Charles Mahoney: The Pleasures of Life

Developed in partnership with Liss Llewellyn, Charles Mahoney: The Pleasures of Life at the Fry Gallery is the most significant show dedicated to the artist since a touring exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1999, also organised by Liss Llewellyn.

Interest in Mahoney's work has since enjoyed a steady rise, together with that of Royal College contemporaries such as Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, and he was one of the most prodigiously skilled artists of his generation. This was a view shared by the former Director of the Tate Gallery, John Rothenstein, who called Mahoney ‘an artist of very exceptional gifts’, and ‘a distinguished successor to the finest of the Pre-Raphaelites’.This exhibition brings together works from throughout Mahoney’s career, and demonstrates the full range of his artistic vision. It includes preparatory studies for all of Mahoney’s major mural cycles, as well as superlative views of Oak Cottage and the gardens he so lovingly cultivated there that provided the inspiration for his keen, minutely observed botanical works. The majority of the pictures have been gathered from the artist’s studio, and never previously exhibited before.

Mahoney was a frequent visitor to Great Bardfield, helping Bawden to decorate Brick House, and sharing his love of gardens with Bawden and with John Aldridge. He shared his own earthly paradise, Oak Cottage at Wrotham in Kent, with his wife Dorothy (Bishop) from the end of WWII until his death in 1968. Like many of the Bardfield artists, he had a love of the domestic and the overlooked scene.

Bawden, Mahoney and Ravilious won the commission to paint the murals at Morley College in Southwark between 1928 and 1930. Mahoney’s contribution was the central panel in the hall depicting seven large figures and titled ‘The Pleasures of Life’. Unfortunately these murals were destroyed during World War II. The work led to further murals: at Brockley School, Kent, with Evelyn Dunbar; and at Campion Hall Lady Chapel, Oxford. His oil paintings are frequently of a religious nature.

The wall paintings for the Lady Chapel at Campion Hall are unique and exquisitely executed depicting the life of Our Blessed Lady, with Mahoney’s great love of colour and horticulture on full display.

When Martin D’Arcy, as the recently appointed Master of Campion Hall, was planning the new building of the Hall in Brewer Street, he naturally wished to make something special of its Lady Chapel. He was enabled financially to do this through the benevolence of his close friend, Evelyn Waugh, who had recently completed writing his life of Edmund Campion and who now agreed to donate the royalties from the sales of the book to finance the painting of a set of Lady Chapel murals.

D’Arcy first invited the celebrated artist Stanley Spencer to consider taking on the Lady Chapel project, but Spencer proved himself eccentric and unpredictable. D'Arcy’s friend, Sir John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery, recommended a promising young teacher at the Royal College of Art, Charles Mahoney, who already had several murals to his credit. Mahoney enthusiastically accepted the commission, and his working relationship with Campion Hall would continue for ten years, resulting in a set of richly coloured and detailed murals portraying the life of Our Blessed Lady which constitutes one of the most splendid and engaging treasures in Campion Hall.

Not a Catholic, Mahoney was thoroughly instructed in the details of Our Lady’s life and traditional Marian devotion, and the Lady Chapel narrates the events and providential role of Mary’s life in three major panels along with the two altar and sacristy walls, and all in the setting of a richly flowered vaulted ceiling. The artist achieves both contemporary relevance and artistic immediacy by dressing participants in everyday clothing and including portraits of some members of the Campion Hall community.

The dominating panel shows Mary crowned as Queen of Mercy surrounded by a garland of flowers and angels and spreading her protective cloak over four kneeling child-sized suppliants: a workman, a student, a uniformed soldier (it was wartime) and a clergyman, his friend the Jesuit Father Vincent Turner. The other two panels continue the theme of the year’s seasons by portraying, first, a winter night Nativity scene, with mundane shepherds replacing an earlier setting with kings; and then a summer-reflecting canopied Coronation of Our Lady by her risen Son when she was assumed into heaven by the accompanying angels.

The wall of the chapel which contains a doorway into the sacristy presented the artist with a challenge. Lutyens had designed the large elaborate door to fit in with his systematic use of wood throughout the Hall. Mahoney incorporated the doorway into his work by placing at the top the scene of the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt, with two panels on either side of the door portraying several other Marian events: the traditionally wondrous birth of Mary to elderly parents; her Visitation to her pregnant cousin, Elizabeth; her betrothal to Joseph, preferred to the other apocryphal suitors; and the unfinished Dormition, or ‘falling asleep’, of Mary, the term traditionally applied to the completing of her earthly life.

The Chapel’s wall which includes the windows above the altar was chosen by Mahoney to display the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel to the young Jewish girl dressed in red, while below (incomplete) two other angels are playing xylophones; and spread across the top are illustrations of Old Testament prophetic titles which are applied to Mary in the traditional Litany of Loreto.

Finally, the ceiling of the chapel draws on Mahoney’s floral expertise to display a delightful luxuriant garden, which may portray a new Eden as the life setting for the new sinless Eve, and may also, with its surrounding wall, recall her being the ‘enclosed garden’ (hortus conclusus) beloved of God in Song 4:12, all surmounted by a radiant blue sky stretching across the ceiling’s vault.

As it happened, the sensitive Mahoney’s work was left unfinished, for several possible reasons: the artist did not feel his efforts were sufficiently admired by D’Arcy after the latter ceased to be Master; or Waugh’s donated royalties grew less over the years and were proving insufficient for what was becoming a lengthy project; or the physical demands of the work were affecting Mahoney’s declining health. The consequence was that the small Dormition panel to the right of the Sacristy door (including Fathers D’Arcy, Martindale, Corbishley, the architect Lutyens and the Hall’s carpenter), and the two other panels placed immediately on either side of the altar, remained incomplete in their grey undercoating. Interestingly, this unplanned feature has produced a simple graceful effect, particularly in Mary’s deathbed, and it also serves in its unfinished condition to highlight the interplay of strong colours which pervades the work as a whole, while also evidencing the otherwise concealed patterning of fabrics and garments which underlies Mahoney’s entire work.

Not completed, and therefore never officially unveiled nor publicly launched, Mahoney’s insufficiently known Lady Chapel murals in Campion Hall are nonetheless capable of making a deep impression on their viewers. They elicit admiration for the peaceful prayerful space which they create, while also being valued as a visible illustration of St Ignatius Loyola’s practice of biblical imaginative meditation.

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Francis Poulenc - Stabat Mater.

Liverpool Cathedral: Art, Faith and Modernity

Sacha Llewellyn and Paul Liss have been responsible for significant exhibitions in recent years which have enabled the prodigious talents of Winifred Knights and Evelyn Dunbar to be reviewed. Through Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, they have, since 1991, been engaged in a wider work of restoring to prominence those in the artistic circles of which the likes of Knights and Dunbar were part. These were artists for whom spirituality and religion were often a central element within their inspiration and practice and, therefore, it should be no surprise that Liss has now brought works by these artists together in a linked series of exhibitions under the title of ‘Art, Faith and Modernity’.

The artists included in this touring series – the second of which is at Liverpool Cathedral from 6 – 30 August 2019 – are symbolists and muralists who were successors to the Pre-Raphaelites by dint of finding inspiration in works of the Italian Renaissance. The exhibition at Liverpool Cathedral includes works by Evelyn Dunbar, Sir Thomas Monnington, Winifred Knights, Rachel Reckitt, Helen Blair, Sir Frank Brangwyn, Edward Halliday, Barnett Freedman, Clare Leighton, Francis Spear, John Tunnard, Glyn Jones and Charles Mahoney

A comment by Thomas Monnington on Allegory, part of the collection of the Tate, two sketches for which are included in this show, sets the scene for the dilemma that, in a secular age, faced artists with spiritual sensibilities who were inspired by religious art. When first asked by the Tate about this work, Monnington wrote that is was a personal interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden. When later pressed to elucidate further, he then denied that it was based on the Garden of Eden but claimed it as ‘an attempt to express in pictorial form my attitude to life – almost my faith’ (letter of 2nd April 1957). Liss suggests that ‘Monnington’s attitude was typical of his generation’ as, ‘although religion was not a defining ingredient of his art, the search for meaning in a wider spiritual context was’.

While this may reflect the attitudes of the artists whose work is shown here, the works themselves primarily utilise Biblical imagery, with the only works that are more abstract and conceptual being those by Rachel Reckitt and John Tunnard. Some pieces derive from church commissions, such as Frank Brangwyn’s Study for central panel of Nativity window, St Mary the Virgin, Bucklebury, Berkshire and Francis Spear’s Christ Derided, but several others reflect personal inspirations rather than commissioner’s requirements.

Despite this, religious commissions were forthcoming for Knights, Monnington and, unhappily, Glyn Jones, as well as Brangwyn and Spear. Monnington and Geoffrey Houghton Brown reflect the influence of Maurice Denis, through his writings and teaching on L’Art Sacré. The work of Helen Blair and Knights show modernist methods applied with particular aplomb to Biblical scenes. A version of The Good Samaritan by an unknown artist set at the Belgian Front at the end of WW1 is particularly evocative and highly unusual.

‘Art, Faith and Modernity’ has been selected as one of the ten best summer collections by the Daily Telegraph and the Art Newspaper. This interesting exhibition of modern works, loosely grouped under the umbrella of religious art, draws attention to one of the richest – though under-researched– aspects of 20th century British visual culture and calls for a reassessment of the place that religious art occupied in 20th century Britain.

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Noah and the Whale - Give A Little Love.

Pallant House: David Jones, Edmund de Waal & Evelyn Dunbar

As if the prospect of a David Jones retrospective was not enough of a draw to Pallant House, the gallery supplements the Jones show with a new work by Edmund de Waal (whose new book The White Road has recently been published) and also has a remarkable collection of lost works by WW2 Official War Artist Evelyn Dunbar.

De Waal's "‘if we attend’ (2015), a white, wall-mounted vitrine with translucent glazing and 16 porcelain vessels, is a new piece produced especially for the David Jones exhibition. It references the calming slowing down effect of these words in the second line of Jones’s poem The Anathemata: ‘We already and first of all discern him making this thing other. His groping syntax, if we attend, already shapes…’. The work, displayed alongside two other porcelain works – ‘in the north north east’ (2014) and ‘thirteen circles’ (2014) - will be accompanied by a series of poems by David Jones, creating a contemplative space reflecting the nature of the work."

Evelyn Dunbar [was] "a Christian Scientist throughout her life, and the church’s influence suffuses all her work.

“She held her beliefs to be self-evident,” writes Campbell-Howes on his blog. “The only doubts she had concerned the readiness of humankind to play its part in the Covenant. The Covenant – my term, not Evelyn’s – as she conceived it, was the promise given by the creator to the human race of a fertile and eternally abundant land, in return for mankind’s promise to cherish it, to appreciate it and to care for it through intelligent and devoted husbandry.”

That explains, no doubt, why nature rarely appears untamed in her work. “She didn’t really do landscapes on a grand scale,” says Ro. “She was more interested in hen coops, worked fields, and the business of tending the land.”

Indeed, almost all the art at Pallant House shows her love for mankind’s nurturing of God’s creation." (The Guardian)

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Emmylou Harris - Every Grain Of Sand.