Images of Christ: Christ amid the cabbages

Rowena Loverance discusses an artwork in the heart of rural England

On 8 August 1932 a group of fifty Protestant fundamentalists descended on a small Cornish church – St Hilary’s, near Penzance – and proceeded to lock up the vicar and trash the church interior. It is a reminder of how recently Christian art was a subject of passionate feelings in Britain, for what had roused their ire were artworks newly commissioned for the church by the vicar, Bernard Walke, and his wife Annie, herself a notable artist among the Newlyn group of painters, a forerunner of the more famous St Ives group on the other side of Cornwall. Happily, the Walkes had anticipated the attack and replaced most of the works with copies.

The Newlyn group specialised in gritty scenes of Cornish rural life, and their influence is apparent in Annie Walke’s most significant work, a painted reredos commissioned for Truro Cathedral. Completed in the 1880s, Truro was the first new cathedral in England since Salisbury, and is enhanced by many spectacular artworks, several by women artists. Annie Walke’s reredos is in the Jesus chapel, off the north aisle. In the background it depicts white china clay waste tips, a favourite subject of her fellow Newlyn artist Laura Knight, and brooding chimneys of the tin mines, later to be memorialised in wartime paintings by Graham Sutherland. Women gaze out to sea, no doubt worrying about the safety of their fishermen husbands. In the foreground workers toil away in a cabbage patch. And planted in the middle of this, like a scarecrow, is the crucified Christ.

Cabbages were all the rage as an image of rural life in the late nineteenth century: one need only think of Lewis Carroll’s ‘cabbages and kings’ in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. But presumably Annie Walke, the vicar’s wife, was also thinking of Jeremiah 10:5, where the idols of the Israelites’ pagan neighbours are compared to a scarecrow in a cabbage patch – can’t talk, can’t walk, useless for anything. Annie Walke has turned Christ into the scarecrow, but he stands erect and victorious on the Cross, and his straight limbs and outstretched arms echo the horizontals and verticals of the wooden screen in which the painting is set.

Only one figure in the painting is actually looking at Christ. On the left a woman stands staring, just stopping in her work and taking notice, while all the others go obliviously on. What does it mean for us to stop and take notice of Jesus, in the middle of life’s daily chores? What did it mean for James Nayler, when he asserted at his trial: ‘If I cannot witness Christ nearer than Jerusalem I shall have no benefit by him’?

In her Christ Mocked, which is housed at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, Annie Walke offers a much more brutal treatment of Christ’s Passion, as Jesus, still set in a recognisably Cornish landscape, is jeered at by a variety of contemporary types. How much worse will it be if we stop and watch, but lack the generosity of heart to respond?

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