From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

A burst of red in the gloom. The eye is drawn to it, the way it is drawn to the red breast of a robin perched on a spade in a winter landscape. A shot of colour, a spark of life. Against a background of smoking chimneys and coal tips, a speaker is rousing the passions of a crowd. Well, not exactly. His eloquence has worked its magic principally on him, and though he looks as if he is about to take flight, his audience remains grounded, in all senses of the word.

The Communist, a Political Meeting, was painted around 1932 by the Welsh artist Evan Walters (1893–1951). Walters came from the coal-mining area of Mynydd-Bach, Swansea. He trained as a painter and decorator, before attending Swansea School of Art, and then Regent Street Polytechnic and the Royal Academy Schools in London. In 1915, he emigrated to America and became an army camouflage painter. Returning to Wales, he built a reputation for dignified and enigmatic portraits of miners, and for his ability to endow the bleak realities of working life with the power and grandeur of myth, but without bombast or pageantry. His harrowing painting, Bydd Myrdd o Ryfeddodau (‘There will be many wonders’, tht title of a Welsh funeral hymn), depicts a crowd of mourners looking down from a chapel at four naked boys with dark red stigmata. It dates from 1926, the year of the General Strike.

The Communist is more ambiguous. If Walters had wanted it to express passion, revolution, world-shaping transformation, wouldn’t the crowd have been differently depicted? Arms waving, mouths cheering, rapt postures. Not here. Maybe these people have heard it all before. Maybe they hear something similar every Sunday at chapel. Maybe they think that sermon for sermon, preacher for preacher, one religion is much like another: not to be cast aside, certainly, but to be questioned and weighed up. The speaker has everyone’s attention, but no-one, except for the solitary applauder, has been galvanised by his words.

In the foreground, an impish little miner, perhaps a boy the same age as the dead children of Bydd Myrdd o Ryfeddodau, face covered in soot, looks out at us. His posture is roguish; a cigarette hangs from his mouth. ‘You heard all this before?’ he seems to be asking. ‘I have.’

I think of him as a trickster figure, and what I read from the bare minimum contained in the white rims of his eyes is ironic, quizzical, and has the effect of capsizing the speaker’s centrality and dominance. The boy is looking out of the painting because he sees through it. His counterpart is the policeman whose helmet we can see at the top left. He’ll have a report to write, not just on the plump little Communist agitator but on individual members of the crowd: the woman on the left with papers or tracts in her pocket, the miners with their food-boxes and lamps, the young boy with his arm around his father in the foreground. Behind them all, the coal and the chimneys evoke the hills and crosses of a Renaissance crucifixion.

These are the 1930s: this is one of the most politically educated crowds in Europe, thanks to the Miners’ Institutes, with their libraries, lectures and evening classes, organised by the workers and paid for from their wages. ‘Libraries gave us power,’ the Manic Street Preachers sing in ‘A Design for Life’ – a homage to a library in Pillgwenlly. Aneurin Bevan attributed his own education to Tredegar Miners’ Library.
Art isn’t there to teach us lessons, but it can, as here, make us suspicious of lessons and of those who want to teach them to us. As today’s slick, well-fed rhetoricians take their own gospels around the country, Evan Walters’s painting reminds us not to be dazzled by brightly coloured words.

From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.