A Nativity

This amazing picture was painted in 1949, borrowing the themes from paintings done a year earlier such as Strange Nativity, Battle of the Boggarts and Buttercup Field . The more I look the more I see and there appears to be quite a lot of symbolism which I’m not sure I understand.

Here we have the farmyard from 'The Battle of the Boggarts' and the gypsy woman from 'The Buttercup Field' strewing flowers in a ritual gesture into the pond. The highly lit teeth of the hay mower could be a reference to the crown of thorns. The procession of people arriving from the left are quite indistinctly painted…the person furthest away is almost wraith-like and as they proceed the characters gain more substance. Even though this is a sunlit scene the moon appears on the horizon...possibly a harvest moon. There is much that is contradictory and yet harmonious. This Nativity is very different from the 'Strange Nativity' but there is a feeling of an age-old mixture of Christian and pagan elements. I think these ‘nativities’ refer to the new surge of imaginative energy which Dad experienced after the War, but still tempered by traumatic memories.

All we know of these two nativity pictures is that they were both probably taken by the same collector to the USA in the mid-fifties.