Ghoulies and Ghosties
This perfect Halloween piece was picked up at a thrift shop awhile back for a few dollars, framed in a simple frame. It amuses me and I display it during October. This year I decided to do a bit of research. There are a number of these lithographs around, and they are described as “an early [Cornish/English/Scottish] Litany”, done with water colors by Nancy Wilds in the 1960s. I noted the three different locations simply because the descriptions on the web vary tremendously as to where the “original” litany was from.
First things first: the artist, Nancy Wilds, is from Aikens, South Carolina, and is still alive at age 98. When she was a teen, she attended a service at a friend’s church, Trinity Cathedral in Little Rock, Arkansas. She fell in love with the stained-glass artwork, and continued to attend the Episcopal Church in town instead of the family’s Presbyterian one. She wanted to become a glass artist, and her parents agreed, though not until she got a traditional education. She studied at The University of Chicago, then went on to study at the Ringling School in Sarasota and a stained-glass school in Memphis. After marrying her twin brother’s Yale college friend, she moved to the remarkable family estate in Aikens, SC called Rose Hill. In 1967, with the support of the family and 5 other local artists, she created an Arts Center in the unused stables on the property. That nonprofit is still running, Aiken Center for the Arts (https://aikencenterforthearts.org/).
Her stained-glass work is remarkable, and often depicts the history of religion around the world. She says “I’m trying to convey the yearning for religion that is in all of us, and it comes out in different ways”. In describing one series of 6 windows, called Gods in Glass, she says “they’re not just for decoration…They tie together. It’s like reading a book.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ouw5DeVFxq8). Her lithograph piece was an early work, done around the time the Art Center was started.
Now, the mystery about the “early” Litany. “Litanies are sets of prayers arranged in the form of a list of petitions, usually sung or chanted [during a church service] by cantors, to which others provide responses” (https://darklanecreative.com/ghoulies-ghosties-and-long-leggety-beasties-2/). It seems the “early litany” aspect of this particular prayer is essentially a marketing gimmick.
Research done by Susan Hack-Lane, debunks the idea that the work was from the 14th or 15th century. The first written version of the litany showed up in 1905, in a story written by Hugo Warrand, calling the poem “a quaint old Litany” (http://www.yorktownmuseum.org/PostCardImages/A-New-Look-at-the-Old-Cornish-Litany.pdf). In addition, Hack-Lane discovered that a small Cornish town, Polperro, began a tourism industry in 1923, describing their best-selling item, a series of postcards, as depicting a “Cornish Litany”. The artist of these “Cornish Litany” postcards, 21-year-old Arthur Wragg, received free room and board at the publisher’s home in exchange for his artwork. So, as Hack-Lane notes, “while the Cornish Litany may well be a quaint old litany handed down through generations of superstitious participants or a later day creation, it was found in print in 1905…enriched by creative minds and their artful pens, and given full fanfare by the Cornish tourism bureau’s 1920’s campaign to entice visitors with their clever little ditties”.
And so it seems history does repeat itself, as my fun version done in the 1960s by Nancy Wilds, was also a best-selling item, used to support a newly created arts center. The saying, quaint though it is, is a good reminder to be wary of everything you read on the World Wide Web – there are certainly ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties out there.