Newsletter No.5 Easter 2016

Welcome to “The Friends” Newsletter No.5 Easter 2016

EVENTS SPONSORED BY THE FRIENDS OF ST MARTINS

Throughout the summer Free Guided One Hour Tours of the Church take place at 10.30 am every Tuesday Morning. They commence on Tuesday 3rd May and the final tour of the year will be on Tuesday 27th September. Private tours can be arranged for groups at a convenient time to all for a donation to The Friends. To arrange this please contact Mike on 07554 070 205.

Last minute cancellations. Should we have to cancel a tour due to unforeseen circumstances then notification will be published on this page of the website.

7pm Good Friday 25th March Stainer’s Crucifixion performed by choir drawn from all the local churches and beyond.

3pm Holy Saturday 26th March Easter Event A short talk on how Easter is revealed through pre-Raphaelite art and stained glass in St. Martin's Church, followed by wine and Simnel cake. Entrance £3 on the door, free to Friends.

9th July Dedication Service Day:

11.15 - 11.45 Talk about the opening of the church in 1863 by Mike Bortoft 12.00 Dedication Mass followed at 1.00 (approx) Lunch with a glass of wine or fruit juice. All invited

Organ Recital dates: Each one will take place on a Friday evening at 7-00pm.

Friday 6th May Edward Hewes Royal Academy of Music, London. Friday 3rd June Geoffrey Coffin Principal Pipe Organs York. Friday 1st July Colin Walsh Organist Laureate Lincoln Cathedral. Friday 15th July David Pipe. York Minster and Leeds Cathedral. Friday 2nd Sept Philip Moore Organist Emeritus York Minster, and President of The Royal College of Organists.

Admission to each of these recitals will be £6. Refreshments will be served by the Friends of St Martin's at the end, when there will be an opportunity to meet each organist.

Finally, an apology for the tardiness in publishing this newsletter due to an extended break in Australasia. Mike Bortoft 14th March 2016.

Contents:

Page 3: What’s in a Window? No 4 The Dorothea and Theophilus Window by Burne-Jones Page 8: Burne-Jones’ pursuit of love, an article by Fiona MacCarthy Page12: A Very Victorian Melodrama – The near death of The Prince of Wales 1872 and the how the celebration of his recovery is commemorated in St. Martin’s Church. Page 16: George Fredrick Bodley – The Early Years

What’s in a Window? No 4

The Dorothea and Theophilus Window by Burne-Jones

Sir Edward Burne-Jones 1833 - 1898

(See the window on our website at: http://www.friendsofstmartins.co.uk/Window15.html)

This striking window is located on the south aisle closest to the main entrance. The story of Dorothea and Theophilus is typical of the pre-Raphaelite’s attachment to heroic or tragic dramas:

St. Theophilus the Lawyer, from the 4th century, was trying cases before the Roman Courts in Caesarea, a seaside town on the modern day Israeli coast. Caesarea was the seat of the Roman province of Judea and was a prominent town through the 5th century.

Theophilus was part of the court's examination of St. Dorothy who was persecuted for not worshiping the Roman gods. While being examined, St. Dorothy told the court upon hearing her sentence was to be execution, "I thank thee, for this day shall I be with my spouse in paradise." Ridiculing the young woman Theophilus said to her, "Going to paradise, Dorothy? Well, send me some of its fruits and flowers; good bye!" Dorothy replied, "Gladly, Theophilus, will I do what you request."

St. Dorothy was lead out of the court to her execution - beheading by sword. Upon reaching the landing where she was to be executed, St. Dorothy knelt in prayer whereupon a child appeared, maybe four years in age. The child had a cloth in his hand with three different fruits and three magnificent roses. St. Dorothy instructed the child to take these fruits and roses to Theophilus and say to him "Here are the fruits and flowers from paradise which you asked for." St. Dorothy then laid her head down, and was martyred.

Meanwhile Theophilus was joking with his colleagues and telling them of this woman Dorothy; his story was met with hearty laughter and applause for his cutting wit. During the commotion of the laughter a child walked among them and approached Theophilus. Opening up his cloth the child said, "These are the fruits and flowers you asked the holy Dorothy to send you. I have brought them at her request from the garden of her divine spouse." At once the child vanished.

Stunned, and utterly shocked by the child's appearance and the gifts, Theophilus experienced a sudden conversion. His colleagues jested with him and tried to laugh him to his senses, but he could not shake off what had just happened. Attempting to reason with his companions Theophilus said "It is midwinter, there are no fruits or flowers like these in February. Our gardens are bare and our fruit trees leafless."

Nothing his friends could say or do would shake Theophilus's new found faith, even though believing in such a faith had just led St. Dorothy to her death; a death Theophilus himself mocked.

Theophilus himself was brought before the same court, but this time not as a lawyer, but as the accused. He stood before the judge charged with being a convert to the new religion Christianity - Theophilus gave witness to the court, whereupon he was summarily condemned to death - the death of a martyr.

Burne-Jones, who received the princely sum of £12 for designing this window, gave Theophilus a rather androgynous

face. He carries a large book of the law while looking somewhat out of

sorts by his confrontation with the angel.

The also androgynous angel bears a flame for the Holy Spirit on his head, and carries three apples – the fruits from the gardens of paradise.

Dorothea (next page) holds a branch of an apple tree.

Maria Zambaco, a sketch for The Beguiling of Merlin by Burne-Jones The window portraying Dorothea is perhaps the most intriguing of the three inasmuch until recently we believed the model for Dorothea was Jane Morris,

However, in a recent talk in the church given by Suzanne Fagence Cooper, the non-fiction writer who has written extensively on the Pre-Raphaelites and Victorian women, the speaker believed the model to be Maria Zambaco, 1843 – 1914.

The window was installed in 1873, soon after Burne-Jones and Maria Zambaco finished a rather public and torrid affair. Despite this Burne-Jones continued to use her as a model for many of his later works. The following short biography of Zambaco helps fill in some of the background to this fascinating figure, and the article following this one “Burne-Jones’ Pursuit of Love by Fiona MacCarthy gives a more in-depth account of her affair with Burne-Jones.

Maria Zambaco (born in London April 29th 1843, family name Cassavetti) was a first cousin of Constantine Ionides. She was a sculptor, but is better known as a model for other artists.

Her features also appear repeatedly in the paintings of Rossetti's friend Edward Burne-Jones, whose affair with the tempestuous Zambaco in the late 1860s came close to wrecking his domestic and artistic existence.

A painter and sculptor in her own right, she is more remembered for the numerous images created by Pre-Raphaelite painters. Born Marie Terpsithea Cassavetti to Greek nobility, wealth, and high position she was a noted beauty, known along with her cousins Aglaia Coronio and Marie Spartali as one of the "Three Graces", but was also apparently a rather rude and unpleasant girl who tended to scare away young men initially attracted by her looks.

She was only 16 when Maria married a Dr. Zambaco and moved to Paris, but when the marriage flopped she returned home, dumped her two children onto her mother, and began to study painting.

She posed for such noted painters as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James A. McNeill Whistler and in 1866 launched a turbulent personal and professional relationship with Edward Burne-Jones who rendered her image numerous times.

Things came to a head in 1869 with Burne-Jones making a show of leaving his wife and Maria putting on a public suicide gesture via laudanum once she realized the leaving was only a show.

In later years she studied painting at the Slade School and maintained a studio next to that of Burne- Jones who reportedly never spoke to her though he frequently used her as a seductress in his paintings.

Trained by Rodin, Maria became a sculptor in Paris and at her death (14th June 1914) was buried in her family's plot under her maiden name.

Others have likened Maria Zambaco’s face to stained glass designed by Burne-Jones. P. Neil Ralley, writing in April 7, 2002 on http://www.stainedglassphotography.com states that the similarities between the face and hands of Maria as portrayed in the Burne-Jones’ 1870 painting of her and the figure of St. Luke in Lanercost Priory (1877) (left) are enough to consider Maria as the source for Burne- Jones design.

And then when you compare the three faces in the window at St. Martin’s … well, what do you think?

Maria Zambaco

Jayne Morris What do you think? Email your opinion to [email protected]. If you are prepared to have your opinion published in the next newsletter, please indicate. Otherwise you vote will be published as part of the overall statistics.

Burne-Jones’ pursuit of love

Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones (Exeter, 1853) was romantic to the point of modernism, argues Fiona MacCarthy.

Edward Burne-Jones fits the definition of the ultimate Pre-Raphaelite. He was the undoubted leader of the second generation of Pre- Raphaelite artists who followed on from Rossetti, Millais and Holman Hunt. But after five years of research for his biography I’ve come to regard him more and more as a precursor of the modern, an artist of unsettling sexual and psychological exploration.

I am not alone in seeing Burne-Jones as a great visionary painter whose influence seeped through to affect the development of twentieth- century European art. An important exhibition at Tate Britain in 1997 – The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts – showed convincingly how closely he related to continental Symbolist ideas and decorative styles. But a close look at his life can take you a stage further in revealing just how far Burne-Jones’ art was a reflection of his own intense and frequently tormented emotional state.

He arrived in Oxford from Birmingham in 1853, aiming to be celibate. Both he and William Morris, his closest friend at Exeter, were originally intended for the church. The young Burne- Jones was an ardent follower of theologian John Henry Newman. Ideals of monastic communities attracted him. But Oxford at that period was a bitter disappointment. Burne-Jones and Morris gave up on religion and refocused their ambitions on a brotherhood of art. It appeared that Burne-Jones soon abandoned celibacy as a practical ideal. Even in those early days there were “heartaches and love troubles” as Burne-Jones’ susceptibility to women first erupted. He and Swinburne would soon be defining Heaven as “a rose-garden full of stunners”. A stunner was an ideal Pre-Raphaelite beauty, frizzy haired, a bit mysterious, a Victorian version of the medieval dame lointaine.

For Burne-Jones, art was life. The features of the women that he loved became imprinted on his artist’s imagination, so that a sequence of his paintings can tell us a whole emotional history. Sometimes the features of Burne-Jones’ desired women strike one as strangely interchangeable. In 1856, once he had moved to London, Burne-Jones became engaged to the fifteen-year-old Georgiana Macdonald, daughter of a Wesleyan minister. He had known the family since they had lived in Birmingham and went to school with Georgiana’s brother. Throughout what became a frustratingly long engagement, since Burne-Jones had no means of supporting a wife, he was drawing and painting her. They were not married until 1861. Often, tellingly, he makes her his

model for the Virgin. Georgie’s decorous, sweet features can, for instance, be identified in the central panel of the Burne-Jones triptych in the chapel at Lady Margaret Hall.

It was part of the whole ethos of Pre-Raphaelite art to draw and paint from people near at hand, part of the intimate domestic circle, in preference to using professional models. Burne-Jones himself was particularly fond of using Georgiana’s sisters as his models. Agnes, Alice and his favourite Louisa can be identified in his pen-and-ink drawings of this early London period. There was a certain clinginess in his attitude to women, possibly related to the loss of his own mother, who died when he was just a few days old. Drawing and painting them was how he laid his claim. Burne-Jones was devastated and indignant as, one by one, Georgie’s sisters announced themselves engaged. There was nothing unsuitable about the men they married. Far from it: Alice’s husband was the sculptor and art school director John Lockwood Kipling and their son Rudyard became the famous writer; Agnes married Edward Poynter, painter and leading figure of the arts establishment; Louisa married the wealthy ironmaster and MP Alfred Baldwin and their son Stanley finally became prime minister. But these defections left Burne-Jones inconsolable. He had a lifelong tendency to see himself as abandoned and bereft.

In the late 1860s a new face begins to appear in Burne-Jones’ pictures: the more exotic and sexually alluring Maria Zambaco. She was a young Greek woman, born Maria Terpsithea Cassavetti. Her mother was an Ionides, a member of one of the leading Greek merchant families in London, a clan so cohesive and interlinked by marriage they were often described as ‘the Greek colony’. Maria had impetuously married a Greek doctor, Demetrius Zambaco, a specialist in venereal diseases whose practice was in Paris. Zambaco was accused within the Cassavetti family of being involved in child pornography.

For whatever reason, the marriage failed. Maria had now returned to London, a wealthy, wilful woman with her own artistic aspirations. Burne-Jones gave her lessons in his studio at his house in West Kensington, The Grange. Maria soon became for Burne-Jones what first Elizabeth Siddall and then Janey Morris became for Rossetti: the visual obsession, the model and the muse. This was his first overwhelmingly sexual experience. Georgie, though conventionally pretty, was no siren. When Rossetti wrote his limerick on “Georgy, whose life is one profligate orgy” he was clearly being ironic. The Burne-Joneses had in any case ceased sexual relations to avoid having more children in addition to their small son Philip and infant daughter Margaret. A third child had been stillborn and Georgie was not strong. Maria was already well known as a pursuer, with an uninhibited physicality unusual in women in London at that time. She was a striking figure with “almost phosphorescent” white skin and come-hither glorious red hair. Burne-Jones believed himself to be shy, gauche and unattractive. His self-cartoons portray him as abjectly undesirable. Targeted by Maria, he did not stand a chance.

He dispensed with most other models now, in favour of Maria Zambaco’s delicate, distinctly Grecian features, her large expressive eyes, well-sculpted nose and neatly pointed chin. From the artist’s point of view she had the virtue of mobility. He told Rossetti that Maria “had a wonderful head, neither profile was like the other quite – and the full face was different again”. She appears in many guises in Burne-Jones’ paintings. There she is in his series Pygmalion and The Image, the statue created to be worshipped by the artist; there she is as his enchantress in the The Wine of Circe; his goddess in Venus Concordia and Venus Discordia; his temptress in The Beguiling

of Merlin, the pursuit of the ancient magician by the sexually predatory Nimuë. If he saw her as Nimuë, then he himself was Merlin. He was conscious of his own succumbing to enchantment: “I was being turned into a hawthorn tree in the forest of Broceliande.” In his final revision of the painting, Nimuë has become a Gorgon, snakes entwined in her enticing Pre-Raphaelite hair.

The affair could not end well. “Poor old Ned’s affairs have come to a smash altogether,” wrote Rossetti, the part sympathetic, part sardonic commentator on Burne-Jones’ fraught emotional life. Maria was putting pressure on Burne-Jones to run away with her and live on a Greek island, the island known as Syra described in Homer’s Odyssey. They could reclaim her classical heritage together. But Burne-Jones had a streak of bourgeois caution. There were turgid scenes of drama in 1869, with Maria pursuing him along the narrow lane leading north from Kensington High Street, proposing a suicide pact. When Burne-Jones refused to take the poison she had brought, she threatened to drown herself in Regent’s Canal. They were rolling about together on the parapet when, in a scene that could have come straight from a Wilkie Collins novel, the metropolitan police arrived.

The story was not over. The Zambaco affair erupted into public scandal in 1870, when Burne- Jones’ painting Phyllis and Demophoon was shown in the Old Watercolour Society’s annual exhibition at its Pall Mall Galleries. The picture, like so many of his paintings, is of a love chase, an episode from Ovid’s Heroides in which Phyllis, daughter of the King of Thrace, apparently betrayed in love by Theseus’ son Demophoon, kills herself and is turned by the gods into an almond tree. Burne-Jones illustrates the moment when Demophoon returns to be reclaimed by Phyllis, who clasps him around, enticingly, while still part of her own tree. The scandal arose not just because the heads of both the female and male figures bear the unmistakable features of Zambaco. Still more controversial was the nudity of Demophoon. When the harassed Society president suggested that his genitals could be temporarily chalked over, Burne- Jones indignantly removed the painting and resigned.

In 1872 Maria unexpectedly moved back to Paris. There were innuendos about another lover. She was later to throw herself at Rodin, still in search of a substitute ‘cher maître’. New research indicates the degree to which Burne-Jones continued to pursue her. He made visits to Paris. He and Maria may even have been in Italy together. In the 1880s she was reportedly renting a London studio next door to his. In a previously unpublished letter of 1888, now in a Cassavetti family collection, Burne-Jones addresses Maria as his “Dear and ill-used friend”. He says, “You must believe a bit that I never forget you.” And indeed how could he forget the woman who had moved his art onto a new level of transfixing and alarming erotic consciousness?

Through the years of public scandal Georgie had behaved with dignity and stoicism. She said stoutly, “There is love enough between Edward and I to last out a long life.” There needed to be. After Zambaco he was never not in love. The story of his complicated sexual history has been hampered by the lack of accessible documentation. There is still no published collection of his letters. In researching his biography, I’ve been the more dependent on the mass of his amorous correspondence still in private collections and the fixations revealed in his own art.

First in the 1880s, Burne-Jones became obsessed with a number of beautiful and self-possessed young women from the artistic and liberal elite: Frances Graham, daughter of his patron William Graham; Mary, William Gladstone’s daughter; Margot and Laura Tennant; Mary Stuart Wortley. These are the girls assembled on Burne-Jones’ aesthetic movement masterpiece The Golden Stairs. In the following decade his emotional focus was his daughter Margaret, the unawakened princess in his Sleeping Beauty paintings, whom he loved with near-incestuous devotion. But Margaret, like the other girls, got married – to his enormous chagrin.

Late in life Burne-Jones found himself embroiled in parallel adorations for an old love, Frances Graham, now Frances Horner, and new love, Helen Mary Gaskell. Both were sophisticated, spiritual women in their forties at the centre of the intellectual clique ‘the Souls’. But these were married women. There were limits. Both affairs were ultimately unsatisfactory. His late painting The Wizard, for which Frances was a model, is painfully autobiographical, suggesting an old man’s sexual frustrations. “I suppose I have learnt my lesson at last,” he wrote to Mary Gaskell three years before he died. “The best in me has been love and it brought me the most sorrow.”

Love was certainly the stimulus for the finest examples of Burne-Jones’ art: Nimuë pursuing and tantalising Merlin; Phyllis clasping Demophoon in that desperate embrace; Pygmalion kneeling daunted at the foot of his own work, the living, breathing women the sculptor has created; the mermaid dragging a lover to the unknown depths of a cruel ocean. These are images of passion but in the end bleak pictures of the incompatibility of men and women.

It is this bleakness of vision that relates Burne-Jones to a twentieth-century art of psycho-sexual exploration. His influence extended to Freudian Vienna, Egon Schiele and the ornately erotic dream paintings of Gustav Klimt. You can find the echoes of Burne-Jones’ search for love, beauty and sexual fulfilment in the work of the Swiss symbolist painter Ferdinand Hodler. There is evidence of the strong impression made by Burne-Jones on the young Pablo Picasso and the early twentieth-century Catalan painters. His preoccupation with sex was to be echoed in the work of Eric Gill and Stanley Spencer. Of all British twentieth-century artists, it is Spencer, with his unrelenting candour and the strangeness of his vision, who relates most closely to Burne- Jones.

Reproduced from http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/features/burne-jones%E2%80%99-pursuit- love. Published 19th April 2011.

A Very Victorian Melodrama

The recovery of Edward, Prince of Wales, from typhoid fever, which he caught in Scarborough, is commemorated in a unique way in St. Martin’s Church. Firstly, this is what happened:

The Prince of Wales together with his Marlborough House set (those who gathered around the Prince of Wales and indulged in the Prince’s fondness for gambling, the turf and the demi monde of London and Paris after dark) were invited to Londesborough Lodge in Scarborough in November 1871 for a hunting party in the company of William Denison, 1st Lord Londesborough. Somewhat unusually for the philandering Prince, he was accompanied by his wife Alexandra, Princess of Wales.

Londesborough Lodge was a relatively cramped house built high up a valley side with what transpired to be a fetid drainage system.

The Princess of Wales, then the Prince himself, complained of feeling unwell and returned to their Norfolk estate Sandringham where the Prince was diagnosed with typhoid fever. Typhoid had carried off his father Prince Albert, the Prince Consort almost a decade to the day of the Prince of Wales’s near- fatal illness.

Such was the seriousness that Queen Victoria was summoned from Osborne House to hold vigil at his bedside with a distraught Princess Alexandra. The Prince of Wales recovered after evading the Grim Reaper by a whisker.

Victoria, at Balmoral at the time Bertie began showing signs of the illness, sent her trusted personal physician Sir William Jenner to care for Bertie at his home at Sandringham.

Coincidentally, Victoria herself was recovering from a rather long bout of ill health following both a fall and an abscess removed from her arm earlier in the year. Shortly before her health deteriorated, Victoria’s children had signed a letter written by Vicky that urged their mother to pay more attention to her royal duties in the face of growing republicanism within the country. In short, 1871 had been a year in which Victoria’s extreme seclusion and depression had finally begun to catch up with her.

Over the following weeks, Bertie’s medical team monitored his symptoms with growing concern. In the meantime, two other members of Lord Londesborough’s hunting party, Lord Chesterfield and William Blegge (Chesterfield’s groom), died from typhoid, likely the same strain from which Bertie was suffering.

Victoria first travelled to Sandringham on November 29, alerting the press to the severity of Bertie’s condition. Friends and family were summoned to visit Bertie during what was feared to be the final days of his life.

Bertie’s illness continued through the month of December. He suffered from bouts of delirium, dangerously high fevers, and severe muscle pain and spasms. That Bertie was faring quite badly on December 14, the same day and from possibly the same disease that had taken his father eleven years earlier was a coincidence that certainly did not escape Victoria. Her journal entries from late November through the end of December recall Albert’s final illness multiple times.

However, a note Victoria made on December 14 shows that she was beginning to exhibit the first signs of emerging from her decade-long obsession with grief over Albert’s death. Victoria had bounced between Sandringham and Windsor Castle several times during Bertie’s illness. On December 14 she happened to be at Sandringham with Bertie instead of marking the day by Albert’s deathbed at Windsor.

Victoria seems surprised that instead of mourning more death, the family was celebrating what seemed to be an improvement in Bertie’s health. Victoria echoed this somewhat unusual concern for the well-being of another during her traditional time of extreme mourning is clear in the entry above. She minimized the importance of her own grief at the loss of Albert in favour of expressing her thanks for Bertie’s survival. In addition, Victoria, who usually felt no qualms about dressing down her children for any perceived slight, seemed to show concern only for Bertie.

For the first time in over a decade, Victoria was beginning to live in the present.

At the first signs of Bertie’s recovery, Victoria began talks with Gladstone, her prime minister, to plan some sort of celebration to mark her son’s recovery. Victoria commissioned a service to be delivered on January 21 1872 in all of the churches in England and Wales. The program included prayers of Thanksgiving for Bertie’s continued recovery from what was really the brink of death.

A larger celebration was planned at St. Paul’s for February 27 in which Victoria and the family attended a larger service celebrating Bertie’s restored health. Ecstatic to finally see their Queen in public, Londoners gave a warm welcome to the family, erecting a triumphal arch near the cathedral and decorating every inch of the procession with flags and banners. A relief exists below a statue in London showing the Queen and her son on the way to the service, memorializing Bertie’s recovery and the rebirth of his reputation.

Although Victoria did remain in mourning for Albert until her own death, she gradually continued to give more of herself to her family and her official duties in the year’s following Bertie’s illness. The republican movement that had been gaining popularity a few months before was now all but dead thanks to the wave of national celebration over Bertie’s survival.

As for Bertie, after some initial interest on the part of Victoria and her administration to give him some sort of official role, soon returned to his partying ways after no role was created for him. He did find some renewed happiness with his wife, Alexandra, following his illness after the two had been growing apart. Like Albert years before, a grave illness brought immense change to Victoria, her life, and her family.

Queen Victoria, however, blamed Scarborough for the scare, and never had a good word to say about the town again!

You might imagine how relieved the population of Scarborough was that the Prince recovered. Miss Mary Craven was no exception, and she decided to give thanks to God for the Prince's recovery by installing more stained glass windows into her favourite church!

Altogether she had three stained glass window put in to replace the original plain glass, two on the South Aisle (The Peter, Paul and Stephen (martyrs) window and the Dorothea and Theophilus window next to it), and one on the North Aisle depicting Moses, Melchizedek and Aaron.

The martyrs window: “A thank offering for the recovery of the Prince of Wales 1872, by Mary Craven

The Theophilus Window: “A tribute of respect and sympathy to the Prince of Wales, 1872, by Mary Craven

All three windows were designed by Burne-Jones and we know he received £12 for his design of the Theophilus window, so perhaps £36 for all three. He must have been pleased. Let’s hope that Queen Victoria was equally mollified! The Moses Window: A tribute of loyalty and respect to Queen Victoria, 1872, by Mary Craven

George Fredrick Bodley – The Early Years Born 14 March 1827 at 4 Albion Street Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England Died 21 October 1907 (aged 80) Water Eaton, Oxfordshire, England

Bodley was the youngest son of William Hulme Bodley, M.D. of Edinburgh, physician at Hull Royal Infirmary, who retired in 1838 when George was 11 years old, and went to live in his wife's home town of Brighton in Sussex.

George's eldest brother, the Rev. W.H. Bodley, became a well-known Roman Catholic preacher and a professor at St Mary’s College, Birmingham.

Bodley became interested in architecture by reading ‘Principles of Gothic Architecture’ by Matthew Bloxham, which was published in 1829. He was encouraged to take it up as a career by Sir George Gilbert Scott, whose brother was married to Bodley’s sister. From the age of 19 in 1846 he was taken into Scott’s office in Spring Gardens, off Trafalgar Square, as a pupil, where he remained until 1850.

Scott was the architect of many iconic buildings, including: The Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station The Albert Memorial The Foreign and Commonwealth Office St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh King's College London Chapel

Sir George Gilbert Scott was an English Gothic revival architect, chiefly associated with the design, building and renovation of churches and cathedrals. The Gothic Revival movement emerged in 19th century England. Its roots were linked directly to the re-awakening of High Church or Anglo-Catholic belief as a reaction to the growth of religious nonconformism.

The style was strongly influenced by the English architect, designer, artist and Catholic convert Augustus Welby Pugin.

The beginnings of Bodley’s pupillage with Scott coincided with a landmark in the Gothic revival, the opening on 1st Sept 1846 of Pugin’s St. Giles, Cheadle, Staffs. (left: Illustrated London News Jan 1847)

St. Giles' was vastly different in concept and design from the mean- looking chapels - such as the converted armoury in Cheadle - in which Catholics were accustomed to worship under the Toleration Act.

Gothic buildings of the 12th to 16th centuries were a major source of inspiration to 19th-century designers. Architectural elements such as pointed arches, steep-sloping roofs and decorative tracery were applied to a wide range of Gothic Revival buildings.

Bodley's pupillage lasted for four years, for which his father paid £100 a year to Scott. Evidently Bodley enjoyed learning the details of his chosen profession, but also, along with fellow pupils George Edmund Street and William White, chafing against what they saw as Scott's narrow insistence on using only the architectural style of late-13th- century England. When Bodley’s pupillage came to an end in 1850 Scott asked him to stay on as an assistant until 1852.

Influences on Bodley:

John Ruskin (1819-1900) Ruskin’s developing interest in architecture, and particularly in the Gothic revival, led to the first work to bear his name, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849).

Seven Lamps promoted the virtues of a secular and Protestant form of Gothic. It was a challenge to the Catholic influence of Pugin.

The profound influence of this, and the second publication by Ruskin - The Stones of Venice (1853) – resulted in Bodley being permeated by Ruskinism throughout his long career. He would evidently mutter to himself as he designed, “I wonder what Ruskin would make of that?”

Continental Influences 1850 - 3: In 1850 Bodley went on a tour of France, followed by one on Italy in 1853 which resulted in the publication two years later of his book Brick and Marble Architecture of North Italy.

The Anglo-Catholic church architects, with a similar extremism, studied the genuine medieval architecture, sketching, measuring it up, and looking at it fervently. G. F. Bodley, the church architect, an early patron of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., arrived at his extraordinary knowledge of Early French Gothic by a long process of gazing; the style entered his bloodstream so that people sometimes wondered if his buildings were old or new.

Fiona McCarthy, William Morris, A Life in Our Time 1994

A close friend of Bodley’s, and one for whom he had unqualified admiration, was William Butterfield. From 1842 Butterfield was involved with the Cambridge Camden Society, later The Ecclesiological Society. That Society had a major influence on the development of church architecture during the mid-nineteenth century. Its famous Journal, The Ecclesiologist, was published between 1841 and 1868.

Butterfield's church of All Saints, Margaret Street, London, was, in the view of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the building that initiated the High Victorian Gothic era. It was designed in 1850, completed externally by 1853 and consecrated in 1859.

In 1852 one of Bodley’s first clients was the Rev. Thomas Keble, brother of the more famous John, both of whom were staunch Tractarians. This work will be the subject of the next article on Bodley.