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the penzance art gallery John Thomas Blight 1835 |
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1835 : John Thomas Blight Commentary On
May Day, 1861, Blight wrote the preface to his new book A week at the
Land’s End. His third and latest book was a charming production, full
of first hand description written in Blight’s straightforward prose
style; and illustrated with his own woodcuts. They portrayed a landscape
rich and fascinating in every way, from the Newlyn and Penzance
fisheries to the granite quarry at Lamorna Cove, where house-sized rocks
were blasted and split for transport by wagon; the mine at Botallack,
driven out below the sea; the rare Cornish chough and the poisonous
great weever fish; ruined chapels; churches and their traditions, the
old stones and their superstitions. He described the former inhabitants
of West Penwith as Britons, struggling to maintain their freedom. Yet he
saw them as a separate race. When describing Gulval, he called the
churchyard ‘truly English’ and asked ‘where shall we find such
spots as this save in our native land?’ To
read Blight’s new book, with its ‘spirited but rough’ engravings,
is to accompany a steady, able writer in a series of rambles across his
home land, to hear the workers calling from the fields, to watch the
changing patterns of the clouds and to feel the Cornish wind as it
ruffles the ever moving sea. Of sitting on the coastal sward after
Tol-pedn, he wrote: ‘…pleasant
it is to repose on these verdant slopes by the sea, to watch the vessels
passing,
and the waves coming on the shore, and the reflected lights of the white
clouds as they
float by; there is nothing to disturb rest or your meditations, the only
sound is from the sea which “cannot rest” or the plaintive note of
some sea bird as it soars along the coast.’ |
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John Blight Fact FileBorn: Redruth (possibly
Illogan), Cornwall, near England, 1835. Interests: Painting, drawing, engraving, learnt from his father. Prehistory (the ‘Giant’s Rounds’ at Lescudjack were a short walk away. Nature, especially seaweeds, but also birds, fish, flowers and ferns, all of which he recorded lovingly. Above all, the landscape of Cornwall, with its ever-changing sea and sky. Career: Like his brother Jo, and sisters Thomasine and Grace, he worked in the family school. He began to win prizes for his artwork and began a serious study of prehistoric sites. His first book, The Ancient Crosses of West Cornwall, was published when he was only twenty-one. Queen Victoria allowed the companion book, Crosses of West Cornwall, to include a royal dedication. His best-loved book, A Week at the Land’s End, has been reprinted down to modern times and is a classic tourist guide. Blight produced scores if not hundreds of illustrations for antiquarian publications, recording sites of antiquity and details of churches he feared would soon be lost. He then met James Halliwell-Phillipps and his life changed forever. Associates: The antiquary Richard Edmonds Jnr., with whom Blight quarrelled bitterly in the press, over who first published the account of the ancient site at Chysauster. The notorious Rev. Hawker of Morwenstow, who tried too hard to influence Blight. They also ended up rowing, Hawker calling his protégé a ‘brainsucker’, ‘trickster’ and ‘of low origin’. Thomas Couch, son of the pioneering Cornish ichthyologist Jonathan Couch, was a good friend, and helped Blight with his publications. The old guard of Cornish naturalists, Ralfs, Montgomery, Vingoe and their colleagues also helped him. The well-known but eventually disgraced William Copeland Borlase MP was a close associate. Blight’s big break came in 1860, when he met James Halliwell, the great Shakespeare enthusiast. If Blight would go to Stratford and produce sketches, paintings and engravings, Halliwell would pay him a little at first. Blight would achieve national recognition when Halliwell’s big Shakespeare book was published. Meantime Blight worked on, eventually making over 600 works of art for his employer. Love: Blight fell in love with Evelina Pidwell , a young woman of Penzance. Whether she rejected him or whether her family prevented her from marrying someone who struggled (and failed) to make £100 a year, their love was not to be. Blight started to show signs of acute depression. Madness: Overwork, unrequited love, failed ambition (Halliwell’s book took too long to publish) and lack of money all contributed. The trigger seems to be a mysterious event in Stratford, when Blight collapsed outside the Falcon Tavern, where Shakespeare is said to have fallen asleep under a crab-apple tree. Blight was never the same again. Depression turned to delusion, centred on religion and his love for Evelina. On the day of judgement, John ‘The Son of Thunder’, would deal with the people who had persecuted him. Evelina was his wife, he claimed, kept from him by force. The Aftermath: In 1871, at the age of 35, Blight was committed to the County Lunatic Asylum, Bodmin, for ‘frightening’ Miss Pidwell, although even his friends had long thought it time for him to be taken into care. They collected enough money to keep him in the gentlemen’s wing for a while, to see how he would get on. Time passed and Blight continued to claim kinship with the almighty and marriage to Evelina. The money ran out and a special fund had to be raised, this time securing an annuity to keep him there to the end of his days if need be. Blight’s publisher told the world that he had died. There was need to keep him confined, according to his carers. Blight was never released and died in Bodmin in 1911 after almost 40 years in the asylum. Irony: When Halliwell died, his collection of original works of art, of which Blight’s were the backbone, was sold to America for over $11,000. Compare that with the £100 p.a. income the artist failed to achieve. A life lost?: This is the title of a novel the deeply depressed Blight was thinking of writing. We imagine a Victorian asylum as a living hell but the artist’s writings and illustrations reveal an entirely different world. Madness there surely was but also humanity. The inmates were taken on picnics. They received visitors (Captain Forward’s son gave me a date and a pencil stub, records Blight). There were long walks and days of helping with the harvest. Routine, rest and a regime opposed to drugs, restraint and solitary confinement. Blight continued to paint and draw, his portraits of attendants and inmates, townspeople and vignettes of Bodmin all vanished except for the small diary rescued from an attic. In August 1900, a smartly dressed and lively looking Blight appears on several photographs of the archaeological excavations at Harlyn Bay, Cornwall. What were his thoughts as he stared into the recently exposed grave? Posterity: Blight’s name lives on as the foremost recorder of a series of vanished landscapes and of a way of life that was disappearing before his eyes, under the influence of the new industrial age and his own failing reason. His painstaking and often extremely beautiful works of art were mainly produced in the fifteen years before the Great Gate at Bodmin shut him away for ever. © Selina Bates and Keith Spurgin SELINA BATES and KEITH SPURGIN have been researching the life and works of J. T. Blight for more than 10 years. They have written the biography of F. H. Davey (Stars in the Grass) and in 2003 wrote and produced the film Blight, Starring Richard Coyle and Mary Woodvine, and directed by Bill Scott. The cast and crew numbered over a hundred and was mainly drawn from people living in Cornwall. Alongside professional actors were players whose real-life roles were the same as their screen parts. Naturalists, an archaeologist, a policeman and a vicar acted with the stars. The part of ‘old’ John T. Blight, artist was taken by John B. Blight, artist! The manuscript biography of J. T. Blight is waiting to be published. Copies of the video Blight can be obtained from the gallery
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