Bishops Cleeve, Gloucestershire

The Madonna of the Butterflies with Saints Michael and Jerome

Something a little different for my Christmas picture this year. Fortunate is the church that has a piece of modern art that works as well as this altarpiece, painted in 2018 for the church of St Michael and All Angels, Bishops Cleeve by the local artist P J Crook. P J Crook’s works range widely and are exhibited in galleries all over the world. For this altarpiece, she worked within the traditional framework of the triptych, filling the work with symbols that are familiar to anyone who had looked at a lot of Christian art. Yet the imagery is also unmistakeably of its time and of its painter: the directness of the way the faces are painted and their deceptively simple range of skin tones, the teeming detail, and the way in which the imagery spills out on to the frame are all typical of the artist.

The triptych shows the Virgin and Child with Mary’s head surrounded by butterflies and angels; saints Michael and Jerome are portrayed in the side panels; the base bears an image of the Last Supper. The butterflies, with their metamorphic life cycle (there’s a caterpillar, by the way, at the bottom of the picture), stand for resurrection, renewal, and the release of the soul from the body. They are just one of an array of symbols: rosemary represents remembrance, the lily of the valley is also called Our Lady’s Tears, the poppy indicates that the altarpiece was painted at the time of the anniversary of the end of World War I. The dove to which the infant Jesus points is a symbol of peace, but also represents the Holy Spirit.

There are also local allusions. There are minute figures of the Magi on horseback (their mounts a reminder that Bishops Cleeve is a stone’s throw from Cheltenham Racecourse). St Michael (battler with the devil, weigher of souls in heaven) is there in part because of the church’s dedication – and that dedication gives the presence of angels in the altarpiece further relevance; there’s a small image of the church above the saint’s left shoulder. The female figure entering through the door beneath the dove is Margaret Whitehead, a local school nurse who was killed in a car accident. She is also seen in the background in her nurse’s uniform, with a group of children. A painting of the infant Christ can also look forward to his crucifixion and resurrection, and this triptych deals with mortality in several ways. The images of Margaret Whitehead represent one way; St Jerome’s contemplation of mortality (symbolised by the skull) is another; the presence of a fox, symbolising King Herod, who ordered the massacre of the innocents, is another; candles stand not only for the light of God but also for remembrance of the dead.

The complexity of this altarpiece, then, reaches the depths, but the directness of the imagery is powerful too and the way in which its art enhances life is, in my eyes, a triumph. I hope that all my readers have an enjoyable and life-enhancing time over the coming days of celebration. Happy Christmas – and season’s greetings, whatever your beliefs.

Shorthampton, Oxfordshire

Survivors

When it comes to parish churches, small is often both beautiful and interesting. Small churches in isolated locations sometimes survive with ancient features intact better than churches in towns and villages on the beaten track, where wealth, piety, and fashion often led to frequent restorations and renovations. Shorthampton in western Oxfordshire, set on a quiet lane not far from Charlbury, is a mixture of Norman, Gothic, and Georgian. But its main interest, apart from the quiet churchyard view views across undulating hills and farmland, lies in its wall paintings.

Because so many images in English churches were destroyed in the 17th century, English wall paintings are mostly fragmentary. What were once entire cycles of images, showing, say, the story of the Passion, are now reduced to a few scraps; a large Last Judgement may be recognisable only by a small group of devils; a feathered wing may be all that’s left of an angelic host. As a result, what survives has a quality of serendipity, and often, divorced form its context, of surprise. At Shorthampton we are treated to a dragon’s wing (presumably all that is left of a painting of St George), a Last Judgement so faded as to be virtually indecipherable, and images showing a bishop (above) and of various saints, not all identifiable but remarkably including St Zita, patron of domestic servants and a far from common subject.


And then there is this unusual subject, the Miracle of the Clay Birds. This is the story of how the infant Jesus modelled some birds out of clay and then brought them to life. If it’s unfamiliar, that’s because the story is told in one of the apocryphal gospels, that of St Thomas. At Shorthampton, although the painting is faded, the Virgin, the infant Jesus, and another child – perhaps John the Baptist – are clearly visible, along with one of the birds.

It is indeed surprising that in this tiny, isolated church, up a lane with just a few farms for company, this obscure story should be portrayed. But miracles fascinated the medieval artists, and miraculous episodes from apocryphal narratives by James, Thomas and the ‘pseudo-Matthew’ (all gospels that satisfied an understandable craving for information about the infancy of Jesus) appear in various churches. No doubt many such images have been lost. It’s a small miracle in itself that in this Oxfordshire church such a painting has survived.