Back to Baroque

My Great Aunt Aline (Lloyd Thomas) is buried in the churchyard of St Swithun (sic), Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire.

The house was originally lived in by the Fettiplace family; Normans who were landowners in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. There are two outstanding triple Fettiplace monuments in the church at Swinbrook. My 2017 post is inaccurate as I had never been to Compton Beauchamp – yesterday was my first time. Anyway, the Fettiplace line sputtered out with the death of Richard Fettiplace in 1806. The Lloyd Thomases lived at Compton Beauchamp in the 20th century and the connection is maintained by two headstones in the churchyard to Hugh and Aline Lloyd Thomas and their daughter and son-in-law, Anne and Ian Weston Smith. Aunt Aline’s headstone is hard to decipher but you can try.

The church was originally Norman but the present building dates from the 13th century. What makes it so interesting, possibly unique unless you can correct me, is that the interior decoration and furnishings were almost all done in the 20th century.

The vine mural in the Chancel dates from 1900 with some small additions in 1967: birds, insects, an owl and a bat. You can see a bird to the left of the candle, above. The main 1900 vine mural was painted by Lydia Lawrence, a member of the Kyrle Society. The KS was new to me; it was founded in Kensington Town Hall in 1877 to “decorate, by mural paintings, pictures, gifts of flowers, &c., workmen’s clubs, schools, and mission-rooms, used for social or religious gatherings, without distinction of creed ;” to lay out gardens and encourage the cultivation of plants ; to organise a voluntary choir of singers, to give oratorios and concerts to the poor ; to co-operate with the National Health Society in securing open-air spaces in poor neighbourhoods to be laid out as public gardens. It is called after John Kyrle, 1637 to 1724, a philanthropist from Ross-on Wye.

This richly coloured relief at the west end of the church fooled me. I thought it was of carved wood but actually it is painted and gilded papier-mâché. There are three interesting wall monuments, to Rachel Richards and her daughter Anne embodying all the 18th century virtues. The third is to their housekeeper, Mary Cooper.

Where Lydia Lawrence and the Kyrle Society left off, Samuel Gurney and the ‘Back to Baroque’ movement took over. “What that meant in practical terms is that churches were to be re-furnished to appear as though they had organically developed as continental churches and had been affected by the aesthetic forces of the Baroque and Rococo. The clergy during worship wore cottas, lace-trimmed albs, Latin chasubles and birettas.” (Liturgical Arts Journal)

Gurney moved to the Victorian Gothic rectory in Compton Regis in 1925 and spent the next twenty-five years embellishing the decoration of the church, much of the design and work being done by his friend and fellow enthusiast, Martin Travers. The 15th century font has a canopy designed by Travers in 1933 and dedicated to Gurney’s mother, Isabel, Lady Talbot de Malahide, who had died the previous year. She was a talented artist herself and, thanks to her first (Gurney) husband’s money, a noted philanthropist.

In the background of my photo, above, you can see “a striking rood group placed above the chancel arch.  Executed in moulded papier-mâché, the figures of Mary and John supported on classical brackets and painted in dark tones of dark purple and black which contrast with the whitewashed walls of the church.“ (Liturgical Arts Journal)

There is a headstone to Gurney in the churchyard of the church he recreated so imaginatively. The church is usually open and is well worth a detour, as the Michelin guides used to say.