This has been an anniversary year for the Jesuits’ church at Farm Street in London – July 31 marked the 175th anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone and also the 170th anniversary of the consecration. The church is visited by up to 3,000 people per week. It has a diverse congregation with a lively faith community at its heart. People come for private prayer and public worship, as well as for the beauty of its art and architecture.
It is the art and architecture that I would like to focus on this Christmas. Farm Street is one of the artistic and architectural jewels of English Catholicism. The work of several architects, numerous patrons and a constellation of artists and artisans, it makes a compelling case for importance of beauty in church building – for the theology of beauty.
The Church of the Immaculate Conception has a complex and layered beauty which is rare in Victorian churches. There is a powerful sense of artistic accumulation and progression. This layered beauty is the result not of chance but of the consistent emphasis placed by the Jesuits and their supporters on art. This tradition of patronage and investment in beauty continues unbroken to this day.
Such a deliberate and discriminating focus on art and beauty is not at all a diversion from the core mission of the parish and of the church. It is didactic, and it is inviting people to service. In the words of Farm Street’s parish priest, Fr Dominic Robinson, “art is used here for evangelisation, to challenge people to be men and women for others”.
Fr Robinson stands in a long line of discerning patrons at Farm Street. His two most recent predecessors, Fr Andrew Cameron-Mowat and Fr William Pearsall, both explored and enhanced the artistic potential of the church through new commissions.
Farm Street Church summons up a “what if?” romanticism of a grand English Catholic parish church constantly ornamented and embellished without break or rupture into the present day; an evocation of what such a church might have looked like if it had evolved from Decorated Gothic’s heyday in England in the 13th and 14th centuries without Dissolution, confiscation and Reformation. It is both English and cosmopolitan. The sort of Englishness that the Jesuit Fr Martin D’Arcy would have approved of, which continues to ease the path for many English converts to Catholicism.
Designed by the Catholic architect JJ Scoles and built between 1844 and 1849, Farm Street was always intended to be a high-profile, metropolitan hub for the Jesuits in England. It is built in a neo-Decorated Gothic Revival style, popular in the mid 19th-century. The church articulates a particular type of “English” Catholic identity, one that claims continuity with the medieval, Gothic past of England but which also demonstrates continuity with continental forms and tastes. The Decorated Gothic architecture of Scoles and the church’s initial Marian decorative scheme have over time been augmented with French, Flemish and Venetian Gothic accents, High Renaissance and Baroque decoration and the Jesuits’ own didactic iconography.
The church was designed to be approached from the small mews just off Berkeley Square in Mayfair from which it takes its popular name. At the time of the building’s construction this was a backstreet, albeit in a very desirable part of London. The front façade of the church (ritual west, but actually south) sits flush with a line of terraced buildings – it communicates nothing of its structure, volume or mass.
The rose window (dominant and overly large) is reminiscent of the massive rose window of Beauvais Cathedral in its design and is inlaid with modern stained glass by Evie Hone.
A very different impression is made by the rear façade of the church (liturgical east, actually north). The plain Neo-Gothic Ragstone chancel does not have the decorative flourishes or Bath Stone dressing of the west end. There is no vantage point which the viewer can use to confirm that the façades are actually from the same building. All information regarding plan and form is withheld.
All of this serves to heighten the drama when the vast and sumptuous interior space is revealed. The Jesuits, then and now, placed great importance on what they call “functionality” and “effectiveness” in their works. Functionality is apparent in a vast and spac-ious nave; effectiveness is manifest in the clear visibility of the altar and pulpit, and in good acoustics. To this we can add “theatre” – because it is nothing if not dramatic.
The nave ascends heavenwards on an arcade of piers crossed with lancet-pointed arches and surmounted by a clerestory which, in turn, supports a dramatically pitched decorated roof. The side aisles are a rather English addition to what is, in most other spatial respects, a Counter Reformation church built on the principle of chiesa ad aula – “church as spacious room”.
The decoration and furnishings in the chancel are illustrative of the church’s artistic richness. The high altar designed by AWN Pugin sits beneath two large mosaics by the famous family firm, Salviati of Venice. These are flanked by walls lined with green Genoese marble and golden alabaster in the high Victorian manner. Above is the spectacular raised east window, modelled on that of Carlisle Cathedral. The stained glass within it is from 1912 and is by Hardman of Birmingham. A new altar was installed at Farm Street in June. An altar table, it affords around and through it new views of the recently restored high altar of Pugin.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, Farm Street has continued its artistic tradition with important new commissions. It has also become a home for talented artists-in-residence. Andrew White’s epic work In Memoriam, a 12ft-long painting of the Last Supper with more than a passing nod to Caravaggio, is a striking example of recent work displayed in the church. White’s newest installed painting, Mother Mary, is a triumph. This is a painting that you really must see for yourself. In my view it is the best new work of sacred art produced by an English artist for some time.
Further along the liturgical north side aisle is Timothy Schmalz’s Homeless Jesus, a challenging bronze sculpture which depicts Jesus sleeping rough on a park bench, crumpled beneath the folds of a cloak. The figure could belong to almost anyone in the tradition of Church art – unless you stop to look closely. Homeless Jesus is a work of art which is helping faith connect with daily life. A large number of people come to the church to spend time with this statue. It draws in people to ask what the Gospel is about, a living Faith which shows us who Christ is in today’s world and who we are called to be.
Why should Farm Street spend money on artworks such as this? You might ask the same question of Pope Francis, who has recently installed another of Timothy Schmalz’s works, Angels Unaware, in
St Peter’s Square. This monument to migrants depicts displaced people throughout history. At the unveiling of this sculpture the Pope said it had been placed in the square “so that all will be reminded of the evangelical challenge of hospitality”. The statue is accompanied by the night shelter in the Vatican. Farm Street challenges people to serve the homeless through its own night shelter and soup run and in engaging local businesses to be of service to the growing number of homeless in the city.
The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote that “beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness”. Dorothy Day, perhaps the best-known radical in American Catholic history, famously defended the vast sums of money being spent on a new cathedral in San Francisco in the 1960s.
She commented that here was a place to feed the poor’s hunger for beauty, a place of transcendent beauty “as accessible to the homeless in the Tenderloin as it is to the mayor of San Francisco”.
That the Jesuits at Farm Street continue to add to the beauty of their church with important artistic commissions and art of great beauty is something to be celebrated this Christmas.
Stephen Withnell is deputy headmaster of Stonyhurst College, an architectural historian and a member of Campion Hall, Oxford. Follow him on Twitter @WithnellStephen
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