The Holiness of Beauty

St Martin-on-the-hill, Scarborough is a Bodley church.

'The Holiness of Beauty: G. F. Bodley (1827-1907) and his circle', an exhibition staged by the RIBA+V&A Partnership, is in the Architecture gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, until 17 February 2008. Phone 020 7942 2000.
www.vam.ac.uk

Safe in G. F. Bodley’s greens and browns
The refined Gothic style cultivated by the architect G. F. Bodley has had its critics. But Michael Hall finds that quality will out.

ONE HUNDRED years after his death, George Frederick Bodley’s Gothic Revival legacy remains an instantly familiar part of the Church of England’s visual identity.

A characteristic Bodley church is late-14th-century English Gothic in style, furnished with a large, carved altarpiece in the manner of 16th-century Flanders or Germany. Its black-and-white chequerboard marble floor is bathed in the silvery-green tones of stained glass by Burlison & Grylls or Charles Eamer Kempe, which perfectly complement the subdued richness of the altar frontals and vestments, woven and embroidered by Watts & Co.

Such interiors are not limited to parish churches: they are found in cathedrals and school and college chapels throughout the Anglican communion. Almost every member of the Church of England will at some time have worshipped in a setting designed or influenced by Bodley.

That legacy has not appealed to everyone. Indeed, there was a reaction against it in Bodley’s own lifetime. His best-known pupil, Ninian Comper, rebelled against Bodley’s aestheticism and lack of interest in liturgical scholarship. Contemplating the Flemish-looking reredos that Bodley designed for St Barnabas’s, Pimlico, in 1892, he wrote: “Splendid as it is (it cost £1,000 or more) and from the aesthetic (only too aesthetic in the abused sense of the word) point of view, faultless; it has not the old Gothic ring about it.”

His criticism was justified: in 1874, Bodley wrote to a friend who had enquired about the correct colours for altar frontals: “Personally I can’t say I care greatly for much strictness of rule or rigid uniformity, so long as all is dignified & solemn, &, from an art point of view, beautiful.”
It could be argued that every successive wave of influence on Anglican church interiors, from Comper’s strict medievalism to the incursion of modernism in liturgy and design, was an implicit criticism of this statement by Bodley, which embodies the beliefs that make him in essence — as Comper recognised — the leading ecclesiastical designer of the Aesthetic Movement.

His churches have also been criticised more crudely for what some find an off-puttingly aristocratic aloofness, embodied in the word “refined”, which was his favourite term of praise. It is a term that has social as well as artistic implications. In 1933, the architect and critic H. S. Goodhart-Rendel mocked Bodley’s churches: “nothing could be nicer, or I venture to think, more embarrassing to poor or dirty people. The cultured atmosphere of the older universities floods every cranny of the building, and even when the organ is silent, the air seems to vibrate with the simple sterling hymnody of educated English voices.”

Although Goodhart-Rendel’s opinion stems in part from his unease with the late-19th-century Anglo-Catholic tradition that he had abandoned for the Roman Catholic Church, it has been echoed by subsequent historians. In his 1999 book The Gothic Revival, Chris Brooks identified a “fatal whiff of gentility” in Bodley’s late churches, blurring issues of art with discomfort about social class in a very English way.

Yet, looking back at Bodley’s reputation over a century, what is remarkable is the very high esteem in which his work has consistently been held. It is not surprising that Betjeman should have admired him, although his reference in Summoned by Bells to feeling “safe in G. F. Bodley’s greens and browns” in Marlborough College’s chapel also suggests that there is something a little too comforting about his architecture.

Less expected is Nikolaus Pevsner’s consistent praise throughout The Buildings of England for Bodley’s churches. Thanks to his German background, Pevsner stood outside the issues of religious allegiance and class so evident in the writings of Goodhart-Rendel, Brooks, and Betjeman, and simply appreciated the buildings as architecture.

BORN in 1827, the son of a prosperous doctor in Hull, Bodley was trained in the office of George Gilbert Scott, who was a relative by marriage. Like other leading architects who passed through Scott’s office — notably George Edmund Street — he reacted against what he saw as the often unthinking reliance on historical precedent in Scott’s practice. Bodley aimed instead for an architecture that was simpler and bolder in style and looked back to early medieval models, in Italy and France as well as England.

This was a self-conscious parallel with the revolution being wrought in English painting at the same time by the Pre-Raphaelites. Bodley’s determination to find opportunities for the Pre-Raphaelite movement to contribute to the decoration of his churches was made possible by the formation in 1861 of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.

The early success of Morris’s firm owed a great deal to the major commissions that Bodley brought to the firm. The result is the magnificent sequence of Morris windows and painted decoration in such early churches by Bodley as St Michael and All Angels, Brighton, and All Saints’, Selsley, in Gloucestershire.

Morris and his colleagues Rossetti, Philip Webb, and Burne-Jones looked to late-medieval English and Flemish models for many elements in their designs, and this undoubtedly influenced the abrupt change in Bodley’s architectural style in 1862. In the revision of his design for All Saints’, Cambridge, he abandoned the early-medieval, tough manner of his early churches in favour of a more elegant, English Decorated style.

All Saints’, Cambridge, itself — now beautifully restored by the Churches Conservation Trust — is the perfect exemplar of Bodley’s new aesthetic, its delicate glass by Morris & Co. magically enhanced by the painted decoration designed by Bodley.

MORE than 70 years after Goodhart-Rendel criticised Bodley, it seems harder to sympathise with the idea that a building can be too refined or too beautiful. His caricature of Bodley’s late work also ignores many important aspects of his achievement. First, there is the consistently high quality of his work. Bodley’s creative energy was as vigorous in his 81st year, when he died, as it had been when his career began, 55 years before.

Part of the reason is that he had a relatively small output in terms of complete new churches. Working either alone, or with Thomas Garner, another pupil of Scott with whom he was in partnership from 1869 to 1897, he designed just 58 cathedrals, churches, and chapels. His work-rate may have been influenced by the fact that he had a small private income, and so could pick and choose commissions.

Whatever the reason, it allowed him to pay very close attention to every detail of his work. He was not an architect who relied largely on drawings to get the results he wanted; he preferred to be on site, standing over the builders and craftsmen. He also ensured fidelity to his wishes by using a small team of firms whom he could trust to carry out his designs without interposing their own ideas.

In the early 1870s, he gave up using Morris, because he could not fully control him. Instead, in 1874, with Garner and George Gilbert Scott Jr he founded Watts & Co., to make wallpapers, textiles and other furnishings for both churches and houses to their designs. Unlike Morris & Co., which folded in 1940, Watts & Co. flourishes still, and has sustained Bodley’s reputation as one of the Gothic Revival’s great designers of pattern.

Bodley’s late churches use an admittedly narrow range of architectural ideas and decorative motifs in a far more varied way than is often appreciated. Budget is only part of the story.

Bodley was deeply sensitive to the individual requirements of particular commissions, and there is a considerable contrast between, for example, the ducal splendour of Clumber chapel or the richly furnished elegance of Holy Trinity, Prince Consort Road, in South Kensington, and the cerebral abstraction of the Cowley Fathers’ church in Oxford or the sturdy simplicity of the Eton Mission church at Hackney Wick.

These churches have to be visited to appreciate their quality, which lies far more in a faultless sense of proportion, crisp architectural mouldings and the relationship of wall to window than it does in rich detail or expensive furnishings. “His life was wholly given up to art,” recalled his widow, Minna, after his death. “He rarely took a real holiday.”

Bodley’s was indeed, a life of singular devotion: to the Church of England, to architecture, and, more widely, to visual beauty as the embodiment of God. As he once urged his pupils, “we should follow beauty, seek it whole-heartedly, & never rest in our search of it.”