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ABSTRACT
The Scottish architect John Ninian Comper (1864-1960) designed two alabaster altarpieces - one for the Lindsey Chapel in Boston and the other for the St Sebastian Chapel at Downside Abbey - in the aftermath of the Great War. This article contends that in both cases, the use of alabaster as well as the homosocial and homoerotic charge of the altarpieces' subjects are both visually and theologically queer. The figure of St Sebastian, which in the Downside altarpiece has links to Oscar Wilde and Renaissance art in the National Gallery, as well as the 36 female saints in the Lindsey Chapel, express and invite queer desire while simultaneously inspiring devotion in the context of the Eucharist. By interlacing theological and art historical perspectives, Comper's work in these two contexts is illuminated afresh both within and beyond the zones of transatlantic twentieth-century Anglo-Catholicism.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Cheng, Radical Love, 131.
2 Ibid.
3 Symondson and Bucknall, Sir Ninian Comper.
4 Hall, George Frederick Bodley.
5 Symondson and Bucknall, Comper, 165.
6 Lepine, “The Persistence of Medievalism,” 323–56.
7 Wilson, “Betjeman’s Riddel Posts.”
8 Jung, “Seeing Through Screens,” 212.
9 Comper, “On the Atmosphere of a Church,” 231–46.
10 Symondson and Bucknall, Comper, 105.
11 Bettley, Buildings of England: Suffolk.
12 Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 191ff.
13 “H. H. Van Cutsem”, http://www.ancestry.co.uk/genealogy/records/henry-harcourt-van-cutsem [accessed 15 April 2015].
14 Curtis, “How Direct Carving Stole,” 291–305.
15 Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious.
16 Aidan Bellenger, “Ninian Comper.”
17 Hall, Bodley, 220–5.
18 Hall, “Thomas Garner and the Choir of Downside Abbey Church,” in Bellenger, Downside, 135.
19 Thomas Garner to Edmund Ford, 11 Feb 1901, Downside Abbey Archives (Garner file).
20 For analysis of the impacts of Greek Classical nude sculpture on British modern art, see Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude; Kim, Painted Men in Britain.
21 Aidan Bellenger also claims that ‘The Aesthetes Andre Raffalovich and John Gray supplemented the Van Cutsem benefaction.’ Draft MS for Comper chapter in Aidan Bellenger, ed., Downside Abbey (London: Merrell, 2011), Downside Archives, Comper and Abbot Ford file.
22 Davis, Queer Beauty, 196. Hart, “Some Memories of John Gray,” 80–88. See also McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy, Priest, 219.
23 Kaye, “Determined Raptures,” 269–303.
24 John Addington Symonds noted this division and revelled in it, in his discussion of an image of St Sebastian by the Renaissance artist Sodoma: “Suffering, refined and spiritual, without contortion or spasm, could not be presented with more pathos in a form of more surpassing loveliness. This is a truly demonic picture in the fascination it exercises … ”. Quoted in Davis, Queer Beauty, 99.
25 Davis, Queer Beauty, 75.
26 For a discussion of Donatello’s St George and homoeroticism, see Patricia Simons, “Separating the Men from the Boys,” 147–76.
27 Hatt, “Physical Culture.”
28 Symondson, Comper, 157.
29 Hatt, “Near and Far.”
30 MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History, 189.
31 See O’Malley, Catholicism and Sexual Deviance; Hilliard, “Un-English and Unmanly,” 81–210; Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints; Janes, Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman.
32 Bloxam, The Priest and the Acolyte.
33 Davis, “Queer Family Romance in Collecting Visual Culture,” 310.
34 Ibid., 316–22.
35 Ibid., 320.
36 Ninian Comper to Grace Comper, 28 April 1905, quoted in Symondson, “Unity by Inclusion,” 18–42.
37 RIBA Archive, Comper papers, Box 23.
38 Trafford became the Abbot of Downside in 1938. See James, The Story of Downside Abbey Church.
39 Downside Archives, Comper papers, 11 March 1918
40 May 1929, The Downside Review, quoted in James, The Story of Downside Abbey Church, 78.
41 The Downside Review, 1925, 172–81.
42 Allen and Comper, The Leslie Lindsey Memorial, np.
43 Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 143.
44 Loughlin, ed., Queer Theology, 7.
45 Loughlin, “The End of Sex.”
46 Allen and Comper, The Leslie Lindsey Memorial, np.
47 Ibid.
48 RIBA Comper archives, Box 23b, Folder 4.
49 Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment.
50 Munoz, “Queerness as Horizon,” 454.
51 Ibid., 457.
52 Martin, Sex and the Single Savior.
53 Martin, Single Savior, 89.
54 Prior, “The Sculpture of Medieval Alabaster Tables,” 17.
55 Email correspondence with Lynne Walker, September 2013.
56 Getsy, Body Doubles, 182.
57 J N Comper to E Rose, 18 March 1918, Downside Archives, Comper St Sebastian file.
58 Hatt, “Thoughts and Things,” 37–49.
59 Aelred of Rievaulx, quoted in Lepinska, Moving Sculptures, 27.
60 Ezekiel 11.19–20.
61 Ross, The Past is the Present, 187.
62 Getsy, Body Doubles, 2; Penelope Curtis in Getsy; Sarah Crellin, Charles Wheeler.
63 Ezra Pound, “The Caressability of the Greeks”, in Getsy, Body Doubles, 183.
64 C. R. W. Nevinson, The Globe, 26 Feb 1916, quoted in Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, 6.
65 Cork, Wild Thing; Turner, “Wrestlers 1914, cast 1965, by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska”; McCarthy, Eric Gill.
66 Comper’s ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey instead, beneath his own stained glass windows in the north aisle. Sebastian Comper devised the wording for his memorial. Symondson, 189; Westminster Abbey Archives, Comper file.
67 Comper, Further Thoughts on the English Altar, 33.
68 Acts 10.
69 Comper, Further Thoughts, 33.
70 Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, 78.
71 Kim, Painted Men in Britain; Edwards, Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism.
72 Symondson, Comper, 76.
73 For stimulating recent studies of queer space and British architecture, see Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect; Brittain-Catlin, Bleak Houses.
74 Janes, Picturing the Closet.
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Ayla Lepine
Ayla Lepine's research focuses on the intersections of theology and the arts in modern Britain. Following her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale's Institute of Sacred Music and the Courtauld Research Forum. She was Lecturer and Fellow in Art History at the University of Essex 2014-18 and subsequently took a BA and MPhil in Theology at Cambridge while training for the Anglican priesthood. She is currently the Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery in London. Her publications include co-edited books on architecture and modern religious communities (Routledge, 2018) and revivalism in visual culture (Courtauld Books Online, 2015) as well as articles in Architectural History, Visual Resources, the Sculpture Journal, and British Art Studies. She is a trustee of the UK charity Art and Christianity.