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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