Windows and a Walk, I

I needed sat nav yesterday to drive to Downe, a village inside the M25 in Kent.

And sat nav needed me. Twice it has asked for help – is this a new interactive feature? Once it wanted to know if there was a stalled car blocking a carriageway on the A4 and yesterday to check if there were still road works causing a tailback. The technology behind sat nav amazes me even as it destroys the car’s suspension by sending me down side streets with vicious speed humps.

But I digress. Pevsner’s guide to South London describes an Evie Hone window in St Mary the Virgin in Downe. Furthermore there is a four mile circular walk around Downe so off Bertie and I went yesterday.

Rachel Phillips on the Visit Stained Glass website provides a useful commentary.

“This window is a quiet, strong, intimate example of her work set in a beautiful church. It has echoes of her greater works such as the Crucifixion at Eton College including the beautiful use of neutral tones and tints of colour for ‘clear areas’ and ‘flesh’ that help to add such richness to the effect. This, coupled with the visual links to early medieval art and commitment to a two-dimensional approach make this, for me, a compelling and inspirational work of art.

A painter who studied under Walter Sickert, André Lhote and Albert Gleizes, Hone turned to stained glass in 1932 and trained with Wilhelmina Geddes before becoming a member of An Túr Gloine in 1935. Influenced by Georges Rouault, mediaeval Irish carvings and Byzantine mosaics, she wrote that she sought ‘not to represent something but to arrange forms and colours in such a way as will produce an effect of beauty, a living organism with rhythm and balance and not a chaotic juxtaposition of brilliant scintillating colour’ Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass, revised new edition, edited by Nicola Gordon Bowe, David Caron & Michael Wynne (Irish Academic Press, 2021).”

Pevsner puts it more succinctly: “bold in colour and design, dominating the whole church”.

(To be continued)