The Stars Are Bright
Zimbabwe through the eyes of its young painters from Cyrene (1942-1947)
Cyrene Art
Art lovers around the world are familiar with Shona sculpture from Zimbabwe. They are less likely to know that the country has also produced striking paintings - and some of the finest are in this exhibition.
Known as the Cyrene Collection, these watercolours date back to the 1930s and 1940s. They were the work of pupils at the Cyrene Mission School, near Bulawayo in what is now Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). The paintings on display today are only a fraction of the total produced during that creative burst, but their vivid colours and distinctive themes are typical of the whole. They evoke the bush of Southern Africa, and particularly the Matopos Hills in the west of Zimbabwe, as powerfully as any crack camera-crew could do today.
Many Cyrene paintings follow a certain style, but little of it is repetitive. The subjects vary widely - historical events, everyday village life, biblical scenes and parables - and in almost every work the detail is worth a close look. Most of the paintings are small or smallish, because the really big work was reserved for the murals that cover the chapel at Cyrene, outside and inside.
Almost all the paintings you will see today were done by teenage boys who were also being kept busy in classrooms and fields. Many continued to develop their artistic talent, becoming full-time painters and sculptors, some of them with international success. The Cyrene School is still there, and it still encourages skills in arts and crafts, but nothing coming from it gets close to the quality and inspiration of the 80-year-old paintings here today.
How it all began
The driving-force behind the Cyrene Mission was Ned Paterson. His early life contained few hints of what was to come: born in Scotland in 1885, went to South Africa in 1901, war service in the British army in what is now Namibia, an army scholarship to study art at the Central School in London (now Central St Martin’s), and back to South Africa in 1923. By then he had decided on the priesthood, and he moved to Matabeleland in 1938 to set up the Cyrene Mission School.
Was he an artist who happened to wear a dog-collar, or more a priest with a paintbox? In the school’s first ten years, it didn’t matter: Ned Paterson’s two vocations were in harness, and the results were extraordinary.
News travelled slowly in those days, but Paterson himself wrote regular reports about life at the Mission. He described the growing body of artwork, and in due course his promotional efforts received the sort of PR boost that professional publicists can only dream of. Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI, visited Cyrene in 1947, and the newsreels showed her admiring some of the paintings.
This was just the encouragement Paterson needed, and he decided to take a collection of Cyrene art to Britain. He wanted to raise money for the Mission’s work, and the paintings and sculpture were powerful proof of its value. So a huge consignment - 200 large paintings and 1,200 small ones, plus wood-carvings and stone sculpture - arrived in London in 1949. The exhibition opened at the Royal Watercolour Society, which then had its premises in Bond Street, and the gallery was soon overflowing. This triumph was followed by a three-year tour of England, and then on to Paris and the United States. Cyrene art had arrived.
And then, quite suddenly, it all but disappeared. The collection that came to London in 1949 never went back home. Some collectors in Britain bought paintings, as did the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. To all intents and purposes, though, the rest of the 1949 collection simply vanished.
Back to Life
The paintings didn’t really vanish, thank goodness. In the small literature about Cyrene, the favoured phrase is that they “went into storage”. Who organised the storage is a mystery, but they knew what they were doing. The paintings were carefully preserved - large ones in boxes and crates, small ones between the pages of scrapbooks - and the whole lot were put into an annexe of St Michael’s church in Shoreditch, barely a mile from where they are on display today. And there they stayed, for almost 30 years.
During those years Canon Paterson set up four more art centres in Rhodesia. By all accounts he was a man more interested in the future than the past, and there is little sign that he was concerned about the fate of the Cyrene collection. He died in November 1974.
As often happens, the Church of England at some point decided to deconsecrate St Michael’s. The site and all its contents were put up for auction in 1978, and the buyer was the London Architectural Salvage and Supply company. LASSCO was a familiar bidder at all such auctions, so it was used to finding strange things hidden in dark corners. Just as important, it knew about conservation.
As a result, the Cyrene art has been properly looked after throughout the 70 years it has been away from home. The collection was bought by the Charnock family in 2011, and then by the Curtain Foundation in 2019.
The Curtain Foundation has strong links to Zimbabwe, which is why this story has a happy ending. In the next year or two the Cyrene Collection will go back to Zimbabwe. It will be on display at a new gallery being built at Aberfoyle Lodge in the Honde Valley. There, in the beautiful mountains close to the border with Mozambique, the work of those brilliant young artists will get the welcome it deserves.
