Some Miraculous Promised Land

Instalment 1

Over the next couple of months I will be posting instalments of my new book, Some Miraculous Promised Land: In Search of James Dickson Innes.

The book will be available to all paying subscribers, who will also have access to the archive of Raids on The Underworld and, further down the line, earlier chapters of Some Miraculous Promised Land.

The first chapter, below, is free to all subscribers. The second and third chapters are for paying subscribers only. So, if you wish to read the full instalment, please upgrade!

Some Miraculous Promised Land is the story of Dick Innes (1887-1914), one of the most original and outstanding of British landscape artists from the early years of the last century. Dick Innes’ star shone briefly in the five years before World War One, a period of uncertainty plagued by a sense of imminent catastrophe (which sounds eerily familiar in 2025).

Innes’ short life — he died of TB at the age of 27, making him a founder member of the club later made famous by the likes of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse — was lived out in the shadow of illness, but that did not prevent the artist from living a life of sometimes ruinous excess. He also loved the outdoors and would spend days and nights out in the mountains of north Wales, in the French Pyrenees, and on the Côte Vermeille. It has been said of Innes that he was ‘the Welsh Kandinsky’, that his daring use of colour linked him both to both Japanese print art and the German Expressionists, but Innes was not a ‘joiner’ and never identified with any particular group or movement. He was very much his own man; an innocent, perhaps, but also one who was very sure of how he wanted to paint. In the words of his friend, Augustus John, ‘Innes’s activity was prodigious; he rarely returned of an evening without a couple of panels completed . . . Perhaps he felt he must hasten while there was time to make votive offerings to the mountains he loved with a religious fervour . . .’

The relationship Dick Innes maintained with the model Euphemia Lamb and with his own sacred mountain, Arenig, in north Wales, make up a crucial part of the story. Euphemia was the love of Dick’s life. He held the two — lover and mountain — in a kind of mystic union, to the extent that, for him — as others have commented —Euphemia was Arenig, and Arenig Euphemia. Before his death he buried their correspondence in a silver casket near the summit of his beloved mountain.

Today, you can read Instalment 1, comprising the opening three chapters. Next Friday, 25 July, I will be posting Instalment 2. I hope you enjoy reading, and do please use the comments section for any feedback or reactions . . .

James Dickson Innes, The Fairy Mountain,

James Dickson Innes (1887-1914)

Ieu sui Arnautz qu'amas l'aura E cas la lebre ab lo bueu E nadi contra suberna.

I am Arnaut who gathers up the wind,
And chases the hare with the ox,
And swims against the torrent.

Arnaut Daniel, translation by Ezra Pound

Chapter One

One morning in February 2020, a few weeks before the Covid pandemic swept into our lives, I received a message from my friend Adam:

Have you heard of the artist JD Innes? Strikes me as someone you would appreciate. I have one in the studio.

Adam had attached a photo of the work in question, and since I was at home, at my desk, I was able to enlarge it on my laptop screen. Even in reproduction, it struck me as beautiful; at once utterly strange and strangely familiar.

A cursory online search identified the painting as one of several the artist completed depicting Arenig Fawr, a mountain in north Wales. A series of other mountain scenes suggested a superbly talented colourist. I don’t want to give the impression that I know a great deal about the visual arts; If I did, I would no doubt have recognised the name James Dickson Innes. However, one of Adam’s qualities is a willingness to educate me in such matters. As chief conservator at the National Museum of Wales, he works in the upper reaches of that imposing building, in a studio that exudes a perfume of acetone, sturgeon glue and occult industry. It is the kind of place one doesn’t immediately associate with the functional and destructive demands of the twenty-first century.

I went about my tasks for the day. But later that afternoon I replied to Adam’s message, and asked if they had other paintings by Innes at the museum. He answered at once:

We’ve got several of his works in our stores. I also have a van Gogh in the studio. Rain at Auvers.

And then:

Would you like to come over next week? Or tomorrow afternoon?

The first thing I noticed when I arrived at the studio the following day was the van Gogh, sitting unframed on an easel in all its brooding splendour, as though its creator had just passed through and left it as an offering, or payment — something he was prone to do — in exchange for goods or food. I gazed at this priceless work, its surface layered with a dense abundance of blue and yellow, scored by dark, slanting strokes to depict the rain.

Vincent van Gogh, Rain, Auvers, 1890 ©Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales

Rain, Auvers was hung at the ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ exhibition in London in the winter of 1910, a show which shocked many, and inspired Virginia Woolf to write that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed.’ Adam told me, in passing, that James Dickson Innes was known to have attended the exhibition; he would have stood before van Gogh’s painting, just as I was standing now, more than a century later. But it would have seemed very different to him, I am sure, because back then van Gogh’s images had not been plastered over rugs, coffee mugs, mouse mats and the walls of a million living rooms.

Temporarily distracted by these thoughts, I wondered out loud how one goes about restoring a van Gogh. In response, Adam outlined to me the essentials of his profession, insisting that although some conservators were themselves artists, he was not. He saw himself partly as a restorer, and in that sense a craftsman, and his job was not to invent or adumbrate but to return a work of art to something approximating to its original state. This was made difficult, he said, in the case of this particular van Gogh, because one of the pigments favoured by the artist, known as geranium lake, had faded almost entirely from the spectrum of colours visible on the canvas. Geranium lake is extremely light sensitive, and there was, he said, no case to be made for re-applying the pigment, which would have lent the original painting a warmer palette. He told me that he had always thought his work as a conservator most resembled that of a translator, an idea that had an immediate appeal for me, since translation is a pursuit, or way of life, that preoccupies me also.

The painting by Innes had gone: it was being sent on to its new owner, whose identity — although known to everyone at the museum — was supposedly secret. Adam had been obliged to part with it before I arrived.

My friend then led me along a corridor and down a stairway, across a large, empty storeroom and down further stairs, and it felt as though we were descending through the entrails of the museum, into a secret domain hidden away from the public realm, where the riches of human and pre-human history were out on display, but which was itself only the outer layer of an infinitely receding treasure trove that lay buried from sight, unknowable, much like the primeval stages of human evolution; and we continued, as I seem to remember, deeper and deeper into an impenetrable domain of forgotten things, and of countless objects and artefacts — rocks, gems, fossils, skeletons, skins; stuffed birds, snakes and rodents; ceramics, fabrics, sculptures, paintings — hidden from view, packed into crates and containers, locked away in vaults and in storage facilities that led off from the corridors through which we walked, and spreading, as I imagined, like a subterranean megalopolis deep beneath the city, below Stuttgarter Strasse and the Boulevard de Nantes and North Road and under Bute Park to the banks of the River Taf, some awaiting repairs or remedial work to be carried out, others lying abandoned for decades, victim to the dissolution and decay that is the destiny of all matter.

There is simply not room to display more than a fraction of the three million works held by the museum, Adam told me, as we entered a tunnel that reminded me of the more forbidding recesses of the London Underground, before arriving finally in a vast hall containing row upon row of artworks, framed and unframed, in wooden racks that were hung on a system of rails. Adam pulled out one of the racks, and then a second, and, not finding what he was looking for, moved further down, until he identified the section containing works by James Dickson Innes. He released them from the rail, and displayed them to me, one by one, and I regarded each picture in turn, exclaiming in surprise at the first of them, which depicted a familiar landscape; not the mountains of Eryri, in north Wales, as I had expected, but of the Côte Vermeille in south-western France, near the Spanish border, and in the distance the unmistakeable shape of Canigó, the great mountain sacred to the Catalans. There were other paintings of Collioure, and of the bay at Cerbère, the coastline stretching down to Portbou and beyond, an area in which I have at various times, since my twenties, lived and wandered. It would be no exaggeration to say that this region has become, for me, a sort of spiritual home, twinned, through some elusive magic, with the Black Mountains of south Wales, where I grew up. There was one canvas depicting the vineyards behind Banyuls-sur-Mer and the Tour Madeloc, a medieval watchtower that oversees the entire coastal strip, and which I have observed in the distance many times during my walks across the Alberas, the last stretch of the Pyrenees before their descent to the sea. The pictures seemed to me like enchanted things; the delight of the artist in his subject matter was contagious, and his use of colour extraordinary and vital. Because I recognised several of the locations, the paintings seemed familiar, though I had never seen them before. I felt an intense curiosity about the man who had painted them, and an immediate desire to immerse myself in a task of excavation that I could barely account for at the time, and am no closer to explaining now, five years on.

For James Dickson Innes, as I would discover, the mountains that he painted represented some quintessential idea of place, which he sought again and again to evoke in increasingly uncompromising terms, most explicitly in his repeated sketches and paintings of Arenig, Canigó and the Tour Madeloc.

I would also learn that Innes left barely a trace of his passing through this world, other than in his paintings. He seems to have been an almost spectral presence. Strangely, only one photograph of him is known to exist. In it, we observe the strong features, black hair swept across his broad forehead, dark eyes focused directly on the camera, and he wears a vaguely bemused or quizzical expression, as though uncomfortable with the attention. He sits straight in the armchair, legs crossed at the knee, and the foreground of the photo is blurred, lending to the scene a sense of the ethereal, as though the figure sitting there were an apparition. Perhaps, I concluded, he did not like being photographed. Although he made friends easily, he was, in other regards, shy and reclusive, and he drank, in part, to overcome his shyness. He did not keep a journal and only a handful of his letters survive. His story is one of silences and empty spaces. There is no record of his travels across France and Spain, or of his final journey to Morocco. Almost nothing is known about the several trips that Innes made to Collioure, or the life he lived on that stretch of coast where France merges into Spain, but we do know that his experience of the place helped transform his art. And it was in this double infatuation, with the mountains of Wales on the one hand, and the landscape of this Catalan border country on the other, that I recognised in James Dickson Innes a kindred soul. There, in the cavernous vaults of the National Museum, a wave of déjà vu washed over me, and with it a sublime confusion.

Later, as the pandemic spread, and a national lockdown was imposed, we retreated into our hermitic lives and my fascination with the life and art of James Dickson Innes only grew. Since so little was available about Innes himself, compared with other artists of his era, I foraged through the biographies of his more famous contemporaries, books about the art of his time, and wrote to those with any claim to expertise in his work. As the weeks passed, I immersed myself in this unsought but now all-absorbing task, imagining my way into the life he lived, or might have lived.

Chapter Two

James Dickson Innes — Dick to his friends — began his studies at the Slade School of Art, adjoining University College London, in September 1905. His easygoing manner and dark good looks, inherited, it was rumoured, from French or Catalan blood on his mother’s side, made him an attractive and popular figure. Nothing, however, supports the idea that Alice Innes (née Rees), who was born to Welsh parents in Lyon, had either French or Catalan heritage. Dick himself probably invented the rumour, and it has since been repeated by several careless commentators. One such writer claims that Innes ‘was Welsh by birth, although his French mother gave him his dark colouring and strong will’ — which, apart from being erroneous, suggests that neither of those qualities are to be found amongst the Welsh.

View of Carmarthen, Watercolour, 1906