La Bête and the Sin-Eater

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La Bête is just about done. He is not as I expected. His costume has been simplified, made as a single garment painted with the elements from the original design that barely register other than as pleasingly abstract shapes. The starched collar and cuffs were made though have been left off, as the painted canvas costume is already rather stiff and the extra elements unnecessarily impeded the movement of head and hands. So he looks rather less the dandy prince in bejewelled doublet, lace and trailing sleeves, and more the alchemist in fusty, pentangled robes.

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The puppet has the proportions of a Bunraku figure, with a small head and broad, bulky shoulders atop a long body. Haven’t yet decided whether to add some legs for a second puppeteer to operate. They’re not strictly necessary, but would add versatility. His articulation is extremely good. I’m particularly pleased with the head. He can turn it from side to side, look up and down and it can shrink down onto the shoulders as if in recoil. My direct control of it from inside the body cavity makes the movement remarkably subtle. While the robes seem almost sculpted because of the paint-on-heavy-canvas construction, the unyielding, hieratic quality, works in favour of the puppet’s character.

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Behind the puppet is a painting by Welsh coal-miner-turned-artist, the late Nick Evans. It shows the old tradition of a ‘sin-eater’ visiting a bereaved household to eat food set on the coffin-lid, taking upon himself the sins of the deceased in an example of sympathetic magic ‘transference’.

Please excuse this image. It’s a poorly-cropped illustration from a book about Evans, and the head of the raven that sits on the sin-eater’s staff is missing from it. The painting itself is too big for me to get a good photograph without setting it up with arc lamps and the tripod camera, and I don’t have time for that today. But there are some good images further down of details I photographed myself.

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In this example of the tradition, the coffin is open and the food is recognisably a plate of ‘Welsh’ cakes, laid out on the dead man’s chest. Nick Evans never observed this first hand as the custom had died out before his time, but he painted it from the description given by his mother, who as a child had witnessed a ‘sin-eating’. Sin-eaters were both reviled and yet clearly useful, and they carried out their work for a fee.

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Peter and I disagreed about the acquisition of this painting at auction. (I wanted it and he didn’t.) So my friend Catriona purchased it for me, and then pretended that it was her idea!!! I only confessed the deceit to Peter after her death!

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Above: the sin-eater with a ‘Welsh’ cake at his lips and his crow on his staff.

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Nick Evans worked exclusively in black oil paint on a white ground, eschewing brushes and using only his fingers and some rags as tools. He is best known for his paintings of the south Wales mining communities, the colliers and pit-ponies working underground, and the families above. Peter would have preferred a good example of an Evans painting showing miners at their work, but I loved this one, with the community gathered around the coffin and the children straining on tip-toe to peek inside it. It’s four foot square, and I can imagine it wouldn’t be to everyone’s tastes, this representation of a corpse, gaunt with age/illness and swaddled for the grave, but I love it.

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Above: children peer into the coffin, a mourner stands with hands clasped to head, and one of the sin-eater’s two attendants bears the bell that sounded their approach. How dramatic and forboding they must have been, arriving after dark and bearing their candle-lantern, robed like druids amid the clamouring of bell and crow!

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