Bringing Gothic art to the age of electric light
John Francis Bentley (1839-1902) designed Westminster Cathedral in an unlooked-for style deriving from Byzantine models. It was, said the architect Norman Shaw, “beyond all doubt the finest church that has been built for centuries”. Well, there may be doubt, but if he hadn’t built it, what would he be remembered for?
This strong-minded man, who refused to enter any designs in competitions, “would have the reputation of a refined and sensitive architect of a few churches and secular buildings, and a distinguished designer of fittings and decorative schemes”. That’s the verdict of the architectural historian Peter Howell in his short new illustrated book John Francis Bentley, published by Historic England and the Victorian Society.
Without Westminster, Howell declares, Bentley’s masterpiece would have been the Holy Rood, Watford, in the Gothic style. I’ve written about it before (Sacred Mysteries, March 24 2019). To know what else to see to understand this endlessly creative architect, Peter Howell supplies a comprehensive list.
St Francis, Pottery Lane, is a good place to start. In 1860 the 20-year old Bentley designed the Gothic altar of St John there, with paintings by his friend NHJ Westlake, which I don’t happened to like. In 1862 Bentley was the first person to be baptised (adding Francis to his name) in the font, with its pulleyoperated cover, in the baptistery he had designed. The high altar is his too, and stained glass such as the mosaic-like window of St Augustine.
Bentley’s work at Pottery Lane reflects his delight in colour. The church was built in a poor, diseased part of London – Notting Dale more than Notting Hill. The rich might walk down to go to church; the ragged poor might not have dared walk uphill to a church in a fashionable neighbourhood. But they could see beauty in the worship at St Francis’s.
One object that Bentley designed in the Byzantine idiom in 1864 (decades before his magnum opus at Westminster) was a monstrance, the metalwork stand on which the Blessed Sacrament is displayed in the devotion of Benediction. The saintly priest who built up the parish, Henry Augustus Rawes, dedicated a devotional book called Sursum “to those members of the congregation of St Francis of Assisi who in their love for the Blessed Sacrament have given a monstrance to Our Lord”.
But in 1981 the monstrance was sold. Anne Hull Grundy, a benefactor of museums, bought it and gave it to Birmingham Art Gallery. There is, though, a great deal of difference between an artwork used in worship and one washed up in a museum.
Some of Bentley’s metal altar rails “have been lost under the mistaken assumption that this was required by the Second Vatican Council”, Howell notes, but there are glorious survivals at St James,
Spanish Place, interlaced with vine leaves and grapes.
A surprising aspect of Bentley’s skill in metalwork is the art of the electric light fitting. Examples from 1887 in twined, organic form, in the chapel of St John’s Beaumont school, “attain the acme of simplicity and grace possible in wrought ironwork”, wrote his daughter Winifred de l’hôpital, the author of a still-valuable two-volume work on Bentley. Excellent light fittings survive at the Holy Rood, Watford, St James, Spanish Place, and St Mary, Clapham.
St Mary’s was John Bentley’s own parish church after his marriage in 1874. Screened by a wonderful metalwork grille, the chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour shows how Bentley could shine in his own interpretation of Gothic art.