Doms Wilfrid Bayne, Peter Sidler, Aelred Graham, Damian Kearney

On Tuesday, November 14, when we prayed the Office of the Dead for All Souls of Portsmouth Abbey, the name of Fr. Wilfrid Bayne was on the list. We had already begun piecing together an exploration of Fr. Wilfrid’s heraldic designs, but hearing his name read out during the necrology in choir, with Fr. Paschal Scotti as acolyte for the week, struck a chord and convinced me that Fr. Wilfrid was the right choice of subject for our artist this month. Since this issue brings us into the beginning of December, it reminds us of the gift that his legacy has been to us for over eight decades, ever since he began designing coats of arms in 1941.

Two archival discoveries made in November gave additional impetus to this choice of subject. The first occurred while I was sifting through materials in the St. Thomas More Library in a windowless lower-level room formerly used by the late Fr. Damian Kearney in which he collected and stored all sorts of paraphernalia for his various art-historical display cases. Hidden beneath a stack of Shakespeare-related posters were five heraldic coats of arms, hand-painted onto a variety of pasteboard and Masonite shields, four of which have identifying labels affixed on the reverse. Two are dated in Fr. Wilfrid’s precise cursive penmanship as “1955.” The second discovery – call it serendipitous, or perhaps providential – occurred last week when Dr. Billings uncovered in the monastery archive a slim homemade book compiled by Fr. Wilfrid, featuring his own hand-lettered label on a pasteboard cover containing three tear sheets of his essays. “Thirty-Three Years of Portsmouth History” (1952), “The Religious Significance of the Beautiful” (1952), and “Heraldry as a Hobby” (1955) were originally published in The American Benedictine Review, which had only just come into existence in March of 1950. Fr. Wilfrid’s Portsmouth history essay covers both abbey and school to that point in time, and he highlights that Portsmouth Priory School was thriving: “The largest enrollment on record in the school is anticipated in view of the completion this year (1952) of a new dormitory.” The other two essays speak directly to our topic of Wilfrid Bayne as artist, providing insight into his artistic endeavor and even his philosophical outlook on art.

Dom Wilfrid’s “Personal Arms”

A few quotations elicit some of Dom Wilfrid’s voice and perspective, and reveal him as not only artist, but historian: In “Heraldry as Hobby” he writes: “The pastoral activities of a bishop and the prayerful life of the cloister are a far cry from the noise and glamour of the battlefield, and it may appear odd that there should be such a thing as ecclesiastical heraldry. But whole books have been devoted to the subject. The fashion of registering one’s identity and proclaiming one’s status by the use of a coat of arms was taken up at an early date by the dignitaries of the medieval Church.” But the history and knowledge heraldry must come to be employed in the service of its artistic intentions and possibilities: “Perhaps the most interesting aspect of heraldry as a hobby is the designing of entirely new coats of arms. This brings into play not only the knowledge gleaned from the study of historic coats already in existence but also imagination, ingenuity, and a sense of design. Even a sense of humor may be useful, if only as a check upon an ingenuity that might well blunder into absurdity.”

His article on “The Religious Significance of the Beautiful” offers a close philosophical study of elements of art and aesthetics, providing us with insight into the thinking of this “artist of the abbey.” It reveals a distinct interest in Platonism. He writes:

From the remotest periods of history beauty as concreted in the products of art has been made to serve the exigencies of religion. Before the age of Pericles, when the Hellenic genius first gave birth to high philosophical speculation, this feeling for the sacred quality of the beautiful and its appropriateness as a vehicle for religious expression was apprehended more by instinct than by reasoned analysis… It is to Plato that we must look for the first fully conscious attempt to solve the problem of the beautiful, and so profoundly did he search into the depths of this problem and so eloquently did he write concerning what he had seen that the philosophical point of you which bares the stamp of the speculations has ever since borne his name. Plato was a poet as well as a thinker and to the problem of beauty he brought all the ardor of the seer who has glimpsed, beyond the veil of the fleeting and obvious, the breath taking vision of the eternal and the ineffable.

Portsmouth Abbey’s Coat of Arms

The publication of his essays in the mid-1950’s in fact coincides with the creation of the shields. All five shields show evidence of once having been displayed by being suspended or mounted against a wall, possibly in the old Barn. The five newly-uncovered shields were featured in an exhibition in the School library 20 years ago, billed as “Fr. Wilfrid’s Shields.” In 2003, Fr. Damian teamed up with Head Librarian at the time, Mrs. Roberta Stevens, to make known these works of art to the wider campus community. Three of the shields present a pair of rampant lions, the largest one with the borrowed Harvard University Latin slogan, VERITAS (meaning “truth” or “verity”), written across a single open book, whereas the Harvard logo has the word spread over three books. The crimson color predominates at Portsmouth, as it does at Harvard. This largest shield has no identifying label. The two mid-size shields retain the original paper labels lettered and signed in ink by Fr. Wilfrid. One represents “Arms ascribed to St. Gregory the Great,” patron of the monastery and school, while the other, similar in design, is labeled “Priory of St. Gregory the Great, Portsmouth.” Both labels hold the signature, “W. Bayne pinxit 1955.” “Pinxit” is from the Latin for “one painted” and added to works from the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance after the signature of the artist. The pair of small shields represents the reign of Edward III to Henry IV (1340 – 1405) and that of Henry IV to Elizabeth I (1405 – 1603). These might tie in more closely with Fr. Wilfrid’s theatrical interests, as, according to his obituary, he “directed the school’s dramatic society in the 1940’s and 1950’s and specialized in productions of Shakespeare.” We note in this connection that we also possess a copy of “Brother Habacuc Writes a Mystery,” a two-act play written by Dom Wilfrid, indicative of his varied interests and abilities.

A Two-act Play

To add texture to our understanding of the man, I recently took the opportunity to speak twice with Fr. Christopher Davis ’48, now 93, of our community, while preparing this profile. His memory is sharp as a tack and his comments as candid as they come. Of Fr. Wilfrid he said, “He was such an improbable monk, he was a dancer in a Russian ballet troupe once and told everyone, ‘I danced with Pavlova!’ which was his phrase.” Having been born in New Orleans in 1893, Fr. Wilfrid “was a proud Southerner, a colorful man,” reminisced Fr. Chris. “He never referred to the Civil War as being justified, preferring to call it the War of Northern Aggression. The monastery in those days was very colorful, remember. One monk made his own wine, one had his own garden, Wilfrid was a chain-smoker. This was in the old days, but then Wilfrid got roped into designing coats of arms for all the bishops and he would do that work in his cell.” Indeed, Fr. Wilfrid’s expertise came to be appreciated widely in the church and he was asked to produce a number of monastic and episcopal shields – a draft of the coat of arms designed for Portsmouth’s own bishop, Ansgar Nelson, is featured on the cover of this issue.

School’s shield on notebook cover

An excellent eleven-page article about Fr. Wilfrid was published in The Current on February 7 – 13, 2021, as an Archive feature. Titled “Wilfrid Bayne: Herald of History,” it was penned by Dr. Billings and focused in particular on the meaning of heraldic imagery and the language and terminology of heraldry. We thus find it appropriate to highlight again Fr. Wilfrid’s widely acclaimed work, as we approach 2024, the fiftieth year since his passing, and as we draw near to 2026, the 100th anniversary of the School whose coat of arms seals his connection to our present day community.

Dom Wilfrid Bayne in Zen Garden