Holyland, John Wallen

JOHN HOLYLAND.
There are people with whom we touch elbows almost every day through the years, and yet who seem to make little or no impression upon us, and whose influence upon our lives is but for a moment. Their paths cross ours and they are gone. But because of the the contact we are ever after different men.

It was my high privilege, some years ago, to minister for several months to the saints of the Fulton Avenue Baptist church of Baltimore. I never served a more appreciative or a more spiritual and in every way delightful congregation. At each Sunday and at each Wednesday evening service there was in the audience one face that inspired me and enriched my ministry, one hand that always grasped mine after the sermon with a grip that meant more of appreciation and more of encouragement than volumes of words could have expressed. I loved to call on him to pray, for he prayed as one who talked to the Father face to face. I was told that now, that the weight of his more than fourscore years had compelled him to lay aside the cares of business, his chief occupation was visiting the sick and distressed and carrying comfort and cheer wherever he went.

One of the charter members of the Fulton Avenue church he has served it for many years as deacon; and many of the former pastors of this church—now scattered over the land—will welcome this word of their old friend and faithful coworker across the years.

My first acquaintance with the somewhat unusual name, John Holyland, was when I saw it appended to some of the illustrations reproduced in the History of Baptist Churches in Maryland, which was published in 1885. In the Baltimore Sun of Sunday, April 15, 1928, appears a most interesting article about this remarkable man, accompanied by a large photogravure portrait under the heading, "Takes Up Painting at the Age of Eighty-five Years".

"Perhaps a sunset," says the writer of the sketch, "is most stirring to those in the evening of life. It was a sunset that roused a new ambition in John Holyland and set him, in his eighty-sixth year, to painting. One evening last summer, while visiting at their country place near Annapolis, Mr. Holyland, with his sister, watched the sun sinking below a horizon of gentle, tree-clad hills. The beauty of the scene impressed him as never before–seemed somehow personal, as if the spectacle had been offered for his special benefit.

"'I'd like to paint that,' he told his sister.

"She smiled at his enthusiasm. 'Why, you can't paint,' she answered.

"He never had, it was true. But he resolved he would. And when he returned to Baltimore he bought oils and brushes and a palette and painted that sunset. The picture now has a place of honor in the home of one of his kinsmen.

"In the painting of it Mr. Holyland found a new interest in life, and that interest he has followed with the result that he has completed forty pictures. Most of them he has sent to relatives in various part of the country.

"Mr. Holyland does the work in his room at the Aged Men's Home, 1400 West Lexington Street, where he has life, of his experiences as a photographer and of the crude state of the photographic art in those early days. An amusing story is told of how he succeeded by cunning in getting a recalcitrant boy, after an hour of ineffectual effort on the part of the lad's parents, to sit for his picture. Putting the parents out of the studio Mr. Holyland forbade the boy to sit in the chair.

The article concludes: "Mr. Holyland chuckles as he tells the story, but without malice. In his reminiscences no bitterness creeps in. Possibly this is because he is a religious man. He is a member of the group that founded the Fulton Avenue Baptist church and still is one of its deacons. 

"Possibly it is because he once discovered a sunset—and the fact that a man can sit in a little room and with paint and brushes create a new world of tranquil happiness.  — JOHN MONCURE, Religious Herald (VA), 1928.