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Wheeler-dealing in Gothic art

Nicholas Cranfield on sculpture brought to English churches from the Netherlands

Closed doors: St Catherine of Alexandria and St Catherine of Siena on the annunciation altarpiece at Oscott College. © not advert
Closed doors: St Catherine of Alexandria and St Catherine of Siena on the annunciation altarpiece at Oscott College. From the book

Imported Images: Netherlandish late Gothic sculpture in England, c.1400-c.1550
Kim W. Woods

Shaun Tyas £49.50 (978-1-900289-83-2)

KIM WOODS has provided a fascinating survey of sculpture that mostly originates in the Low Countries and which can now be found in English churches.

The book begins with a history of sculpture across the Burgundian Netherlands, and as far afield as Picardy and the Rhine. A brief survey of the pre-Reformation Church follows, with an account of the iconoclasm of the 16th century which destroyed so many images. There is, however, no mention of the documented losses in the Civil War of the 17th century.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the chapter on 19th-century antiquarianism, and the trade in Continental sculpture which furnished ecclesiologists such as A. W. N. Pugin with the raw materials for their neo-Gothic revival. Oscott College remains, with St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham, the real beneficiaries of the man who was even accused of smuggling images out of the Continent.

The rest of the book is a gazette of 109 sculptures that have not been published or extensively discussed before. Crucially, Woods has referenced these to work that survives elsewhere in the Low Countries. This helps secure dates, and suggests likely schools and workshops for the works.

With the possible exception of the carving in Canterbury Cathedral, which Cardinal Morton may have commissioned for Henry VII, most of the works discussed by Woods came to Britain only after the Napoleonic programme of the enforced laicisation of orders, and the destruction of Continental cathedrals and collegiate churches. Unscrupulous dealers, often at large international art fairs, still manage a brisk business in church furnishings.

Woods recognises that the volume cannot claim to be comprehensive. It is hoped that other imported work will now come to light. The reluctance of many churches to have such treasures publicly noted in a gazette is all too understandable — though the theft, for instance, of nine scenes of the Passion from a Suffolk church (St George’s, Stowlangtoft) remains reasonably unusual. (They were recovered 13 years later, in Holland, and generously given back to the parish.)

Some absorbing histories are contained in these pages. The sculptures in the 1853-54 church of St Mary on Brownsea Island (a church that, according to Pevsner, “is interesting not as a building but as a museum”) indicate how a single landowner — in this case, a Cavendish-Bentinck who was something of a collector in the 1870s and 1880s — could change the interior style of an entire building.

At Warwick Castle, the chapel, remodelled and furnished in 1759 by the first earl of the new creation, has long since lost a powerfully expressive pietà group; but at least it is still in a church building.

Recently placed on long-term loan to a cathedral is the large oak Passion altarpiece that the Tractarian Rector of Plymtree in Devon, Joseph Dornford, bought for his church for £25, in 1842. His successor had it sent to a museum, claiming that the pictures were “not admissible into an Anglican church”. Nowadays diocesan chancellors are less blinkered when granting faculties.

By choosing a private press rather than an academic publisher, Woods has been able to get this handy book out for less than £50. But a price is paid: her prose needed a sub-editor. The loss of possessive apostrophes is galling. There are obvious errors: in the panels in the Zouche Chapel in York Minster, the scene wrongly identified in 1947 as “Christ Gives St Peter the Bread of Life” shows the Lord passing the sop to Judas. This is not the “curiously tender gesture of touching him on the chin”, which would be odd indeed, even for the Netherlands in the 1550s.

Maybe this publication will encourage the churchwardens of St Peter ad Vincula, Coveney, to have the five panels of their made-up retable correctly rearranged, even though Athelstan Riley seems to have tolerated the solecism of Christ’s trial preceding Gethsemane. The book should, in any case, be welcomed widely, and I hope for a fuller second edition, in time.

The Revd Dr Cranfield is Vicar of All Saints’, Blackheath, in south London.

Imported Images is available from Shaun Tyas, 1 High Street, Donington, Lincolnshire PE11 4TA; 01775 821542.


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