ST MARY’s, Runwell, is the most historic and Anglo-Catholic of the three churches in the Wickford and Runwell Team Ministry, where I minister. The unusual but beautiful interior of St Mary’s — principally the result of decisions made by a collection of interesting former incumbents — is enhanced by a large painting, The Baptism of Our Lord, behind the font.
With its flat, outlined style and use of gold leaf, this image has the feel of an icon. Christ is seen in the waters of the Jordan, depicted as a cleft in the rock, a reminder of God’s provision of water to the Israelites in the wilderness. Christ is framed by John the Baptist on the left, angels on the right, and, above, the hand of God the Father and the dove of the Spirit.
The painting was given to the church by the Revd David John Silk Lloyd, a former incumbent, and proves to be a useful visual aid during baptisms. The artist, Enid Mary Chadwick, was an Anglo-Catholic who came to the restored Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham as a pilgrim. She then stayed, to devote 53 years — until the day before she died — to the work of decorating the Shrine Church. According to Bishop Chad Jones, she was, “for all practical purposes, the official artist of the restored Anglican shrine throughout much of the 20th century”.
Born in 1902, Chadwick was the daughter of a priest, attended a convent school in Oxford run by the Society of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and then trained at the Brighton School of Art, before coming to Walsingham in 1934. The 90th anniversary of her arrival falls this year.
She was part of a generation of innovative female artists whose work is increasingly being re-evaluated. They include Vanessa Bell, Hilda Carline, Evelyn Dunbar, Gwynneth Holt, Gwen John, Laura Knight, Winifred Knights, Dod Procter, Rosemary Rutherford, and Betty Swanwick. All of these women, who challenged the conventions of their day to become respected artists, engaged with religious art or church commissions.
THESE were Chadwick’s primary focus. The first mention of her at Walsingham comes in 1935, in the winter edition of Our Lady’s Mirror, the quarterly paper set up in 1926 by the Revd Alfred Hope Patten for the members of the Society of Our Lady of Walsingham, in relation to her map of the village showing the way to the shrine. Michael Yelton, the author of Alfred Hope Patten and the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, writes that “the revival of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage after the Reformation” began with the appointment of Fr Hope Patten as the new vicar of the village, in 1921.
Walsingham Anglican Archives Enid Chadwick painting in the old St Augustine’s Chapel at Walsingham, in 1951
The Revd Charles Smith, a later Administrator of the Shrine, who gave the address at a funeral mass for Chadwick on 28 October 1987, suggested that she “could not have foreseen the next 50 years, the way in which she would become completely identified with this Shrine Church, but she had just those abilities Fr Hope Patten could use”. Much of her work can still be seen in the shrine today.
Fr Smith said that Chadwick’s painting and personal style made the Shrine Church what it is, so that her mark is everywhere within it, and, after her death, it was difficult to think of it without her. Her work in and around the shrine included the painting of roof bosses, hatchments, Guardians’ stalls, statues, Stations of the Cross, an intercessions box, and murals in the shrine’s 15 chapels and elsewhere.
Isabel Syed, the recently retired honorary archivist at the shrine, confirms that “everywhere you look in the shrine, you see something Enid has done.” She advises those visiting to “look carefully because, as with illuminated manuscripts, there are many little extra details to see”.
Fr Smith described Chadwick’s style as “direct, and full of devotion. . . The mysteries of the faith, the lives and legends of the saints, are set before us in a way all can understand. The simple, as in the Middle Ages she loved, learn directly from her paintings, and many who would be regarded as sophisticated in these matters, find that their unpretentious charm speaks to them as the children of God.
“Behind all this and supporting it, was a life of deep and dedicated prayer . . . a matter of remaining quietly in the presence of God.” Appropriately, on her tombstone are found the words: “Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house.”
Fr Smith recalled that Chadwick had many friends. She “was to be seen at Walsingham gatherings all over the country, and people delighted to see her there”, as “she was part of Walsingham.” She loved “parties and invitations and the social life of this village in an almost girlish way”.
The social side of her personality went hand in hand with her “puckish sense of humour”, as seen often in her paintings, and also “her power as a caricaturist”, as evidenced in the collections of her cartoons treasured by her friends. She satirised, in poetry and prose, contemporary pilgrims who sometimes expected “great comforts, things taken for granted by many of us, such as a daily bath, cups of tea in their lodgings”, arguing that such pilgrims could learn lessons from those who had come in the early days of the shrine, and for whom privations “added to the joys of pilgrimage”.
Ms Syed highlights the “wide variety of her work”: annual-report covers, cards, notices, letterheads, orders of service, and books for the shrine and for wider circulation.
ALTHOUGH Chadwick was so closely identified with the shrine, her work and influence extended beyond it. In 1950, she designed the brick façade and some of the furnishings for a temporary church built by the Roman Catholic diocese of Northampton, on the site of the Church of the Annunciation in Walsingham.
In 1978, the Episcopal diocese of Fond du Lac, in the United States, formed a partnership with her to produce At God’s Altar, illustrated children’s pamphlets for holy communion according to Rite I and Rite II of the then new American Prayer Book. A polyptych that now resides in the sacristy of St Mary’ RC Church in Greenville, South Carolina, was originally commissioned by the Revd Conrad Kimbrough as a reredos for his oratory altar.
Jonathan EvensThe Baptism of Our Lord by Enid Chadwick, in St Mary’s, Runwell
Her best-known book is probably My Book of the Church’s Year, published in 1948, which she wrote and illustrated; it was reprinted in 2018 by the St Augustine Academy Press. The book provides a month-by-month guide to the principal feasts, seasons, and celebrations of the Church’s year. Her other publications included The Seven Sacraments and Things We See in Church.
Despite the continuing appreciation of Chadwick’s work, she remains relatively overlooked in relation to her peers. A monograph or biography would be welcome, as would a survey of artworks in the Shrine and churches of Walsingham.
Ms Syed wrote, in an article for Forward! Plus, “the quantity and quality of her work is greater than was appreciated in her lifetime”. Ms Syed also places her as part of a tradition of Anglo-Catholic decoration that brings simplicity together with elaboration, developed by such as Sir Ninian Comper, William Butterfield, Alexander Gibbs, and Martin Travers, Ms Syed characterises the period and Chadwick’s style in terms of “joyfulness of elaboration and decoration”, with the reminder that it is decoration “to be seen in worship”.
In contrast, the art historian the Revd Dr Ayla Lepine sets Chadwick with artists such as Winifred Knights, Dame Elisabeth Frink, and Dame Tracey Emin, who have “encouraged the Church to include women and express sacramental theology in ways that continue to inspire and challenge”. Ms Syed suggests that Chadwick, being “devoted to Walsingham, which was the centre of her life”, would have been unaware of such wider movements, despite being, in her own way, a contributor to them.
Ms Syed concludes that, in “the restoration and growth of the shrine, she had the perfect canvas on which to express the faith and to mediate it to others. . . Generations will continue to reap the benefit of that dedication.”
Whether seen as the final chapter of one particular form of an aesthetically creative Anglo-Catholic movement, or as being at the start of a new engagement between the Church and female artists, Chadwick’s work deserves to be better known, better understood, and more widely appreciated.