Inside St Bartholomew the Great, London
In this stone font
Was William Hogarth baptised
Artist of great fame
An artist baptised
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Tag Archives: hogarth
William Hogarth and Damien Hirst as neighbours in a church in London
ST BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT church in the City of London was founded in 1123 by Rahere, a courtier of King Henry the 1st, who reigned from 1100 to 1135. It was originally built as the church for an Augustinian priory, which was abolished and partly destroyed during the reign of King Henry VIII. When this happened (in 1539), the priory church’s nave was demolished, leaving only the apse and beyond it, the Lady Chapel. The choir, which used to be at the west end of the apse and at the eastern end of the demolished nave, now stands at the east end of what is now the nave, but was formerly the apse. The current nave (formerly the apse of the original church) is a magnificent example of Norman architecture. I could go on describing this magnificent church in great detail, but I will not because plenty of people have done it before me (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bartholomew-the-Great and https://medievallondon.ace.fordham.edu/exhibits/show/medieval-london-sites/stbartsgreatchurch). Instead, I will mention a couple of the many interesting items in the church that caught my interest during a visit today (the 2nd of April 2024).
Both the objects of interest stand in the southwest corner of the church, close to the entrance that leads to the path that runs along the location of the long-since demolished apse of the priory church. The two things stand a few feet from each other. One of them is a carved stone font, said to be one of the two oldest fonts in London – the other being in the parish church of St Dunstan & All Saints in Stepney. What interested me about St Bartholomew’s font, which is still in use, is that it was here that the painter William Hogarth (1697-1764) was baptised. He had been born in a house in Bartholomew Close near the church in the Smithfield district of London.
Hogarth was a successful artist in his time, and has become recognised as one of the famous British artists of the 18th century. Not far from the font, there is a dramatic gold coloured sculpture by one of the most famous British artists of our times – Damien Hirst (born 1965). The sculpture, which is on loan from the artist, is called “Exquisite Pain.” It is Hirst’s depiction of St Bartholomew holding his skin, having been flayed. The church’s website (www.greatstbarts.com/visiting-us/artworks/damien-hirst-exquisite-pain/) revealed:
“St Bartholomew, one of the original twelve disciples, was sent as an Apostle to Armenia, where he was killed by being skinned alive. The classic iconography of the saint sees him naked, his muscles exposed, his skin hanging over his arm – and in his hands, the instruments of his torture. This statue sees Damien Hirst conform to this imagery, but give it a unique twist: the instrument in his hand is not a standard knife, but a scalpel, used in the hospital across the road which also bears the saint’s name.”
I think it is a wonderful sculpture. However, like most works of art, it might not suit everyone’s taste, but there is no doubting that its dramatic impact and skilful execution are remarkable.
While Hirst’s fame is great today, and his works command high prices, I wonder whether his reputation as a notable British artist will survive as long as Hogarth’s.
A home and museum near Holborn
THE ARCHITECT SIR John Soane (1753-1837) created what is my favourite museum in London – Sir John Soane’s Museum. Son of a builder, Soane became a successful architect in the reigns of Kings George III and George IV. In 1806, he was elected Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. Although he was able to undertake the Grand Tour in Italy and Malta during the period 1778 to 1779, many of his students were unable to do so because of the Napoleonic Wars raging in Europe between 1803 and 1815. This meant that they were deprived of the opportunity of viewing the great works of art and architecture, which was considered an important part of an architect’s training during the Regency Period. However, Soane got around this problem as I will explain.
Between 1792 and about 1812, Soane purchased and then demolished three neighbouring houses on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He rebuilt them to his own designs. He continued remodelling their interiors to test out the efficacy of his novel architectural designs. One feature that stands out are his clever ways of getting natural light to reach parts of the buildings that were far from natural light sources. Often skylights are located above tall internal lightwells, which allows light to reach, for example the basement rooms. In addition, carefully placed mirrors assist the distribution of natural light. These clever methods of illumination were important innovations in the era before electricity or gas-lighting.
Soane lived in his houses, had his architectural workshops there, kept a picture gallery, and created a museum. The picture gallery is ingenious. A small square room, lit from above, has some of the pictures arranged in two layers, one covering the other. The wall carrying the outer layers of pictures is in fact a huge, hinged door, which can be opened to reveal the pictures on the layer it covers (see the photo above). By this method, Soane created much more hanging area within the room. The pictures and drawings include many by Hogarth and Piranesi, and at least one by Canaletto. There is also a pair depicting Soane and his wife. Other pictures depict buildings designed by Soane as well as projects that he planned but were never fulfilled. To squeeze so many large artworks into such a small room, where they can be viewed comfortably, is a work of genius.
Soane, who was a successful architect and married the daughter of a wealthy builder, was not short of cash. He spent some of it on purchasing a huge variety and a great number of antiques including the Sarcophagus of Seti (Egypt, c 900BC). The sarcophagus had lain in front of the British Museum for two years before he was able to purchase it from the man who owned it. It had been offered to the British Museum, which declined to purchase it for £2000. So, Soane bought it, and it is the most important exhibit in his museum. The other antiques include Ancient Greek and Roman as well as mediaeval and renaissance artefacts. Soane put much effort into arranging his collection and established it as a museum. In 1833, he managed to get a Private Act of Parliament passed. This enshrined in law that after his death, number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields (the museum) should be preserved in perpetuity in the state he left it. And this has been done faithfully, but with careful restoration when necessary.
One of the purposes of Soane’s Museum was to allow his architectural students to view and study the sort of things that would have been able to see had the Napoleonic Wars not prevented them from undertaking their own Grand Tour. A visit to the curiously cluttered museum is fascinating and wondrous. The staff and volunteers that keep an eye on the various rooms and chambers in the museum are well-informed and provide interesting information.
From his garden to his grave
IT IS PLEASANT to stroll beside the Thames along Chiswick Mall. Occasionally, we take a look at the graveyard of Chiswick’s St Nicholas Church. On a recent visit to this place, we walked deeper into it than usual and spotted a grave marked by a remarkable sculpture.
The idyllic, romantic, leafy churchyard by the river is chock full of graves. Several of them caught my attention. One is that for the artist William Hogarth, who lived close-by. His monument is protected by a cast-iron fence. An urn on a plinth decorated with an artist’s palette and brushes. It was erected after the death of his sister in 1781 (who is also commemorated on this monument) and was restored by a William Hogarth of Aberdeen in 1856. Another painter, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812), who was born in Strasbourg, is buried with his wife Lucy de Loutherborg (née Paget). Like Hogarth’s, their decaying monument on the north side of the cemetery is surrounded by cast iron railings. In 1789, Philippe gave up painting temporarily to develop his interest in alchemy and the supernatural. Later, he and his wife took up faith-healing. The remains of yet another painter, James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), lie in the cemetery.
Private Frederick Hitch (1856-1913) is less famous than these artists. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his brave actions during the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (January 1879) in the Anglo-Zulu War fought in South Africa. He is also buried in this large cemetery.
Amongst the more recent graves is the one with the unusual sculpture. It is that of Baronet Percy Harris (1876-1952), who was a Liberal politician. Son of a Polish immigrant, he was born in Kensington, and died there after a long career in parliamentary politics. According to a website listing British Jews in WW1, Percy was Jewish, yet his grave is distinctly Christian in sentiment. Aesthetically, his grave is the most remarkable one in the cemetery next to St Nicholas. It includes a semi-abstract, vorticist carving of The Resurrection of the Dead, created by the sculptor Edward Bainbridge Copnall (1903-1973) in the 1920s. Harris had acquired it for display in his garden long before it was moved to adorn his grave.
Although Percy Harris was born Jewish, he is buried in the graveyard of a Church of England parish church. Despite searching the Internet, including reading his extensive entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, I cannot determine whether or not he converted to Christianity sometime during his life.
An actress on the village green
SHE SITS THERE MOTIONLESS, day after day and year after year, watching the traffic on Westway either rushing past or crawling along in a traffic jam. In her heyday, before being captured in stone, instead of the noise of motor vehicles, she would have enjoyed the sound of the applause given by audiences in dimly lit theatres. She was the actress Mrs Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), and her carved stone statue stands facing the elevated Westway in Paddington Green, just west of the Edgware Road.
Paddington Green used to be part of an expanse of ancient wasteland located in an area now bounded by the Regents Canal, the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal, and Edgware Road, but now much of this wasteland has been built upon. Writing in 1867, John Timbs noted:
“Paddington Green, now inclosed and iron-bound, was the green of the villagers, shown in all its rural beauty in prints of 1750 and 1783. Upon a portion of it were built the Almshouses, in 1714; their neat little flower-gardens have disappeared. South of the green is the new Vestry -hall. At Dudley Grove was modelled and cast, by Matthew Cotes Wyatt, the colossal bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington … it is thirty feet high, and was conveyed from the foundry, upon a car, drawn by 29 horses, Sept. 29, 1846, to Hyde Park Corner.”
Dudley Grove was in Paddington. What is now left of the wasteland consists of St Mary’s churchyard and next to it a small grassy area, still known as ‘Paddington Green’, and marked as such on a map drawn in 1815. It contains the statue of Mrs Siddons. The first written record of the Green is dated 1549. The Green contained a mediaeval chapel, now long-since gone. It has been replaced by St Mary’s Church, which was built in the Georgian style, in 1788. It was designed by John Plaw (1745-1820), who emigrated from London to the North American Colony of Prince Edward Island in 1807. His church in Paddington was later modified in the 19th century but restored to its original shape (a Greek Cross in plan) in 1970 under the guidance of the architect Raymond Erith (1904-1973), amongst whose other creations was the current form of the Jack Straws Castle pub in Hampstead.
The present church is the third in the area, which was halfway between the ancient villages of Paddington and Lilestone. The old Manor of Lilestone (or ‘Lilystone’) included the present Lisson Grove and extended as far as Hampstead. The earliest church was taken down in about 1678. The second church, which replaced it, can be seen in old drawings. It was a simple edifice with a single aisle and a small bell tower at one end. Edward Walford, writing in the 1880s, described it as:
“… not unlike the type of country churches in Sussex…”
The poet and preacher John Donne (1572-1631) preached his first sermon in the first church in 1615 and the painter William Hogarth (1697-1764) was married to Jane Thornhill (c1709-1789) in the second in 1729 without her parents’ knowledge.
Next to the western end of the church there is a single-storied rectangular, brick building decorated with trompe-l’oeil grisailles, one of which depicts Mrs Siddons. Today, this houses the Phileas Fox Nursery School. Built on the site of the old, now demolished, vestry hall (parish council meeting place), this building, the church hall, in a late Georgian style was designed by John Quinlan Terry (born 1937), an architect of the ‘New Classical’ style favoured by Prince Charles, and built in 1978-81.
Apart from the statue of Mrs Siddons on Paddington Green, most of it is surrounded by buildings or roads built either at the end of the 19th century or long after. At the eastern side of the Green there is what looks like a pair of either early 19th or possibly 18th century houses. The reason Mrs Siddons is commemorated on the Green is that she is buried in the adjoining St Mary’s Churchyard. Her gravestone is contained within a cast-iron enclosure that looks like a small cage. For some time, the actress lived in Paddington in a house which used to stand in the area around Westbourne Green, which is near the current Westbourne Park Underground station.
Mrs Siddons was highly acclaimed as an actress by many. The critic James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) had reservations as he remarked in his autobiography:
“Want of genius could not be imputed to his sister, Mrs Siddons. I did not see her, I believe, in her best days; but she must always have been a somewhat masculine beauty; and she had no love in her, apart from other passions. She was a mistress, however, of lofty, of queenly, and of appalling tragic effect. Nevertheless, I could not but think that something of too much art was apparent even in Mrs Siddons; and she failed in the highest points of refinement.”
Although the poet and playwright Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), shared Hunt’s opinion about her, others held her in higher regard.
The statue of Mrs Siddon in Paddington Green was sculpted by the French sculptor Léon-Joseph Chavalliaud (1858-1919). In the 1880s, he moved to London from France and lived south of the Thames in Brixton. His Mrs Siddons, based on a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, was unveiled by the actor Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905) in 1897. It was the first statue of a woman, who was not royal, to be put up in London.
Paddington Green, like its close neighbour Paddington Station, figures in the history of London’s transportation. For, it was from here that the coachbuilder George Shillibeer (1797-1866) ran London’s first omnibus service to The Bank of England in 1829. He had got the idea from Paris, where he had been asked to design carriages that could carry up to 24 passengers at any one time.
The Paddington Green police station building stands a few yards east of Paddington Green. Constructed in 1971, this used to provide local policing services as well as an interrogation centre for terrorist suspects. Suspects accused of terrorist activities were brought here for questioning from all over the UK. Although it was refurbished in 2009, the station was closed in 2018. The building’s future is in the hands of property developers, who plan to build new housing on its site.
Until the beginning of the 19th century, Paddington Green was a bucolic environment on the edge of what was then London. Now, surrounded by buildings and highways, it is a green but noisy oasis in a highly urbanised area.
How well do you know Leicester Square
IT WAS EERIE walking in Leicester Square today in early February 2021 at midday because we were almost alone. Normally, the square is full of people milling about and joining circles of folk watching street entertainers perform, sometimes with great skill. Apart from us, I saw no more than ten other people in this usually crowded popular focal point for Londoners and tourists alike. There was a sense of peace and calm that one customarily associates with spots deep in the countryside. I doubt that this square has been like this for many years, maybe since it was first laid out between 1630 and 1671, when it was then known as ‘Leicester Fields’.
At the north-east corner of the Square was Leicester House, which was named after Robert Sydney, 2nd Earl of Leicester (1595-1677), and was built in about 1635. It was home to members of some royal personages including, briefly, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (1596-1662) whose life ended in the house, and later the huge natural history collection of Sir Ashton Lever (1729-1788), the last lessee of the house before it was demolished in 1791.
During the 18th century, the houses surrounding Leicester Square were occupied by several people, whom we still remember today. The artist William Hogarth (1697-1764) lived on the east side of the square on a site that was later occupied by the Sablonière Hotel, now demolished. The hotel’s plot is now the site of a twentieth century building housing the offices of several radio stations including LBC and Classic FM and a branch of TGI Friday. The famous surgeon and scientist John Hunter (1728-1793) lived in the house next to Hogarth’s from 1785 until his death. He kept his collection of specimens there as well as giving lessons in anatomy and dissection in rooms he added to the rear of his home. Hunter was buried in the nearby church of St Martin in the Fields. Across the square on its west side, the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) lived and worked from 1761 until his death. His studio was an octagonal room. According to John Timbs, writing in 1867:
“… the sticks of his brushes were 18 inches long; he held his palettes by handle …”
In addition to his residence and studio, Reynolds built a gallery for his works. The row of houses that included that of Reynolds has long since been demolished. When I first knew Leicester Square, the east side of the square was occupied by a large office building, Fanum House, that housed the Automobile Association. Its appearance has been modified and is known as ‘Communications House’.
Other artists, who lived in the square, include Hans Huyssing (1678-1753/53), a Swedish painter; Jacques Christophe Le Blon (1667-1741); Michael Dahl (1659-1743), a fashionable Swedish portrait painter; and William Martin (1753-c1836), an English painter. Apart from artists, other notable people, several military and medical celebrities, lived around the square.
The square has a garden, in the centre of which there is a statue of William Shakespeare. This is a copy of an original made in 1741 by the Flemish sculptor Peter Scheemakers the Younger (1691-1781) who spent most of his working life in London. It was placed in the square in 1874 when the financier and member of Parliament Albert Grant (1831-1899), who was born ‘Abraham Gottheimer’, bought the garden and opened it to the public. During the 18th century, there was another statue in the square: a metal equestrian sculpture of King George I, sculpted by C Buchard.
The large Odeon Cinema on the west side of the square has a black tiled façade. It was built in the art-deco style in 1937, designed by Harry Weedon (1887-1970), who designed many other cinemas in the 1930s. It was built on the site of the big Alhambra Theatre, which opened as a music hall in 1858 and survived until its demolition in 1936. Today, there is a bar next to the Odeon. It bears the name ‘Lost Alhambra’.
The Empire Theatre, now a casino and a cinema, is on the north side of the square. With its neo-classical façade, it was built in 1884 as a variety theatre. Its architects were Thomas Verity (1837-1891 and Thomas Lamb (1871-1942). This stands roughly on the western side of the land occupied by the former Leicester House. To the east of this plot, there stands another cinema, a fine example of the art-deco style, the Vue Cinema, which was built in 1938 and opened as the ‘Warner Theatre’. Its architects were Thomas Somerford (1881-1948) and EA Stone. The façade includes two bas-relief sculptures, one representing the spirit of sight and the other of sound, which were created by Edward Bainbridge Copnall (1903-1973), who was born in Cape Town in South Africa.
The Swiss Centre that used to stand at the northwest corner of the square was demolished a few years ago and was replaced by a newer building. The Centre contained a couple of expensive but good restaurants where Swiss specialities were served. The steak tartare and cheese fondue, which were served at the Centre, were particularly good. A clock with a carillon adorned with the crests of the Swiss Cantons is all that remains of that fine Swiss establishment.
At the south side of the square, facing the cheap theatre tickets booth, stands the Hampshire Hotel, currently devoid of guests. Before it became a hotel, this building housed the former Royal Dental Hospital. Opened in 1858 in Soho Square (number 22), it moved to the premises in Leicester Square in 1874 (https://ezitis.myzen.co.uk/royaldental.html). In those days, the once fashionable Square had become a run-down part of London. In 1983, The Royal Dental Hospital was merged with Guys Hospital Dental School. When this happened, a dental friend of mine, who worked at Guys, suggested to me that the merged hospital should be renamed as ‘Roys’. In 1985, the Leicester Square hospital was closed. Soon after this, the former hospital was reconditioned to become a hotel.
Being the centre of London’s theatre and entertainment district, it is appropriate that recently the square has been adorned with life-size sculptures of famous entertainers such as Charlie Chaplin, Rowan Atkinson (with whom you can share a bench), Laurel & Hardy, Mary Poppins, and other familiar actors. I cannot decide whether these frozen figures enhance the square, but as they are fairly discreetly positioned, they do add something to a place that has been home to well-known people since the beginning of the 18th century.
Had Leicester Square not been as empty as it was today, I would not have spent so long there to take photographs. I realised that this square, through which I have always preferred to hurry, has some interesting architecture and such a lovely statue. Although I enjoyed Leicester Square without the crowds, I look forward to healthier times when people can mix there, freely and happily.
yamey 