Capel Salem is a

Grade II In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

listed building in the hamlet of

Pentre Gwynfryn Pentre Gwynfryn is a village in the Ardudwy area of Gwynedd, Wales, about east of Llanbedr. The village is at the confluence of the River Artro and the River Cwmnantcol. The inside of the village's chapel (Capel Salem) was made famous by th ...

, near

Llanbedr Llanbedr () is a village and Community (Wales), community south of Harlech. Administratively, it lies in the Ardudwy area, formerly Meirionnydd, of the county of Gwynedd, Wales. In 2011 the community had a population of 645. History Ancient ...

Gwynedd Gwynedd () is a county in the north-west of Wales. It borders Anglesey across the Menai Strait to the north, Conwy, Denbighshire, and Powys to the east, Ceredigion over the Dyfi estuary to the south, and the Irish Sea to the west. The ci ...

, Wales. This

Baptist Baptists are a Christian denomination, denomination within Protestant Christianity distinguished by baptizing only professing Christian believers (believer's baptism) and doing so by complete Immersion baptism, immersion. Baptist churches ge ...

chapel building is about a mile upriver of Llanbedr, on a ridge between the two valleys, upstream from where the two rivers meet. The building was begun in 1826 and completed in 1851, but ten years later it was extended to include the chapel house and to remodel the interior.

''Salem'' by Vosper

The Chapel is the subject of a 1908 painting by

Sidney Curnow Vosper Sydney Curnow Vosper Royal Watercolour Society, RWS, Royal West of England Academy, RWA (29 October 1866 – 10 July 1942) was an English painter and etcher of landscapes and figure subjects. His later work has a close association with Wales an ...

, (b. 29 October 1866). The painting was purchased by

Lord Leverhulme William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (; 19 September 1851 – 7 May 1925) was an English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician. Educated at a small private school until the age of nine, then at church schools, he joined his f ...

in 1909, and became popular when he used it to promote Lever Brothers' Sunlight Soap, which offered to send purchasers a colour print. At a time when many homes owned no form of visual art, prints of Salem became widely and uniquely popular amongst working class communities, especially in Wales. As the painting's popularity spread, so did the discussion and rumours around the notion that it contained a hidden figure, most notably that the devil was depicted in the central figure's shawl. The various interpretations of the painting, themselves became considered as examples of how people viewed rural nonconformist communities, and how the Welsh viewed themselves. Vosper always denied he had painted any faces into the shawl. However, the painter did confirm that he painted a ghostly face in the window above the central figure. The partial knowledge (that somewhere within the painting is a hidden face) was probably the starting point for the belief that a devil was painted into the shawl. Today, the painting and its hidden faces are often cited as an example of

pareidolia Pareidolia (; ) is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus (physiology), stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Pareidolia is a specific bu ...

. The original picture now hangs in the

Lady Lever Art Gallery The Lady Lever Art Gallery is a museum founded and built by the industrialist and philanthropist William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme and opened in 1922. The Lady Lever Art Gallery is set in the garden village of Port Sunlight, on the Wirra ...

Port Sunlight Port Sunlight is a model village in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral, Merseyside, England. It is located between Lower Bebington and New Ferry, on the Wirral Peninsula. Port Sunlight was built by Lever Brothers to accommodate workers in ...

References

{{Coord, 52.8257, -4.0750, display=title Llanbedr Llanbedr, Capel Salem Chapels in Gwynedd