The Lady Chapel paintings and a mystery
I have been looking into the paintings we have had in the Lady Chapel over the years. Remember Sergei Chepik’s Golgotha (1)- a temporary installation in the late 1990s? That wasn’t the first time a crucifixion had hung over the altar. Before Donald Towner’s Christ in Majesty, painted in memory of his mother, Grace, in the late 1950s (2) there was another painting of the crucifixion (3). (Apologies for the quality but it’s a phone photo of a very old print). Allegedly it suffered from over-zealous cleaning and was destroyed. Imagine being the person who did that!
After Chepik it became for a while a place for temporary artwork. Alfred Lohr provided us with the seasonal paintings from which the covers of our orders of service were taken (below is the one for the Trinity season) (4) and a few of his friends contributed works as well.
However our interest was aroused by a reference to an Ellis Wooldridge fresco – Woldridge designed the windows over the high altar at the time of the major re-alignment of the church and construction of the chancel and chapel but I hadn’t realsied that he was also responsible for some of the other decoration. Apparently he painted the Baptism of Christ “in the chapel” – but where? Pictures of the time show that the walls and ceiling of the 1878 church were highly decorated, there wasn’t an inch of space, it seems, that didn’t have a scroll or a text or an angel. And there was definitely something on the north wall of the chapel, over what is now the clergy vestry. Could this be where the Wooldrige Baptism was? Did nobody think to photograph it? We have pictures of Wooldridge’s painting in the chancel (you can find one in Prof Michael Port’s “Story of a Building” – or you could if we were allowed to have books out!) so why not the chapel?
Sadly by 1958 all the painting, including those done by Alfred Bell in the nave and Wooldridge’s work on the chancel and chapel, had darkened so much that it was deemed necessary to paint it all out and opt for a lighter colour scheme. Visitors today remark on how light the church is. It was not always so.
PS None of this investigation would haver arisen had we not (well, had Ayla not) successfully entered the church for the Open House London weekend – 19/20 September. More about that soon.