Some thoughts on Our Lady of London
One of my favourite images of Our Lady is the poster 'Our Lady of London' which was designed in 1935 by Martin Travers. I took this photo of it from a surviving copy hanging in a Nottinghamshire church. Our Lady has twelve stars around her head and is set in a crescent moon, superimposed against the sun, holding the Blessed Infant. Below is the sillouhette of the London skyline and St Paul's cathedral against a dusky sky. It is a striking image.
The iconography of Our Lady and the crescent moon isn't particularly unusual. The iconographical elements are all based on the vision of the woman in Revelation 12: 1. Usually Our Lady is standing or sitting on the moon. Albrecht Durer produced a woodcut of the Virgin and Child with all of these and it bears a striking resemblance to Travers' work. Except that Our Lady and the Infant are set on the crescent moon, rather than in it.
There is more. Among my collection of oddments at home, I have a small pewter pilgrim badge dating from the later part of the Middle Ages, which I bought it from an antiquities dealer in the mid 1990s. This tiny badge had been found on the foreshore of the river Thames, where I understand they have been found in their hundreds. The badge itself is believed to have been a pilgrim souvenir obtained during visit to the shrine of Our Lady of the Pew, an image of the Virgin and Child set in a chapel in the north Ambulatory of Westminster Abbey. Like the Travers image, on the pilgrim badge, Our Lady is set in rather than on the crescent moon. So I wonder - as well as seeing the Durer woodcut, had Martin Travers also seen a copy of this pilgrim badge? Was his design and the choice of this form of the Virgin and Child, based on this London connection with the cult of Our Lady of the Pew?
Comments
I, too, recall the CLA's reprints done as I recall for the 150th anniversary of the Assize Sermon.
Upon the whole they turned out quite well. Travers never turned his own work into posters and the one discovered by Alan Barton dates from this enterprise. It is interesting to know that it has survived the vicissitudes of the last thirty years.
Nothing had changed since he moved in in the late 1920s and it was entirely evocative of the Anglo-Catholic Congress movement and the taste of the SSPP. It was Gurney who was responsible for the format of their publications, designed on the principles of Sir Emery Walker, and many of the engravings used came from books in his library, made into new blocks by an old-fashioned printer called Quick.
I must admit to not being overkeen on the Our Lady of London image but would the ACS not be a likely candidate for reprinting the image as prayer cards/ember cards/such like?
I must have been confused by the fact that here in the States, they were sold as part of that anniversary.
Also, Father Symondson, why is so little available about Sam Gurney? Why I have been able to find has been quite interesting, but it is not enough and I would like to know a great deal more. The history of the Anglo-Catholic movement is not well enough known and all churchmen should know it better.
"And has Sam Gurney poped"
The late Fr Henry R.T.Brandreth O.G.S. said that Sam Gurney used to say that there were only two people not needed in this world,the butcher and the hangman.
Alan Robinson
Why?
2. I've never been to London - is the skyline depicted readily identifiable as that city?
It's not really accurate, an idealised London.
John Barnes's 'All Generations shall Call me Blessed' was seen through the press by Brian Brindley and printed by the Clarendon Press, Oxford. He took a long time to do it and I was deputed to finish the final printing. It was a typographical masterpiece, the best thing that Brindley designed. I imagine it is now scarce.
T. Noyes Lewis was a member of the congregation of St Alban's, Holborn, and his liturgical studies were based on Garner's tryptich of blue and gold carved wood behind the high altar and his altar ornaments. All but the ornaments were destroyed during the Second World War. Lewis was related to the formidable Mother Superior of a London house of the Society of St Margaret, East Grinstead, in Queen Square, Holborn. It ran an outstanding embroidery room but the community was received into the Church in 1906 and their vestments and chapel furniture are now at Farnborough Abbey. Noyes Lewis did not follow her example and much of his later work was done for Mowbrays and the Faith Press.
Canon Tallis
As Allan Barton has noted, there is a chapter on Sam Gurney in Michael Yelton's 'Outposts of the Faith', Canterbury Press, £22.99. The problem with Yelton's work is that it is often gossipy and he is too young to have known the people he writes about, or fully experienced their world. The c20 Anglo-Catholic Movement needs a more serious approach but, given the straights it is going through, it is unlikely that a scientific approach of any value with emerge in the foreseeable future. The subject is either riddled with nostalgia or antipathy.
Anonymous 2
Henry Brandreth was correct in quoting Gurney as he did. He was a vegetarian but would produce meat for his guests. He always engaged good cooks.
Billy D
Allan is also right in identifying the supporters of modern Roman liturgical reform as antagonists of Travers's style. Most had been young towards the end of his life and they reacted against it in middle age, seeing it as emblematic of a superseded period of Anglo-Catholic history, as obsolete as the English Use. They were embodied in clergymen like Charles Smith, of St Mary Magdalene's, Oxford, and Herbert Moore, of St Stephen's, Gloucester Road.
Gavin Stamp and I admired Travers for his artistry as much as his aesthetic and we were encouraged by Douglas Carter, the Secretary of the Church Union, without whose agreement the posters would not have been published. He, too, was a modern Romanist but he also saw the value of Travers's work and the success of the posters reaped their own reward. I don't think there would be the will or the expertise to reprint them now.
Davis d'Ambly
I had no idea, Davis, that the Travers posters ever reached America. A large run was printed by the CLA and the stocks must have lasted quite well. By 1983 I was on my way to the One True Church and I did not participate in the Oxford Movement celebrations. By then the scales had dropped from my eyes.
By the way, if you would like to read my assessment of Anglo-Catholicism, past and present, a revised and extended version of an essay I wrote on the subject has just been published in the tenth anniversary edition of 'The Path to Rome', edited by Dwight Longenecker and Cyprian Blamires, Gracewing, £12.50. It should soon be available in the United States as it contains some new American contributions, but none, I am relieved to say, emanating from the Traditional Anglican Communion. These include essays by Admiral and Mrs John Poindexter and Marcus Grodi
Apart from the even more bitter observations than mine of Peter Anson, few have attempted to come to terms with it as a serious subject. You would not have enjoyed Anson's company and I have letters from him which, even now, almost take my breath away. He would circulate copies of others he had written to good old priests like Marcus Donovan, for instance, to show how clever he was, and how stupid Donovan was in comparison. One of the reasons for the current neglect of the subject is that the present Anglican status quo regards it as a subject of no significance, best forgotten. It no longer fits the picture.
You have no idea how badly architects like Stephen Dykes Bower and his contemporaries who used the historic styles as a living architectural language were treated and suffered from the antipathy of the emerging status quo after 1962. In fairness to them, his style and that of his distinguished predecessors (Comper, Eden, Temple Moore, to a lesser extent Travers and some others) represented an element of stuffiness that had outlived its time. Exemplified by the work of Francis Stephens and the Faithcraft Studio this was, in my opinion, indisputable. It was given an extended life by the deplorable work of Lawrence King, perhaps the worst late-c20 English church architect whose work gave as much pain to Dykes Bower and that of George Pace.
Fortunately for you, you are free of these raging antipathies and your interest in the period gives me hope that one day it will be seen objectively as an artistic and architectural achievement in its own right. When I was your age I made many mistakes of attribution but I was fortunate in coming to know many pupils and protagonists who survived from the period and trained me to do better. At the moment you are too occupied with being trained for your professional life but I hope that one day you will find time to work in archives and work seriously in the subject. In the meanwhile, there is no harm in a correction or two intended to reinforce a stronger foundation.
As for the Church of England, in a curious and rather perverse way I admire it more than I did when I was part of it because I see that it is becoming more faithful to its origins. As an Anglo-Catholic I wrongly believed that the principles alone rightly expressed the faith of the Church of England. That was little more than vain optimism as the history of the national Church demonstrates in the post-Duffy and MacCullogh era demonstrates.
With regard to my attribution of work, I sense in your last comment that you are calling into question my academic methodology. I am a person, I think, with a reasonable sense of scholarly integrity. When I am uncertain I don’t ever make a definitive attributon, I always couch the attribution as a question, as I did with the frontal at Grantham and the dossal at Great Haseley. This is with the view, I hope, of others answering that question. I get as irritated as you, when wrong attributions are made. I am happy and grateful when a correction is made from whatever source it comes.
This blog does not represent my serious academic work in any sense, but is a by-product of my exploration and enthusiasm. As I said to you before it is my attempt to infect others with the enthusiasm for medieval art and architecture that I have. My professional development, for want of a better word, is not impairing my serious academic work. My serious academic work focuses on late medieval Gothic art and architecture. I am currently engaged on a volume on the medieval stained glass of Nottinghamshire for the international Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi and concurrently I’m working on a number of articles on late medieval mercantile patronage. This is work that is based on original archive work and on the solid academic foundation of my research degree.