British churches contain almost all our surviving medieval sculpture, the bulk of sculpture from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries and much from later decades; but British sculpture is undervalued: there is a general perception that there is no post-medieval distinguished native tradition, and that all fine sculpture before the late eighteenth century was produced by European immigrants, or at least by those trained by such immigrants. Neither art historians, whose training contains little on the native sculptural tradition, nor the church authorities, who regard the built heritage as a nuisance, ripe for demolition, do anything to correct this neglect. Surely no archbishop of Canterbury since George Abbott has had Justin Welby’s ability to hit the wrong target.
This book provides a salutary corrective to such attitudes. Cameron Newham, FSA is a fine photographer and a master of the arts of digital manipulation. Over recent years he has recorded almost every parish church in England. Here he concentrates on funerary sculpture, and presents it as art. Other deservedly respected books about the art in churches – Simon Jenkins’s England’s Thousand Best Churches (Reference Jenkins2012), John Goodall’s Parish Church Treasures (Reference Goodall2015) – are general treatments, Hugh Collinson’s Country Monuments (Reference Collinson1975) is more interested in the background stories than in the sculptures themselves and works such as Brian Kemp’s English Church Monuments (Reference Kemp1981) are concerned with history rather than aesthetics. Joe Whitlock Blundell and John Physick’s beautiful Westminster Abbey: the monuments (Reference Whitlock Blundell and Physick1989) takes an aesthetic approach, but is concerned with just one building.
Newham deals only with monuments, and he spans all of England and Wales, depicting 365 monuments. The subjects range from the tenth century (hog-backs from Brompton-in-Allertonshire, Yorks) to 1984 (a wall monument showing a maze to Canon Harry Cheales at Wyck Rissington, Glos). The range is comprehensive, from brasses to massive standing wall monuments. The perspective changes from details – the rhinoceros on the monument by William Wright to Sir Robert Gardner (d. 1619/20) at Elmswell, Suffolk – to shots showing the monument in its setting – Richard Westmacott Jr’s monument to Charlotte Egerton (d. 1845) at Rostherne, Cheshire. Most monuments are made from stone or brass, but among other materials here are wood, plaster, glass and ceramics. All are beautiful objects, recorded in beautiful photographs. Everyone who knows monuments and reads this book will engage in whatabouttery, but it is difficult to know what to discard to include one’s favourites.
The arrangement of the book is disconcerting, and really needs an index. It is divided into regions, within which the monuments are shown chronologically. Each section has a list of the contents: the descriptions of the individual items include facts about the subject, identification of the artist and remarks on the form, materials and setting, where known and appropriate. Newham has an eye for arresting detail: Fanny Samuelson, commemorated in a pretty monument by Sir George Frampton at Kirby Wiske, Yorks, died in 1897 as a result of a horrible accident at the hairdressers; Sir Edward Ward (1638–1714), commemorated at Stoke Doyle, Northants, on a monument of 1723 by Rysbrack, presided at the trial of the pirate Captain Kidd. He also deals with the unusual: the extraordinary Bertie monument at Spilsby, Lincs, with its wodewose is included, and it is good to see the wrestling enthusiast Sir Thomas Bunny (Bunny, Notts) standing ready to encounter Death.
There is a concluding section of short biographies of the sculptors. The book has a conservative introductory survey of the history of funerary monuments and useful appendices including a glossary, advice on church access, comments on the care of monuments – do not use them as places to store church equipment, put flower arrangements or stick Post-it notes or Blu Tack – and suggestions for further reading and national societies concerned with the preservation and study of funerary art. He surprisingly omits the many local archaeological, historical and genealogical societies that share these interests. The main problem with the book is its heft: at 4.5lb it outweighs both Jenkins’s Best Churches and Best Houses (Reference Jenkins2004), although it has fewer pages than either. It is not a book to be carried on a church-crawl. A paperback edition is urgent, desirable and deserved.
The advantage of the arrangement is that the art is allowed to speak for itself. Comprehensive information is available about each entry, but the monuments themselves dominate and demand attention. The pictures show how good some undervalued English sculptors were: the innovative Richard Parker (fl. 1532–d. 1570), with his transformation of weepers on early modern tombs into conversation pieces, the beast carver from the workshop of Samuel Baldwin and the undervalued Stanton atélier. The animation of the figures on table tombs, only visible from overhead shots – a God’s eye view – is a revelation. The flowing lines of the fourteenth-century Cheltenham monuments at Pucklechurch, Glos, emerge beautifully, as do the gorgeous vegetable forms of the drapery on the monument to the composer Amy Woodforde-Finden (d. 1919; she wrote Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar) at Hampsthwaite, Yorks, carved in 1923 by George Wade to a design probably by Gerald Giudici.
The monuments chosen show other sides of their appeal and importance: the evidence they provide of emotional history, as with the heartbreak of the 1705 Clayton monument at Bletchingley, Surrey, with its foregrounding of their only child, dead in infancy four decades earlier; the way in which they link the present with the past. What the Church of England prioritises today are current worshippers – we can discard the past and ignore the future – but it is the artistic impact that is the greatest, and it is to be hoped that this book will attract a wider readership than those already invested in ecclesiology, including art historians.
