Mosaicist Restored by Tessa Hunkin and Helen Craig

A Mosaic Restored

Tessa Hunkin and Helen Craig.

Until a few years ago, almost nobody knew that the deteriorating mosaic of a Madonna and Child on a Hampstead Cemetery headstone was the work of mosaicist, painter and Pre-Raphaelite artists’ model Gaetano Mao (1849-1925) – and that he too lies under the mosaic he created as tribute to his wife Agnes Morton on her death in 1921. That is, until his great-granddaughter and former Hampstead resident Helen Craig, herself an artist and illustrator, learned of the mosaic and its parlous state.

Meo was 14 years-old when, in 1864, he set out alone from poverty-wracked southern Italy to walk to England. He was aiming for the Gold Rush in California, and carried only his harp, which he played in exchange for bed and board. He reached London in 1865, where a tip from a barber in Clerkenwell’s Little Italy led to employment by fellow Italian Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a model (Dante’s Dream) and subsequently for other PreRaphaelite artists, including Edward Burne-Jones (Love Among the Ruins) Henry Holiday (Dante and Beatrice), Simeon Solomon, and William Blake Richmond; to whom he became assistant, model (Venus and Anchises) and life-long friend, moving to Hampstead by 1881 to be near his studio. From Richmond, Meo learned to paint, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, and also began to work in mosaic, assisting Richmond in St Paul’s Cathedral, and going on to commissions at St Andrew’s Chapel, Westminster Cathedral, Debenham House and more.

Helen Craig grew up surrounded by art and by stories of her artistic family. Her great-grandmother was actress Ellen Terry (another Hampstead resident) whose son by architect Edward Godwin was theatre designer Edward Gordon Craig. While a guest at No 8 Downshire Hill, he fell for Gaetano Meo’s violinist daughter Elena, who lived at No 41. She ran away to live with the married Craig, enraging her father. In later years they reconciled, and their son, Helen’s father, art director Edward (Carrick) Craig, often sat as a boy with his Italian grandfather, listening to tales of the brigands Meo encountered on his walk to England, the Calais captain who smuggled him aboard a ship bound for England, his meeting with Rossetti, and more. In years to come, the mosaic on the Hampstead Cemetery grave would be somehow forgotten, its existence no longer known to the family or those who knew of Gaetano Meo’s work.

Almost a century later, determined to save her greatgrandfather’s last mosaic from approaching ruin, Helen Craig teamed up with noted mosaicist Tessa Hunkin who herself worked on the mosaics in Debenham House, to restore the Madonna and Child. Skilled cleaning, replacement of fallen tesserae, re-gilding and Craig’s reimagining of the figures have brought Meo’s Madonna and Child back to the brightness and beauty which the grieving widower gave it in 1921. It resumes its place in what must surely be a minuscule number of English gravestones adorned with a mosaic made by the artist who lies underneath. The grave is at the rear of Hampstead Cemetery, Fortune Green Road in the northwest quartile (Section E7 No 46).

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