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As a child and as I got older, I used to find myself drawn repeatedly to a painting by David Inshaw in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. The title, borrowed from the last line of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘After a journey‘ is: ‘Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.’

When I was first encountered the image, I found it strangely flat, but over years of regular staring, began to uncover depths. 

Below is a short tribute to the painting and the museum that houses it (I have a feeling it’s not currently on display). In circular, rather meta fashion, I have also written a poem about it, which you can read at ‘After poetry.‘ A poem inspired by a painting, with a title drawn from a poem…

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How many times we went to the museum when I was growing up I couldn’t say. Certainly enough for some items to have become lodged in the vaults of my own memory.

If pressed, I could probably list at least a hundred items, but if I cast my mind back, the first exhibits I recall are always these: a vast canvas hung above the stairs, filled with purple heather stretching across a hill somewhere in France, Peter Blake’s multi-layered, playful Owl and the Pussycat, the stuffed Indian Tiger, doomed to crouch forever in the jungle, as some Imperialist hunting party hoves into view – fatal shot fixed eternally in paint, a moment before it’s fired. 

I particularly liked to gaze up at the Romany Caravan or vardo, its elaborate decoration faded, but still bright enough to marvel at. For small visitors, a short set of bright red steps led up to the door, from where you could peer inside through glass and peek at pots and pans, a table, drawers; objects from another kind of life. Watching the recent non-demise of Tommy Shelby, my mind went racing back through multiple impressions of staring at that particular wheeled chunk of wonder.  

Also on display for years during my childhood, was David Inshaw’s ‘Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.‘ I can’t say I exactly liked it, although I always had to take a look whenever I was in the gallery. I must have been interested enough to buy a postcard of it. Shown above, now rather faded. For some reason, it haunted my imagination. Some combination of intriguing title, borrowed from a Thomas Hardy poem and its neat, graphic style, depicting a predominantly green bucolic scene – with an intriguing figure at the heart.

The scene depicts a woman standing amidst gravestones in a country churchyard. Compared with then neighbouring Victorian paintings of Egyptian ruins, or of the Ark of the Covenant, emitting, or receiving, God rays (Raiders style) as it is carried through a rocky valley, ‘Our days..’ seemed a little static for my young taste. 

Especially when looked at after first passing through the prehistoric galleries nearby – jammed with fossil bones and prehistoric panoramas, monster dragonflies and a giant Irish elk – its skeleton towering over a graphic backdrop, filled with cartoonish rocks, scattered across mile after mile of desolate ancient terrain. 

How could a mere painting compete with this? And yet, something about it got my attention. Superficially, it was all surface, a muted world of green planes, and shade. The woman at the centre, a human shadow, held there in a snooker-table landscape. Her smooth realm, urged eyes away, to slide off the surface. Except, something about her seemed resistant. That funereal black dress, looked almost chic next to the graves. In my mind she was half turning, facing out of the canvas, perhaps defiant, daring onlookers to stare. In fact, she doesn’t peer out, but looks back down towards a grave. 

Over the years and countless visits, I began to find new things within the scene. Noticed hedges, fields, neatly clipped yews, low rounded headstones, white flecks on legs of distant cows in pasture and massive trees in full leaf, crowding in – life perhaps, looming over death. All of this suspended there, captive in dry paint and time.

As I got older, the woman grew comparatively younger. The last time I saw the painting, I half-fancied she was no longer alone, waiting there amongst the dead, but joined now by a startled face, a boy, I think used to know, caught there, looking back. 

Link & References

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

View the painting at Bridgeman Images

The David Inshaw website and online gallery

Our Days Were