Hafod - one of the sites in The Three Landscapes Project

Notes on the Picturesque - Four - The Three Figures

The three figures standing against this house in this landscape are Thomas Johnes, his cousin/wife Jane, and their daughter Mariamne. We might also invoke a fourth figure - the second dead child.

It is here that Inglis Jones, who once again describes figures in a 'mid shot', frustrates me most. The filling out of 'character’ 'plot', ‘cause' and 'effect' is extensive but entirely speculative, and working to her contemporary agenda (a 'ripping yarn', a ‘good read'), rather than teasing out the nature of the individuals concerned. Nowhere in her account do I 'touch the face of' any of these three. So where do we turn to find first hand evidence or testimony?

The letters of Thomas Johnes are published and we can, as far as the niceties and structures of language will allow, begin to sense either the breadth of the man's vision - architecture, forestry, agriculture, fine art, land management, cheese making, publishing etc - or his promiscuity and inability to carry out a small number of projects consistently and thoroughly! We can sense a close affection for his daughter, as well as a deep desire never to wander from his valley in west Wales. We also must acknowledge his hatred of his mother, his disdain for his fellow Welshmen, his inability to face up to financial realities and his genuine passion for fine objects and the picturesque aesthetic.

But the most gripping information is in the margins.

He was, by the latter part of his life, very fat and suffered from high blood pressure - which caused constant nosebleeds. He commissioned the building of braces or 'stays' to attempt to straighten out his daughter's spinal deformity - at a time when there was no standard item of equipment for the task and, in a letter to a male acquaintance during his daughters fifteenth year when, presumably, she begins to menstruate, he proudly announces that his daughter 'is now a woman'.

He personally designed walks through his landscape and had trees planted and earth moved so as to create views according to the very precise laws of the picturesque. It is in these details - that assert his difference from us rather than his similarity - that I can begin to 'touch the face of' Thomas Johnes.

Jane Johnes has disappeared. Few of her letters existt, and we have only flimsy accounts of her ‘goofd works' on the estate - with the school for the children of her husband's tenant farmers and the medical services made available to them and their families. We assume that the death of her second child was associated with the couple's decision/inability regarding further children.

But we do know that she created a garden as soon as she set foot on the site, and from ear1y_ordnance survey maps, it would appear that this garden was laid out very formally - quite at odds with Johnes' notions of the picturesque, and closer to the work of Capability Brown – whose work Johnes did not favour. Also, we read that, within two years of her husband's death, she destroyed all of her personal correspondence related to the Hafod years.

What might this all mean?

Mariamne's story, on the face of it. is a clearer one - an only child, a precocious and talented infant who, even though not yet into her teens, was taking long walks over the Hafod landscape studjtng insects and plants with the country's most eminent naturalist, James Smith, and who, in one letter, begrudgingly considers her father's new head gardener - brought from the Botanical gardens in Edinburgh - to have a fair knowledge of botany!

Her tragic illness – scoliosis, or a disease of the spine - stands out in high relief and allows us to come close to her physicality at least. Her strange garden - an alpine one high on a ridge some distance from the house, where she built a moss house, grafted new and foreign species onto other rootstocks, and continued to seek out new species of beetle and wild plants to send to her dear friend Smith - seem to speak across the centuries to us, of an unusual and obsessive child.

But still, it is in the strange comment she makes at the night time observation of the first fire in Hafod’s outbuildings that seems to create a crack into her world - whilst all of the staff of Hafod fight the fire, she stands watching the blaze, transfixed, and refers thereafter to the sight as ‘sublime'.

And we are left wondering at her relationship with at least three key male figures in her life - her father, Smith her botanist friend, and her constant collaborator on her garden, the Scotsman Mr Todd – who, after he falls from a horse when she is eighteen, begins to act strangely and aggressively.

But it is the unnatural physicality that is imposed on her by her scoliosis that demands careful attention. Laban movement analysis has much to say about the psychic damage to body image and body meaning brought about by either major surgery or accident or other physical trauma, and 'physical unnaturalness' becomes an exciting but difficult notion for us to work with.

Cliff McLucas