On April 27 a hundred years ago, in 1920, Samuel Bugeja was born in Rabat. His father, Adam, was a woodcarver who produced exquisite decorative motifs for furniture, chests and funeral carriages. His son, Samuel, grew up literally playing with shavings of wood and eyeing the various gouges which he himself would use later on in life.

Mermaid

At a very early stage, Samuel, feeling this urge for sculpture, decided to take his vocation seriously and started attending art lessons at the School of Art under Antonio Micallef. He was hardly 18 years old when he precociously produced a wooden head of an angel executed as a testimonial of his skill to the Naxxar parish authorities for which they commissioned him the decoration of the organ loft of the parish church.

This early – if not earliest – work reveals an artist who followed the traditional classical style as was then taught in art schools. Indeed, this care for the consummate technique, essentiality and perfect form harks back to the Renaissance, perhaps to that current in the early Quattrocento one.

Another later Mother and Child

For such a young sculptor to be entrusted with such a commission must have filled him with much satisfaction. His future looked rosy.

Unluckily, World War II would shackle somewhat the development of the artistic career of this talented, young and promising sculptor.

In the first half of the 20th century, many young Maltese artists would proceed to Rome to further their studies both in painting and sculpture. Suffice to mention the brothers Antonio and Francesco Saverio Sciortino, Giuseppe Galea, Esprit Barthet, Vincent and Willie Apap, John Spiteri Sacco and Anton Inglott.

When war broke out, all hope of obtaining a scholarship to proceed to Rome was shattered. To make matters worse, during the war, Samuel’s father died and he, only 23 years old, had to tend financially to his numerous younger siblings.

Our Lady of Lourdes

Luckily, one must say, he was employed by Antonio Sciortino in 1942 as a restorer at the National Museum.

After the war, in 1948-49, he was awarded a government scholarship to further his studies in sculpture at Leicester College, London. Later on, in 1956, he was awarded another one-year scholarship to study restoration at the Accademia del Restauro in Rome.

 Indeed, apart from teaching art in government schools and at the evening School of Art, Bugeja spent much of his energy in restoration projects, such as that of the decoration of the Manoel Theatre, the fresco ceiling by the Sicilian Manno brothers at the Mdina Cathedral (1956-1972), as well as of the fresco ceiling by Virginio Monti at St Helen’s parish church, Birkirkara.

He sort of perceived a soul inside the wood which required an artist’s skill to be able to manifest and ‘incarnate’ itself

Remarkable were the restorations of the Our Lady with Jesus in the Mellieħa sanctuary in 1972 (with the removal of the 19th-century stucco) and of the St Paul Polyptych at the Cathedral Museum, Mdina, where one may now appreciate its bright International Gothic colours. Indeed, this restoration activity made Bugeja more known as a restorer in his lifetime than as a sculptor. However, sculpture gave him much more satisfaction.

Angel’s Head

In the 1950s, he was commissioned to make designs for the silver pedestal of the statue of the Assumption of Our Lady of the Gozo Cathedral. The pedestal consists of four figures in the round of the Fathers of the Church, and four bas-reliefs representing scenes from the life of Our Lady. In the 1970s he was commissioned to design six high reliefs (eventually executed in fibreglass) for the Mellieħa Sanctuary, as well as the processional wooden statue of Our Lady of Lourdes for the parish church with that title in Paola.

Although these commissions boosted his morale as a sculptor, Bugeja felt he could express better his feelings and emotions in sculptures that were not the fruit of commissions. He used to get inspiration from pieces of different types of wood, mainly of olive and pine, which he would go in search of in the countryside, and whose strange forms would suggest to him the subject which would come out of them. He sort of perceived a soul inside the wood which required an artist’s skill to be able to manifest and ‘incarnate’ itself.

Mother and Child

Two of these early works were a Mother and Child, exhibited at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1967, where the two figures of mother and baby hold onto each other in a harmonious embrace as if the mother is the trunk and the baby a bunch hanging from it. This peculiar exploitation of wood made Bugeja a pioneer in this field. Other sculptors would follow suit.

Another characteristic of his sculpture lay in the way two or more figures intertwine to create movement and drama. A fine example is the Divine Comedy, where there are four figures. In the lower stratum there are two condemned figures with their tragic and hellish grimace and contorted bodies physically in pain. Rising from these two figures we find a figure which clutches another one higher up and which symbolises a purgatorial soul. The top figure is a seraphic one, with head uplifted and hands clasped in prayer already enjoying the heavenly vision.

What is remarkable is the way Bugeja exploited the shape of the wood to make every posture of the figures look as natural as possible, achieving in the process a powerful synthesis.

Samuel Bugeja

This type of sculpture, as one may surmise, needs a great deal of patience and it is time-consuming. Sometimes he would spend a year on a single work, because one cannot commit mistakes, since form, grace and anatomy have to be respected. So every single stroke of the gouge has to be calculated beforehand, keeping in mind the overall effect.

I remember him expressly telling me, his son, that the long toil involved should be always accompanied by spontaneity. This emphasis on spontaneity he certainly drew from Sciortino, whom Bugeja held in high esteem and with whom he felt an elective affinity.

According to my opinion, a small work of his, which sums up his art – originality, gracefulness, charm – may be found in his Mermaid, where he exploits, as already explained, the peculiar form of the wood to capture the mystery which emanates from this mythological half-woman and half-fish.

Another late Mother and Child is also worth mentioning. His last work – perhaps his swan-song – is the St John of the Cross, which synthesises the qualities outlined above.

From this brief description of some of his works, one may gain a glimpse of Bugeja’s wooden sculptures and how they constitute an interesting and innovative development of this idiom, which art historians should take into account when they research and study wooden sculpture in Malta in the second half of the 20th century.