Frederic James Shields (1833-1911)
'Deceit' for the Chapel of the Ascension
£3,200
This study was for the Chapel of the Ascension in Bayswater, London, envisaged by its benefactress Emelia Russell Gurney as a sanctuary ‘wherein body, mind, and spirit, oppressed within the hurrying roar of the city’s life, might find repose’ (Manchester Quarterly, XXIV, 1898, p 98). After meeting Frederic Shields in 1882, she commissioned him to decorate the Chapel’s interior, sending both Shields and architect Herbert Horne to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore della Pietrasanta in Naples for inspiration. When, finally, the exterior of the building was completed in 1894, Shields began work on his series of murals and panels depicting heavily symbolic, often esoteric, imagery from both the Old and New Testaments, many of which the artist himself discusses in his pamphlet Chapel of the Ascension: Its Story and Scheme (12 editions published by the Women’s Printing Society between 1897 and 1935) . The Chapel and its painting scheme - Shield’s life’s work - was destroyed during the Blitz.
While ‘Violence’, clothed in the skin of a wild-eyed lion, slays the innocent, ‘Courage’ sits, the eyes of his lion skin shut, and his bow un-strung; ‘For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart’ (Psalm 11:2) Shields’ pointed allusions to arrows, lions, and ox-horned helmets could refer to Numbers 24, when Balaam declares that the Israelites have God’s protection: ‘God ... is for him like the horns of the wild ox; he shall gore all nation ... and pierce them through with his arrows. He crouched, he lay down like a lion and like a lioness; who will rouse him up?’ The oak tree behind suggests that here is ‘an oak of righteousness’, and a courageous defender of the faith.
