An altarpiece made now

Paul Robinson on commissioning a portrait of St Bede

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ influential 1977 book Environment and Art in Catholic Worship calls for “fewer objects on the walls and in the corners” of our churches. St Bede’s, Clapham Park, clearly wasn’t on message earlier this year when a highly embellished object was installed in one of its corners. The object is an altar, at the centre of which is an item that, in centuries past, wasn’t unusual: a specially commissioned painting of the church’s patron saint.

The painting (and its frame) is the work of James Tyldesley, a longstanding parishioner at St Bede’s. Parish Priest, Father Marcus Holden, offered Tyldesley the commission of an altarpiece for a side altar dedicated to St Bede earlier this year (funded by a legacy bequeathed to the LMS by the late Mr John Arnell), with an ultimate completion date of 27 May, St Bede's feast day; Tyldesley had about three months to complete both the painting and the frame.

Art commissioned for the Church raises several challenges, including considerable practical decisions for a painter. In Tyldesley’s words, “When you’re asked to do something like an image of St Bede you think, well where do I start, what right have I to conjure up an image and say ‘Oh this is St Bede’?…. If you look at the past images of St Bede most of them have opted for an old guy with a long beard. I definitely wanted to keep away from the Old Guy With a Beard and the sense that he must have been a kindly old chap just sitting there writing and reading books”.

As part of the exploration process Tyldesley created a large number of drawings and small paintings. “A commission for an image of a man who lived some 1400 years ago obviously posed some basic questions. What did he look like? Do we have any information at all about his personal characteristics? Of course, we know equally little about many of the great saints, though nevertheless the history of art is full of images depicting them. St Bede died when he was about 65 years old and my first decision was to present the image of a man in more or less the prime years of his life. I also felt that, given the petitionary nature of the altarpiece, I should try to create an image which would engender contact with the saint… St Bede was taken as a child to the monastery at Jarrow and, barely in his youth, he witnessed the deaths of everyone at that monastery due to some kind of 'plague', leaving only himself and the Abbot (St Ceolfrith). During the rest of his life, he accomplished an enormous amount of scholarship and spiritual writings and through his teaching, which he loved so much, passed on to so many the invaluable riches of Christianity. And all this in the challenging climate of the north east of England during the ebb and flow of a battle between the growing Church of Christ and the powers of paganism. In my painting, in the act of giving a blessing, St Bede holds what I hope would be assumed to be his ecclesiastical history, which to a large extent describes that battle, and the cross, signifying the victor of that battle. His prayers and James Tyldesley’s painting of St Bede: ‘We enjoy and protect a intercession for our beloved phenomenal legacy of Catholic art stretching back centuries…’ England have rarely been more needed.”

Beyond these practical challenges, art commissioned by the Church also raises a broader consideration: shouldn’t there be more of it? We enjoy and protect a phenomenal legacy of Catholic art stretching back centuries, but just as the Old Guy with a Beard was once a young man, what is now ancient was once new. As Tyldesley puts it “the Church could have stopped producing any liturgical music 800 years ago; the 12th or 13th Century had enough liturgical music even then to last for the rest of history; at any point the Church could have said ‘we’ve got enough we don’t need any more’, but that would have meant we didn’t have the great music of Byrd, Tallis, Fauré… We’ve got masses of great music, architecture and art but we should be itching to put our two penneth in as well”.

James Tyldesley’s painting of St Bede: ‘We enjoy and protect a phenomenal legacy of Catholic art stretching back centuries…’