eric gill's stations of the cross in westminster cathedral

The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the Present

Eric Gill's Stations of the Cross in Westminster CathedralAuthor(s): Judith CollinsSource: The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1890-1940, No. 6 (1982), pp. 23-30Published by: The Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the PresentStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41806691 .

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Eric Gill's Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral

by Judith Collins

In 1892 Cardinal Vaughan, 3rd Archbishop of Westminster, initiated the building of the new Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster. The architect chosen was John Francis Bentley, and he was encouraged by the cathedral authorities to design it in an Early Christian Byzantine style. The first stone was laid in 1 895 and the fabric of the building was completed by 1 903 . Bentley did not live to see this, since he died suddenly in 1902. He left a number of rough indications and working notes of ideas for schemes for the decoration of the cathedral interior, but it is likely that had he lived he would have proceeded empirically, gradually deciding on the details. He made a start with the side-chapels, leaving the major decision on the decoration of the nave until these smaller scale murals had been accepted. Interior decorative work which was carried out under Bentley's supervision was the completion of the Chapel of the Holy Souls. Although it was done under his direction and the cartoons of the mosaics carried out by Christian Symons were approved by Bentley, he is known to have been dissatisfied with the result. It is certain, however, tnat he did plan for mosaics to cover the insides of the three domes which span the nave, as they do on the vault of the Chapel of the Holy Souls, because the bricks and concrete blocks which make up the domes in the nave were deliberately left rough and unpointed in order to provide a satisfactory support for the subsequent application of tesserae.1 At his death, the delicate problem of the interior decoration of Westminster Cathedral fell to his chief assistant, John Marshall, a man who had worked with Bentley for twenty-five years. In the decade after Bentley's death, the cathedral authorities, along with Marshall, now the architect in charge, set about commissioning isolated portions of interior decoration as the wishes of donors and financial conditions allowed. The decoration of a second side-chapel, that of St Andrew and St Paul, was begun in 1910 with funds donated by Lord Bute, and designs provided by Robert Schultz Weir.

Eric Gill was to become a frequent visitor to the new Westminster Cathedral as his conversion to Catholicism became more distinct and positive. On his thirty-first birthday, 22 February 1913, Gill and his wife Ethel were received into the Church of Rome at a ceremony which took place not at Westminster Cathedral, but at a church in Brighton. At the very time that Gill was received into the Catholic faith, the Cathedral authorities were attempting to respond to donors' wishes that a set of the Stations of the Cross should be provided for the building. There was no stipulation as to whether the Stations were to be painted or sculpted, only that they were to be the work of an artist, rather than the products of a church furnishing company. Gill admitted later how complete chance and pure luck seemed to give him this job. He was introduced by Gerald Siordet, a friend of a friend, to John Marshall, the architect in charge, as a suitable candidate for the work of carving the Stations:

'I was almost unknown in any respectable circles and, I suppose, entirely unknown among catholic ecclesiastics. I believe it is true, as I was told by the architect in charge, that had it not been that I was willing to do the job at a price no really "posh" painter or sculptor would look at, I should certainly never have got it. As it was, the pious donors were getting restive and as the Cardinal Archbishop is said to have said, if the architect didn't hurry up and do something about it, he would give the work to the first catholic he met in the street. So they gave it to me.'2

Thus, in the spring of 1913, as a new Catholic convert, and a relatively recent convert to sculpture, Eric Gill was faced with the daunting prospect of providing fourteen large-scale sculptures for the most prestigious church of the Catholic faith in England. However, he was pleased to undertake the work, even though the fee was small for a job which was to occupy him for four years, since it would, if successful, establish him as a prominent sculptor as well as a letter-cutter. Late in 1915, he found that the commission was not profitable financially because his expenses were very heavy. He was paid £ 14 1 1 5 0 for the first three panels, and if that fee can be taken as standard, then for each panel he was paid £47 5 0, or a total for the job of around £665.

Gill has left a record of his opinion on Bentley's cathedral - he thought it 'a work of genius'. Gill had a good knowledge of building and construction, having been apprenticed to W H Caröe, the

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architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, London, for a period of four years - from 1899 to 1903 - with the intention of becoming an architect. He was impressed by the massive brick piers supporting concrete and brick vaults:

. as a piece of brick and concrete work it is magnificent. In any other view it is scarcely less ridiculous than the Pavilion at Brighton or the Albert Memorial. The unadorned interior of Westminster, the Forth Bridge, the Nile Dam at Assouan - these are great and beautiful works.'3

He was not alone in decrying the interior decorations of Westminster Cathedral; the art critic P G Konody had this to say:

'Is the great artist to whom we owe the most lofty and inspiring architectural conception of our age responsible for all the tawdriness, false glitter, inappropriate motives and glaring incongruities which abound in the completed chapels - the vaulting of the Baldachino, the pulpit in the manner of the Criterion Restaurant decorations, the late Renaissance cornices and mouldings over the altars in some of the side chapels which destroy the beautiful unity . . . '4

Given Gill's preference for the noble, unfinished and unadorned quality of the cathedral, how did he feel about undertaking the carving of fourteen stone panels for the interior? He argued, persuasively as a practising Catholic, that the Stations of the Cross were 'furniture, not decorations' and knew that he had to confine himself 'to what might be called a diagrammatic treatment of the subjects. They are meant to be in stone what in words is called "plain language" and in music "plain chant".'5

Bentley had obviously intended that a set of the Stations of the Cross should be situated in the nave, and had had elaborate marble frames made for them, and provided spaces on the nave

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let it entley's intentions as to the nature of the Stations of the Cross, his son, Osmund Bentley, let it be known that his father planned for the fourteen Stations to be produced in opus sectile panels. Other panels of a flat, encaustic tile inlay can be found in the side-chapels, and adorning the reredos, and it was a treatment much favoured by Bentley. Indeed, the Judgement of Solomon panel in the Chapel of St Gregory and St Augustine, an opus sectile panel with an elaborate marble frame, was regarded as a possible exemplar of Bentley's intended Stations. Certainly, multi-coloured panels of the Stations of the Cross would have fitted more easily into the proposed whole decorative scheme, where the cathedral interior was to be transformed, with mosaic vaults and variegated marble revetments, into a rich harmony of shimmering and reflective colour. With the trial commission for the Stations of the Cross offered to Gill, a stone carver, it would be obvious that he would be unable to realise Bentley's wishes. But then Marshall, in giving the commission to Gill, was the one who challenged and disregarded Bentley's intentions. However, when five of the panels were set up for inspection in the cathedral in 1915, it was Gill, rather than Marshall, who came in for criticism on this count. He responded to his critics thus:

'I think I am justified in saying that the greatness of Bentley's building is entirely in its fine sense of size and proportion, and that it is not necessary to follow a great engineer's work in decoration because he was a great engineer. It was originally intended that the reliefs should be carried out in the method known as opus sectile, a method ... by which pieces of tile are glazed and burned in colours ... It is the general opinion amongst artists that it is a very bad method. Large kilns and plant are required for such work, and it can only be carried out by firms of church decorators. It is factory work, and to any real craftsmanship it is death. No artist, in fact, has ever adopted it ... It was decided that this method was not desirable for the Stations, and that they should be done in low relief carving . . . '6

By the late nineteenth century, the Stations of the Cross had been codified into a definitive series of fourteen episodes, which commemorated significant events of Christ's journey along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, from His condemnation by Pontius Pilate to His burial. These events were used by worshippers as a contemplative ritual. The fourteen Stations were marked by a shrine or important religious object, or, more simply, by a plain wooden cross; and it was the cross, rather than any figurative image, which was the object of devotional prayers and meditation. Temporary Stations of the Cross, most probably simple wooden crosses with titles,

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had been set up in the nave of Westminster Cathedral, and since they were felt to fulfil their religious function completely, some Catholics were understandably anxious, firstly, that the artist given the commission for a permanent set of Stations might not measure up to such a

powerful and difficult subject, and secondly, as to whether there was any need for figurative imagery in conjunction with the crosses and titles since it might restrict the devotion and imagination of the individual worshipper. As usual, Gill was most willing to respond to such criticisms:

'For, much as he (or she) and I would prefer plain lettered tablets to the usual pictorial banalities, the human appetite for pictures, statues and ornaments is not to be denied, and our business, therefore, is to discover how that appetite (divinely implanted, be it remembered) can be justly satisfied.'7

With the justification of The Highest Authority on his side, Gill set about the problem of planning the fourteen Stations. Being a relatively inexperienced sculptor, only taking up the discipline in 1910, it is reasonable to assume that Gill would have looked to some earlier sets of Stations of the Cross for guidance. But, as he wrote: 'The Stations of the Cross is a comparatively modern devotion, and there are in consequence no very good precedents for an artist to follow ... In the absence, then, of any good precedent, the artist attacked the problem de novo . . '8 Although John Marshall gave him the commission in the spring of 1913, Gill was first required, at his own expense, to provide a sample carved relief, which would be set up in the cathedral. If and when the cathedral authorities approved this sample panel, then Gill would be free to proceed with the whole set. He attacked the problem of the Stations by first and foremost working them out graphically. He made pencil and pen sketches, and by the end of 1913, had produced a set of printed designs from woodblocks for the fourteen Stations.9 The Station he chose as his trial panel was the fifth of the series- Simon ofCyrene helps Jesus to carry the Cross- and a preliminary drawing for it is in the Charles Rutherston Collection of Manchester City Art Gallery (Plate 1 ) . The trial panel was 4' 6" square, slightly smaller than the 5' 8" of the reliefs now in situ. It is instructive to compare the trial version of the fifth Station with the final version, and since the present whereabouts of the trial stone panel are unknown, the comparison has to be made between the preliminary drawing for the trial panel and the final carved version (Plate 2). There are two immediate differences. Firstly, in the drawing Christ and Simon proceed from right to left, whilst in the final version, they face the opposite way. The lateral reversion of the design probably relates to the engraved woodblock, executed as the middle step between the drawing and the final stone version, and in which the drawing is reversed when printed. Secondly, the drawing contains three figures, Christ, Simon, and a Roman soldier, all of whom are set against sections of decorative foliage. In the carved version, Christ and Simon are accompanied by two small boys as onlookers, and the presence and dominance of the Roman soldier is more aggressively indicated by symbolic means. The rope around Christ's waist, held by the soldier who leads him, is pulled by an invisible hand beyond the right edge of the panel, and from that same area, come two thrusting spearheads. All foliage has been eliminated, and the background plane of the panel is completely bare.

Gill did not carve the fourteen Stations in their ritual, devotional order. The cathedral authorities must have allowed him to produce them in the order he chose, and he began with the 2nd, 10th and 1 3th. The 2nd -Jesus receives His Cross - and the 1 3th - The Body ofjesus is taken from the Cross - still retain a feature of the drawing in the Rutherston Collection, for they both contain foliage (Plate 3). Likewise, the 10th - Jesus is stripped of His Clothes - contains extra detailing, albeit symbolic in this case, where two dice are shown in perspective in the bottom right hand corner of the panel. After these first three reliefs, Gill pared down the content, and was not afraid to leave large areas of the panels completely bare, witness the 12th - Jesus dies upon the Cross (Plate 4). All the reliefs were carved in a Derbyshire carboniferous limestone known as Hoptonwood stone, and all are 5' 8" square. Below the figurative scene, each has the number cut in Roman numerals, and the title, in English, cut in Roman capitals. Relevant biblical texts in Latin appear on eight of the panels, cut into the background around the contours of the figures. Each is surrounded by a different carved decorative border; however, every border does contain, at the central point of the top edge, an identical small carved cross in a roundel. Thus Gill provided the obligatory feature of the fourteen Stations, the cross, which is the true object of the spectator's devotion. The massive nave piers of Westminster Cathedral are clad in a green,

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patterned marble, with a bottom strip of dark-grey marble. Gill's reliefs of the Stations of the Cross are set on these nave piers, well above eye-level, with their lower edges about nine feet up from the nave floor; the position that the fourteen Stations would occupy having been already determined by Bentley. Gill took the step from letter-cutter to sculptor in 1910, when he carved, for his own pleasure, a small Hoptonwood stone bas-relief of a crouching naked woman supporting a framed inscription - a text in Greek. The figure is dominated visually and symbolically by the carved inscription, in which the letters are coloured, and serves to indicate Gill's tentative move towards the carving of figures in the round. After encouragement from colleagues such as William and Charles Rothenstein (the latter changed his name to Rutherston) and Roger Fry, Gill resolved to establish himself as a sculptor as well as a letter-cutter. With his long apprenticeship in cutting letters into a shallow block of stone, he began his career as a sculptor by keeping within such confines, and thus his early works show a high proportion of bas-reliefs, and small sculptures intended to be viewed from one or two aspects only. Also from the discipline of letter-cutting he carried over an emphasis on the sharp, telling contour seen best from a frontal position. So, although John Marshall and the Westminster Cathedral authorities agreed on stone bas-reliefs for the Stations of the Cross as the only suitable sculptural mode which would fit into the proposed scheme of the cathedral interior, after the idea of opus sectile had been abandoned, it was also Gill's preferred mode and the one in which he had had most experience. He was also very proud of the fact that he had the capacity to cut stone directly, without the middle step of working from a clay maquette, another benefit derived from his experience as a letter-cutter. He was to emphasise this fact, when he wrote an article on his Stations of the Cross in 1918, (even though he wrote the article under a pseudonym):

'Now of the Stations as works of Art, it is more difficult at present to form an opinion. Some of the panels are better than others; in all there are bad things and good things. It may, however, be urged that they are at any rate stone carvings and not stone imitations of plaster models. . . The present degradation of sculpture is largely due to the fact

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that the modern artist works in clay and gets his model made into stone by more or less mechanical means. The stone has therefore little or no influence upon the form of the work.'10

Gill carved his reliefs of the Stations of the Cross from half-size working drawings, which were arrived at after a series of preliminary sketches. But the working drawings only indicated the primary contours, with coloured outlines indicating the depth of the cutting.11 By carving directly in stone from a working cartoon, Gill was able to preserve the integrity of his ideas and the simplicity of his original graphic statement. But this simplicity was to arouse questions about his style. Adjectives such as Neo-Byzantine, Assyrian and Primitive were conjured up by critics of the Stations. When" press interest coupled with growing hostility grew to a head at the installation of the fifth panel in the cathedral in the winter of 1915, Gill felt compelled to reply on the vexed question of his style:

'I gather from what I have been told of the various criticisms that it is generally supposed that I am endeavouring to imitate some bygone style. Critics always say that I am a person who attempts to be Egyptian or Syrian, or something or other. That is simply not the case. I am working in the only style in which I can work. I am not a learned antiquarian who can work in any style at choice.'12

He might have eschewed the title of learned antiquarian in print, but in practice Gill was a fervent admirer of Medieval art. He received this stimulus early when as a boy living in Chichester he gained a firsthand knowledge of the two 1 2th century relief panels depicting scenes from the Life of Christ in the Cathedral. The interest generated by these two reliefs led him to study medieval sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Museum. It is not too farfetched to suggest that the two Chichester reliefs, of The Raising of Lazarus and Martha and Mary kneeling before Christ at the gates ofjerusalem, appeared as a form of precedent when Gill was casting round for suitable imagery for the Stations. To begin with, these two panels, which are exact squares just like the Westminster Stations, are undoubtedly part of a larger series

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of figurative scenes - sadly no longer extant. Secondly, the 8th Station of the Cross (Plate 5) -

Jesus comforts the Women ofjerusalem - shares a strong iconographical link with the Chichester panel of Martha and Mary kneeling before Christ at the gates ofjerusalem, (Plate 6), since in both Christ has to respond to a group of weeping women. It is more than coincidence that the Christ figure in both the medieval panel and Gill's Station faces left, and strides out with His right foot first and His left arm bent across His body. His action is also balanced in both by a group of praying women; quite possibly the summary indication of a round-headed arch behind the heads of the two praying women in the 8th Station is an echo of the more prominent round-headed arch in the Chichester relief, an arch and a structure which stood symbolically for the gate ofjerusalem. Gill was not only criticised for the style in which he carved the Westminster Stations, but also for the fact that he introduced small areas of colour into a couple of them. He was in the habit of colouring some of his inscriptions, and when he turned to sculpture, he applied colour to some of his early statuettes and bas-reliefs. When he began to install the Stations in Westminster Cathedral, he discovered that the light was poor, and utterly different from that in his workshop. Because of the change in the light source and quality, and thus a change wrought in the subtle interplay of mass and contour in the reliefs, Gill might have felt that an application of colour to the edges of garments would have a counterbalancing effect. Late in 1914 he applied blue and red borders to the Roman soldiers' tunics in the 10th Station - Jesus is stripped - and green to the foliage in the 13th Station - The Body of Jesus is taken down from the Cross. He had some correspondence with William Rothenstein on this subject and they were both in agreement as to some use of colour in the reliefs. Unfortunately, this view was not supported by John Marshall, and Gill subsequently removed the colour. When the fourteen Stations of the Cross were canonically consecrated in the cathedral on Good Friday, 29th March 1918, the reliefs bore no coloured decoration. After Gill's death, the Stations have received applications of colour; the haloes are edged with gold, the letters of the English titles and the Latin quotations are painted red, and the Roman numbers are painted black.

David Jones wrote an appreciation of Eric Gill as sculptor a few weeks after his death, and the only works he singled out for consideration were the Westminster Cathedral Stations:

'His fourteen Stations of the Cross remain appropriate, unworrying (curiously unidiosyncratic considering the severe personal convention) . Taking into account the situation of the arts and civilisation it is a unique achievement.'13

The author is in complete agreement with this opinion. She is aware that this article could have provoked Gill to accuse her of treating the Stations not as church furniture, but as objects for sightseeing and for critical appraisal. However, in this year of the centenary of Gill's birth, and having regard to the quality of the Stations, the author is prepared to face such charges.

Footnotes 1 A large watercolour, executed by Cyril Farey in 1950, and framed at the west end of the nave of Westminster Cathedral, provides an illustration of the completed interior- with golden mosaics covering the three nave domes.

2 Eric Gill, Autobiography, Cape, 1940, p. 200. 3 Eric Gill, 'Westminster Cathedral', Blackfriars, June 1920, p. 153. 4 P G Kpnody, 'The Decoration of Westminster Cathedral', Observer ; 3 October 1915, p. 9. 5 E Rowton - pseudonym for Eric Gill, 'The Stations of the Cross in the Cathedral', Westminster Cathedral Chronicle , March 1918, p. 52. 6 'Mr Gill's reply to the critics', Observer ; 17 October 1915, p. 16. 7 Eric Gill, Letter to Blackfriars, October 1920, p. 434. 8 E Rowton, 'The Stations of the Cross in the Cathedral', p. 51 . 9 A set of these engravings is in the collection of Manchester City Art Gallery. A further response to the Westminster commission can be seen in a Ditchling Press publication, entitled The Way of the Cross, with text by H D C Pepler and wood-engravings by Gill after his designs for the Stations, published in 1917.

10 E Rowton, 'The Stations of the Cross in the Cathedral', p. 52. 11 These working drawings, preserved at the Victoria & Albert Museum, have orange outlines where the depth to be cut was Vi inch, and blue for 1 inch.

12 'Mr Gill's reply to the critics', Observer ; p. 16. 13 David Jones, 'Eric Gill as Sculptor', first published in Blackfrìars , February 1941, and reprinted in Epoch and

Artist, Faber and Faber, 1959, p. 292.

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eric gill's stations of the cross in westminster cathedral

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