St Michael and All Angels is tucked into the skirt of the Sussex Downs, just above the village of Berwick. The church itself is Saxon in origin, though a burial mound within the grounds suggests it may have been a sacred site long before the advent of Christianity. When I visited to see the murals made in the 1940s by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, which have recently been restored, there were maroon hollyhocks flowering in the September sun and figs tumbling over the flint wall. The interior is startlingly light, the consequence of a decision in 1944 to replace leaded windows blown out by a doodlebug with plain glass. Sunlight pours in, illuminating this ancient space, which is as filled with colour as any place of worship in Siena or Arezzo. It is as if the Italian Renaissance had found its way to Sussex, centuries too late.
Painted churches are a rarity in England. Most Medieval churches were elaborately decorated with religious scenes, but these images were defaced or destroyed as idolatrous during the Reformation, part of that great shift from the Catholic image to the Protestant word. Where traces of angels or apostles do remain, their eyes are often gouged out by Cromwell’s men, a startling reminder of the ferocity with which Catholicism was expelled. During the early days of World War II, the Right Rev George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, became obsessed with bringing art back to the Church of England. He wanted to find a way of helping artists struggling in wartime, and believed the church could take up its former role of patronage. ‘It is important to begin,’ he wrote firmly. ‘Even small beginnings help.’
He was inspired by the work Kenneth Clark was doing to support artists, and as a result of his advocacy the scheme for the decoration of St Michael and All Angels was set in motion in 1940. At the time, Vanessa Bell (no relation) and Duncan Grant were living a few miles from Berwick in Charleston, the farmhouse to which they had decamped during the previous war.As members of the Bloomsbury Group they were resolutely modern artists. Grant was predominantly gay and neither was religious, though he did have a mystical vision of Christ while in his teens. Their interest in taking on the project was bedded instead in their love of Italian paintings. It was a time of acute personal difficulty, especially for Vanessa. In 1937, her older son, Julian, was killed while driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War.
In March 1941, just as the church was making its decision on their proposal, her sister, Virginia Woolf, committed suicide by walking into the River Ouse. Bell was grief-stricken, rarely leaving the house. The two murals she made for Berwick were The Annunciation and The Nativity, both of which foreground the Virgin. The latter scene in particular feels heavy with foreboding. As the current rector of St Michael and All Angels, Peter Blee, observes in The Bloomsbury Group in Berwick Church: ‘The way in which Mary is holding her child might almost evoke a pietà: the image of Mary cradling her dead son after he has been taken down from the cross.’
The artists worked on plasterboard panels in a local barn, assisted by Bell’s son Quentin and using villagers, friends and farmworkers as models (the actress Chattie Salaman was draped in a sheet and splayed across an armchair to give the soaring angels the right feeling of weightlessness).They transposed their bible scenes to Sussex, so that in Quentin’s The Supper at Emmaus the window opens on to the Downs, while in Vanessa’s The Annunciation the backdrop is probably the walled garden at Charleston, given over to wartime vegetables in orderly winter rows.
If her paintings are dutiful, a little stiff and suffused with melancholy and fear, Duncan Grant’s can only be described as ecstatic. When I posted a picture on Instagram of his crucifixion, The Victory of Calvary, a friend described it knowingly as the Irn-Bru Christ, in reference to its garish oranges and blues. It’s certainly the campest depiction of Our Lord I’ve ever set eyes on. But as Blee is keen to attest, there is scriptural authority for Grant’s unusual decision to portray the crucified Christ in a state of uncontained joy, though it’s a depiction more common in Eastern Orthodoxy than the Christian West. The figures in the murals are a little larger than life-size, particularly the enthroned Jesus in Grant’s Christ in Glory. They loom gloriously from the walls of the nave and chancel arch. But one of the most touching elements of the scheme is that the decoration extends right through the church on a smaller, more homely scale. Arches and pillars are picked out in flat stripes of ochre and sienna. The chancel screen is decorated with images of the seasons.
A horse pulls a plough; two boys are caught in the act of apple-picking, in a lovely medley of russet-ripe curves. Even the pulpit is painted. It was originally decorated by Bell with images of angels, but after being defaced in 1962 now shows stylised fruit and flowers, the most recognisably Bloomsbury of all the paintwork. Bishop Bell hoped the murals would initiate a new golden age for the painted church. It’s a great pity more weren’t made during the war years; that there aren’t country churches displaying the apocalyptic domestic scenes of Stanley Spencer or the wild visions of Paul Nash. Regarded in isolation, the Berwick murals could be criticised as both amateurish and oddly conservative, a not-altogether-successful exercise in Renaissance pastiche. Seen in situ, they have a much more moving effect, harmonising with the deep calm of this ancient place. A country church seems an unlikely place for Modernist experiment, but if Bloomsbury was a search for the most direct way of expressing feeling, then it’s perhaps not strange that the work done there by a gay man and a grieving woman still rings so true today.
A version of this article originally featured in the December 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
St Michael and All Angels church, Berwick, E. Sussex BN26 6SR
For more information, visit berwickchurch.org.uk
