The Nativity and Other Stories

For many years, each Christmas, Creffield would begin a Nativity painting; each Easter, he would make paintings of Christ’s passion. He became a devout Catholic in the 1950s, momentarily forsaking painting with a view to taking the cloth, only to be talked out of this plan by a priest, and he always had an extraordinary sense of the seasonal rituals.

The remarkable Nativity painting shown above tries to find a modern way of making a Christmas painting - the animals and the figures drawn as simply as possible; the familiar story allowed to tell itself. Just look at the gesture of Mary's arm. Creffield often spoke of the power of physical gesture in medieval painting; he had a special love of pre- Renaissance painting, which he thought lacked ego (i.e., its subject was not the artist). He loved its apparent simplicity, which was hard won, the result of immense sophistication.

There are no Wise Men, no Shepherds in this painting; the animals as much as Mary and the Child are at heart of this painting. In the dress of the Virgin, there may be a reference to the traditional blue of the Virgin Mary. But this is not a super-natural scene. Like the medieval masters he so loved, Creffield has made the miracle of the Christmas story into a very human story.

Creffield’s faith was always rooted in the physical – the living, breathing, human truths at the heart of the divine mysteries of the liturgy – and his religious paintings represented means of communion with his subjects on these terms. Even as a student under David Bomberg, before his conversion to Catholicism, he completed remarkable, large-scale oils such as the work shown below, which depicts the three crosses at Calvary; muted, pale greens and yellows of the landscape give way to the vivid mosaic of bright tones with which Christ’s exposed flesh is rendered.