruth Borchard, dated 1959, from Newton Abbott in Devon. His full name was Thomas Nathaniel Davies, but he signed his pictures Nathaniel Davies, and preferred to be called by his middle name. In the first, he writes: 'This self-portrait is the earliest I have – apart from one or two drawings of myself. One is rather sentimental about self-portraits, as I think a painter views them with a somewhat unique personal attachment – they usually have a great exercise value to the painter... This painting was done when I was 24, twelve years ago. I was actually in the army at the time.'
Ruth was pleased with the painting but found it lack certain (innately symbolic?) qualities she had observed in other works by him. So in the second letter, he writes: 'Concerning the reservation you made – I have two other self-portraits, apart from numerous drawings of myself, but neither of them I feel reflect a great deal of the style that you may have in my other work, partly due to a difference in subject matter, partly because of a different motive behind the painting and partly because the human face, especially one's own, doesn't lend itself to symbols which one has in other paintings.'
He goes on to say: '... nowadays – I feel painters tend to alter their style, in a subtle way, according to the subjects they are painting. I think it is "the mood" which is the constant thing – the style may change, and one may be influenced one way or another, but one can still be sincere, and convey something.'
It seems likely that Ruth was first alerted to Davies's work in Jack Beddington's 1957 book Young Artists of Promise. A percipient, realistic portrait of an earnest-looking, bearded, bespectacled young man – Alan Shipton by 'Thomas N. Davies' – is illustrated here in black-and-white.
In Davies's self-portrait, the head is modelled with robust delicacy, and the kind of quality that the painter John Craxton once identified as 'the chic of facility'. The huge hazel eyes looking obliquely away are drawn with childlike forthrightness (his right eye appearing as if it has become virtually semi-detached from the face). Features are exaggerated and transfigured (rather in the sculpturally attenuating manner of Modigliani's portraits): the generous lips, the large sweep of forehead and the thick, black, glossy hair, the angular chin (itself delineated by the most slight yet assured, singular brushstroke right up to the cheekbone). It is the dark, prominent eyes above all – like mesmeric eyes in an Indian Mughal miniature – which communicate an enchanting if disquieting sense of mystery.
Davies was a good-looking man; he was sometimes likened in his youth to the film star Douglas Fairbanks Junior. But the picture seems devoid of vanity. the strong, gentle face has something fierce, even desperate in its brooding tenderness. The background is quite abstract, but may show bluish-grey water below a leaden sky (with a hint of a chalky cliff or an expanse of white sands perhaps to the left, and maybe reflections of trees, gone a somewhat muted crimson, in the water to the right). The face appears dramatically illuminated as though by sun suddenly piercing a gap in the clouds. The shadows on the right of his face evoke sunburn perhaps, contrasting strongly with the Modigliani-like, salmon-pink pallor where his face is lit. But the atmosphere of this portrayal is far more than strictly meteorologically defined: it seems directed by primal inner forces.
The neat, dusky, tomato red shirt collar and just visible dark blue tie, along with the abundant though neat head of hair, suggest a man who enjoyed his appearance. For the austere, short-back-and-sides 1940s, when male flamboyance or pleasure in an individualistic appearance were usually frowned upon, his is a colourful, artistic appearance. Nathaniel's son, the photographer Marcus Davies (in a conversation in 2003 with the author at the Photographer's Gallery in London, where Marcus exhibits his own works) testifies that his father enjoyed wearing bright, often bohemian-looking clothes, including a wide variety of hats.
It may be that, painted in 1947 following Davies's war service (he had been called up in 1942), this is an especially reflective painting, in which the artist is searching out his real, hitherto often-subsumed identity as an individual and as a painter, and contemplating the difficult return to civilian life. It is highly likely that something of the suffering and perturbations of the war years – spent serving in the Royal Corps of Signals, with a long spell in North Africa – when he witnessed some terrible events, rarely alluded to in later years – is in some way contained in his haunted, introverted look.
In its refreshing mixture of sophistication and deliberate Douanier Rousseau-like naivety, it is a picture quite close in spirit to portraits by Christopher Wood (who had died in 1930 at the age of twenty-nine), and Cedric Morris, the Welsh-born painter whose work was shown widely in Wales in the late 1930s, and which quite likely Davies encountered.
After being demobbed, Davies resumed his studies at Cardiff College of Art. His war experience had matured and changed him considerably: one undoubted effect was to make him much less ambitious as a professional painter. In 1947 he took up a teaching appointment at South Devon College of Art at Newton Abbott, remaining a full-time teacher until he retired in 1984 as Head of the College's School of Art and Design (which had moved to nearby Torquay in the early 1970s). For a brief period in the 1950s, he taught at the Royal College of Art, where the sculptor John Skeaping, a professor there, became a close friend. John Skeaping's Chickens is the title of Davies's spirited picture of a group of quirky, elegant fowl.
Davies was born in Dowlais in South Wales, where his father, a stonemason, through necessity worked as a bricklayer at the big steelworks which dominated the small town. When the steelworks shut down in 1934, the family moved to Cardiff. Nathaniel became a keen footballer, and was so good that he considered football as a career but his longstanding ambition remained to become an artist. In 1939 he became the first member of his family to go to college. At Cardiff College of Art, he was taught and befriended by the painter Ceri Richards (1903-1971); there, drawing from the human figure was central to his studies.
Davies's self-portraits as a young man form a small but masterly body of work – with influences ranging from Post-Impressionism to Picasso, and, doubtless, early Italian and Flemish portraiture too. He made another self-portrait in oils in 1947. The eyes here are still large and prominent, but the look is no longer hauntingly oblique but rather one of transfixing, yet nevertheless somehow rather wary, directness. The moustachioed face appears more naturalistic, less angular, less sculpturally drawn. He wears some kind of scarf or cravat (subtly red-spotted) under a charcoal grey sweater, and a wide-brimmed hat decorated with playfully exuberant subtlety round the brim with colourful, abstract, Klee-like shapes: a red triangle, mauve square, what looks like a yellow cross. This handsome, young figure – appearing somehow emotionally muted or even drained (despite his colourful, bohemian attire) – is set against a backdrop of a vivid, dusky red curtain and window panes letting in a quavering, silvery light.
Further self-portraits in charcoal on paper, oil on card and pencil on paper, over the next few years evidence the same kind of fine, inimitable draughtsmanship, piercing, shadowed intensity, and deep process of resolutely stylish individuation.
There is a 1948 oil portrait of his wife Heather (her name etched in large capitals into the paint down the left side of the picture) in a salmon-pink top, looking imperturbably serene, and, from about the same time, a portrait of a woman called Pauline – her large green eyes drawn with haunting, childlike asymmetry. A characteristically graceful use of line is seen in an undated drawing of a naked woman in a series of sinuous poses.
Davies's style change a good deal over the years. When he wrote to Ruth that 'painters tend to alter their style, in a subtle way... it is "the mood" which is the constant thing', his words were to prove curiously prophetic in regards to his own future development as an artist. His work moved closer and closer to abstraction over time, though towards the end of his life, in his print-making, it returned to figuration, now itself informed by a powerfully reinforced abstract sense. A 1962 oil portrayal of a baby in its high chair (Nathaniel's daughter, Ceri) – which can be related to Kitchen Sink School paintings of babies and infants by Jack Smith and Peter Coker (q.v.) – has been, to a high degree, abstracted into simple, spare geometric forms. In fact, the use of volumetric abstraction serves only to heighten to the sense of humanity – the presence here of a palpably real baby. (Nathaniel had two daughters and two sons; his son Marcus notes that 'my father was a very proud and loyal family man and devoted dad.'). In the early 1970s, Davies made large, clean, sparse abstract paintings, eschewing figuration entirely but, as always, a robustly sensitive use of line is pre-eminent.
Paintings, and later prints, amalgamating memories and impressions of both childhood and contemporary Dowlais, evoke a sombre, politically oppressed world shot through with shafts of sudden illumination, liberating notes – literally, in the case of a bitterly ironic woodcut print (Pit Closures, 1993) of out-of-work miners and their wives huddling together ruminatively outside gloomy terraced houses (one of which has the advertising slogan, 'You'll Neever [sic] Work Again – £5 Million Weekly Payout' for Littlewood's Pools displayed beguilingly on the wall. In their midst of the picture is the at once quotidian and transcendent presence of a radiant white greyhound. The National Library of Wales has a copy of this print.
Reviewing the original Face to Face book in 2004 in Galleries magazine, Nicholas Usherwood wrote: '.................' In May 2009, an exhibition of his art over many years took place at Whitfield Fine Art in London, which at last brought Davies's art to the wider public and critical attention it merits
In a 1949 poem, the artist had articulated the sense of compassionate humanity, rooted in his Welsh background, which lies at the heart of his work:
I know these squatting men,
These silicosised coughing men,
These bitter unemployed men arguing again
And again for fair spirituality.
Nathaniel Davies died in 1996. He once wrote: 'You are going to look at a painting. Take nothing with you – no memories, no intellectual preparation, no sentiment, no not even a canon of beauty. No preconceived ideas will help, but go with nothing and maybe you will receive something.'
