Berwick Church: Bloomsbury Baby!

If any readers of this blog ever find themselves meandering about in East Sussex they could do a lot worse than to visit the wonderful Bloomsburyfied church at Berwick. This is where we were only last week and as well as having splendid views of the South Downs, the inside of the church is literally plastered in the bold, beautiful and thoughtful work of Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Quentin Bell.

Like nearby Charleston House, where the artists lived, there is hardly a scrap of blank space that goes unpainted. Regular readers may remember that I am fascinated by the so-called Bloomsbury interiors – that is to say the unconventional things which members of the Bloomsbury group did with the inside of their houses. This is also a Bloomsbury interior – but a public one and a religious one which shows these artists to be even more inventive and remarkable than I thought before. Grant and Bell were not at all religious, of course, but they did not belittle their religious subjects. They really knew how to use space and how to adapt and co-exist with the world around them.

As far as I can tell, Duncan Grant did most of the painting and in particular, he is the creator of the depiction of “Christ in Glory” on the chancel arch. He combined religious images with local landscapes to powerful effect. Thus, below Christ and the angels rolls the Sussex countryside and the scenes and faces of local life are all around the church. The murals were painted during World War II and below Christ and the angels sit, on the left three local servicemen in their uniforms (one of whom died before the war was out), and on the right the Bishop and the Rector who commissioned and supported the murals. Painting patrons into pictures was of course a strong feature of Italian renaissance art and the Italian influence on these murals was what struck me immediately. They feature so much that is English but in some ways, they are very foreign. They seem to be two things at once, without losing the essence of either.

Vanessa Bell followed Duncan Grant’s lead in her depiction of the Annunciation in which Mary and the angel Gabriel (posed, incidentally by the writer Angelica Garnett and Chattie Salaman) sit against a backdrop inspired by the gardens at Charleston House. Again, the familiar and the foreign, the sacred and profane, the timeless and the contemporary are placed within one frame and the result is startling. As you will see from this post, I got a bit overexcited with my picture taking....

And if that was not enough excitement for one day, my husband (who is himself becoming something of a master grave-finder having, only last year found Diana, Unity, Pamela and Nancy Mitford) spotted the grave of Cyril Connolly, which rather inspires me to finally read his book Enemies of Promise, itself a long term resident of my TBR pile. For another, more misanthropic day methinks...