My 2023 pair of paintings, Saints Rose of Lima and Martin de Porres, has been selected from 1200 entries from 48 countries as one of the top ten finalists in the Laudamus Award 2024 for Sacred Art. Now it is up to the public to select the First Prize Winner. Voting is open now through June 15. The winning artist will receive 25,000 GBP.

I am surprised and honored to be among the finalists and grateful to John J. Studzinski, CBE for providing such a generous award. Should I win, I would treat it as a kind of Rome Prize like those of the French and American Academies (I applied for the American Academy’s Rome Prize in 2019). Instead of Rome, however, I would use the money to make an extended visit to the Prado Museum in Madrid and learn from my favorite painter, Velazquez.

Copying from the masters has been integral to the development of all great artists. National Museums like the Prado and the Louvre were founded primarily to provide spaces for future generations of artists to hone their craft. It is said that arguably America’s greatest painter, John Singer Sargent, copied every Velazquez at the Prado. I may not be the next Sargent–and given visa requirements, the longest I can stay in Madrid is three months–but I know that making copies at the Prado would transform my work.

Please help send me to Madrid by casting your vote for Saints Rose of Lima and St. Martin de Porres. Then, encourage all of your family and friends to vote too!

St. Martin de Porres was previously awarded 3rd Place in the Catholic Art Institute’s 2023 Sacred Art Prize. St. Rose of Lima placed as a finalist. The pair was commissioned by a parish church in the American Midwest.

Prints are available in the Shop.

This pair of paintings is inspired by the apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in the late 17^th century and to Sr. Lucy of Fatima in the early 20^th century. Christ appeared to St. Margaret Mary “with flames escaping from all parts of His Sacred Humanity, but especially from His chest, which resembled a furnace.” His Heart, “the living source of these flames,” was “surrounded by a crown of thorns and surmounted with a cross.” St. Margaret Mary was asked to console him, to make reparation for sinners, and later to spread various devotions to His Sacred Heart. In 1689, Christ asked her to petition the King to consecrate France to the Sacred Heart, but it was only in 1791, in the midst of the Revolution, that Louis XVI vowed to do so if he was restored to his crown. Instead, he was guillotined on January 21, 1793.

The Immaculate Heart appeared to Sr. Lucy in the Virgin’s “left hand, without sword or roses, but with a crown of thorns and flames.” The piercing thorns, she was told, represented the continual “blasphemies and ingratitude” of men. As with the apparitions to St. Margaret Mary, the requests to Sr. Lucy progressed from personal consolation and reparation, to spreading devotion to the Immaculate Heart, to asking the Holy Father, in union with all the bishops of the world, to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart. “Like the King of France,” Christ told Sr. Lucy, “they will repent and do it, but it will be late. Russia will have already spread her errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions of the Church: the Holy Father will have much to suffer.”

Kingship—Christ’s, that of France, and that of the Popes—is at the heart of both apparitions. The painting of the Sacred Heart emphasizes this through the flames escaping from the wounds of the crown of thorns form a crown of immolation. The visual counterpoint of the crown of flames in its companion painting is the smoke issuing from the thurible-like Immaculate Heart. Smoke is a sure sign of fire, but it is not fire itself. Likewise, Mary’s Immaculate Heart is a perfect sign pointing to Christ’s Sacred Heart, from which it nonetheless remains distinct. She calls sinners to imitate Her in becoming signs or images of the Sacred Heart, raising the sweet fragrance of spiritual incense to God.

Sacred Heart and Immaculate Heart are available for purchase in the Shop. They are currently on view at St. Edmund’s Retreat, Enders Island, Connecticut.

This painting endeavors to make visible two theological paradoxes.

We see the Christ Child at about the age of reason, and yet already His Precious Blood trickles down His forehead, and His hands, raised in blessing, reveal the wounds of the Cross. This apparent incongruity depicts the unity of the Incarnation and the Passion in the economy of salvation: the Son became man in order to suffer and die.

Likewise Christ is depicted in regal splendor: robed in scarlet, caped in ermine, His neck and hands encircled in courtly ruffs. Yet these splendid vestments, from the tradition of the Infant of Prague, are paired not with a crown of state, but with the Crown of Thorns. For Our Lord is at once the Man of Sorrows and the King of Kings.

Moreover, in God’s inscrutable wisdom, strength is made perfect in weakness and glory is the crown of suffering. In the course of our pilgrimage on earth, and especially in this season of Lent, we must never forget Our Lord’s teaching that it is only by denying ourselves and taking up our crosses that we may follow Him into His Kingdom.

On view at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis during Lent 2023, The Passion of the Infant King is now available for purchase framed and ready for hanging.

Thus from glory—in Dante’s telling—does St. Peter Damian recount his reception of the galero cardinalizio, the cardinal’s hat and symbol of office. Alas for Damian, Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs has called and dragged him forth again—this time from Paradise to her St. Louis studio—to don the scarlet for a new portrait. As soon as she received an inquiry about a commission to paint St. Peter Damian, she knew that she wanted to paint him as a cardinal, for reasons artistic and theological:

As a painter, I longed to try my hand again at painting red moiré silk. I also wanted to exploit the contrast between the organic effects of the silk and the geometric idealism of the hemispherical galero. As a sacred artist, I considered that this painting needed to convey the awesome paternal authority of the holy prelate. Much of what St. Peter Damian fought to uproot from the Church in the eleventh century has taken root again, and as in Damian’s day, true reform will only be accomplished through the application of that authority. The galero, robes, and pontifical gloves are meant to communicate the authority with which Christ has vested His Bride.

The patron—the St. Peter Damian Society—heartily agreed. Founded by laymen to promote a truly Catholic response to the clerical abuse crisis, the Society advocates the clear denunciation of sin and the wholehearted embrace of penance on the part of the hierarchy. “For too long,” says the Society, “the language of bureaucrats and businessmen has been allowed to supplant that of the saints—of sackcloth and ashes, of bell, book, and candle.”

St. Peter Damian himself (1007-1072) led a life of mortification and contemplation as an eremitical monk in central Italy. After becoming prior of his community he began raising his voice to denounce widespread sexual perversion and simony among the clergy. He was unafraid to rebuke bishops and popes for failing to extirpate vice, and eager to lend them his help in implementing dangerous reforms. His efforts eventually bore fruit through the cooperation of reforming popes like Leo IX; Stephen X, who created Damian cardinal; and Alexander II. Damian also worked closely with Hildebrand, the future Pope St. Gregory VII. Widely venerated since his death, in 1823 Leo XII added St. Peter Damian’s feast to the universal calendar and proclaimed him Doctor of the Church.

In the preface to his frank and influential Book of Gomorrah, Damian compares himself to a doctor combatting plague: “It is shameful to relate such a disgusting scandal to sacred ears! But if the doctor fears the virus of the plague, who will apply the cauterization? If he is nauseated by those whom he is to cure, who will lead sick souls back to health?” In her portrait, Gwyneth sought to capture the saint’s fearless, clearsighted attention to the moral plague of sin.

The Way of Life and the Way of Death

St. Peter Damian is depicted as a venerable yet virile authority with a white beard and piercing eyes. He faces forward and stares directly out at the viewer, calling him to personal repentance and to the performance of the duty of his state in life in promoting reform in the Church. His eyes, bearing, and finery call us to attention. The ecclesiastical garments remind us that Damian teaches not with his own authority, but with that vested in the Church by Christ Himself.

Lit from the heavens, Damian’s wide-brimmed galero casts a band of shadow over his eyes, alluding to depictions of Lady Justice blindfolded and holding scales. Like Justice, St. Peter Damian applied God’s law to meek and mighty alike. Extending the allusion to Lady Justice, and visually punning on the etymology of “cardinal”—from the Latin cardo, cardinis: a hinge or pivot—Damian holds two opposing objects: a millstone and a disciplina.

The millstone alludes to Our Lord’s warning about those who scandalize the innocent: “But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6; see also Mark 9:41 and Luke 17:2). For this reason it serves as the symbol of the Society of St. Peter Damian. (See note.)

In his other hand the saint holds a disciplina, a knotted cord used to inflict corporal mortification in imitation of Christ’s scourging. St. Peter Damian himself popularized the use of the disciplina among his and other monks. The name derives from the virtue of discipline of which the Wisdom Books speak: “The very first step towards wisdom is the desire for discipline” (Wisdom 6:18, Knox trans.; see also Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 1:34; Psalm 17:36). As the penitential tradition teaches, the humbling of the flesh is a necessary pre-condition for self-mastery and a lifelong remedy for pride. The disciplina is also an implement of divine mercy, whereby God grants those He has already forgiven the means to unite their own meager mortifications to the unspeakable agony of His Son’s saving Passion.

The disciplina and the millstone thus represent the choice between “the way of life” and “the way of death” (Deuteronomy 30:20; Psalm 1) which St. Peter, in conformity with Revelation, recalls to the viewer’s attention. St. Peter raises the discplina, putting it into use, thereby urging the viewer to join him in choosing life.

A Painter’s Painting

Gwyneth conceived the painting in the tradition of Renaissance depictions of St. Jerome as a cardinal. “I didn’t want to get lost in trying to discover what a cardinal might have worn in the 11^th century,” she says, “and I wanted him to be instantly recognizable as a cardinal, so I turned to the iconography of St. Jerome,” who lived before the formation of the cardinalate, but served as an advisor to Pope Damasus I and is almost always depicted as a cardinal.

In addition to St. Jerome, Gwyneth looked to Innocent X—in the famous portrait by Velázquez—for visual inspiration. Velázquez is the dominant inspiration behind Gwyneth’s brushwork. “So much of the beauty of Velázquez’s brushwork lies in its confidence,” she says, “a confidence perfectly attuned to convey the confidence of a subject like Innocent X. It seemed advisable to borrow some of that same painterly bravura in depicting St. Peter Damian.”

The bravura brushwork shows up especially in the watered silk. “When light hits the moiré pattern, it creates high contrast, while elsewhere the pattern nearly disappears. You wind up playing lost and found with the it,” Gwyneth explains. Initially, she applied thin layers of paint. Once the underlying color was in place, she loaded her brush and applied thick dabs of paint. “Impasto requires a decisive yet light touch—perhaps like that of a surgeon,” she says.

She painted “wet-on-wet”, applying several layers of paint in a single session. Once she felt confident about her plans for a stretch of the silk, she would block in a large area with alizarin crimson and then paint in more opaque reds: peony, vermilion, and cadmium scarlet. “Painting wet-on-wet gives the brushwork greater fluidity. The paintbrush glides across the surface like a freshly polished skate on ice,” Gwyneth says. Blending gently with the underlying layers, each stroke acquires great subtlety and dynamic range.

This was the first time Gwyneth has worked with vermilion, an old and expensive red pigment that was used by Velázquez and other Old Masters. “I was frankly a little disappointed with it,” Gwyneth admits. “Certainly for potency, it can’t compete with the cadmiums,” which were only invented in the 19^th century and first widely exploited by the Impressionists. “I love the dynamism of the cadmiums in the high range. Vermilion is much more subtle,” she says, and when she used vermilion, she found herself mixing in cadmium scarlet. “That’s anathema in certain artistic circles,” Gwyneth confesses, “where the idea prevails that if you want to paint in the tradition of the Old Masters, you have to limit yourself to their materials and tools. My approach is to incorporate inventions that I think the Old Masters would have embraced had they had access to them. I think Velázquez might well have availed himself of cadmium scarlet in painting a cardinal.”

In emphasizing the cardinalatial scarlet, Gwyneth sought to draw attention to the beauty of the office of the cardinalate, which, as always for a prelate, is so much more important than his person:

In our day, many people have forgotten that it is only when the personalities of prelates disappear beneath the trappings of office that the reflected glory of God can shine through them. Ecclesiastical vestments transfigure the poor sinners who wear them, so that instead of the merely human and mundane, we can see in them the resplendent divinity of the Bridegroom, Who has clothed His Bride “in gilded clothing, surrounded with variety” (Psalm 44:10). I wanted the painting to serve in part to remind viewers of this often overlooked but crucial truth of the importance of prelatial splendor.

Gwyneth hopes that her image fosters prayer to St. Peter Damian in particular for and on the part of cardinals. “Humanly speaking, the solution to the current crisis in the Church lies in the hands of the Pope and the cardinals,” she says. She is certain that St. Peter Damian, who not only bears the name of Peter, but served Peter’s successors in his life and died on the Feast of St. Peter’s Chair (February 22), is eager to assist the Holy Father in wisely selecting cardinals for creation—and in assisting the cardinals themselves in personal holiness; in wisely counselling the Pope; and in electing a holy, orthodox, and capable successor.

Note

Since millstones are used to grind wheat, they also bear a Eucharistic connotation. In an Easter sermon, St. Augustine compares the neophytes to wheat “ground and pounded . . . by the humiliation of fasting and the sacrament of exorcism” and by baptism “moistened with water in order to be shaped into bread” (Sermon 227, trans. Wilfrid Parsons). Similarly, St. Ignatius of Antioch compares his martyrdom to the grinding of wheat: “I am God’s wheat and I am being ground by the teeth of wild beasts to make a pure loaf for Christ” (Letter to the Romans 4.2, trans. Cyril C. Richardson). Both Augustine and Ignatius speak of how corporal mortification incorporates the Christian into Christ’s Mystical Body. In this reading, the millstone itself points to the inescapable role of mortification, whether unto perdition or salvation.

A quiet Umbrian glow suffuses the new portraits of Saints Benedict and Scholastica by sacred artist Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs. She achieved it by painting mostly on sunny August afternoons, when the light in her studio reflected off the oak floors, casting a soft gold hue on her models’ features and costumes. The golden light at once roots the saints in their Italian homeland and suggests their heavenly glory. Designed to be fitted into seventeenth century frames as altarpieces for side chapels in a monastic church, the paintings are meant to complement the whispers of private Masses and prayer.

To show the vitality of the Benedictine charism, Gwyneth depicted the saints at about thirty-three, the age of Christ at the consummation of His life on earth. Reading St. Gregory the Great’s Life of Benedict in preparation for the project introduced her to the vigor of Benedict, “renouncing the world in the prime of his life for a life of manful asceticism, laying down monastic rules that have endured to our day,” she says. “I wanted to impart that vigor to the portrait.” The client agreed, suggesting Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments as a visual reference point. For St. Scholastica, Gwyneth was asked to depict a cross between Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, and Julia Child. “I knew someone who was just the type,” Gwyneth recalls, “and she had a brother with the ascetic gravitas of Heston.” She was looking to work in part from sibling models, since Benedict and Scholastica were siblings and probably twins.

For the habits, Gwyneth borrowed from various Benedictine houses. “I’m so grateful to the Benedictine  nuns and monks who loaned habits for this project,” says Gwyneth. “They were extraordinarily gracious, as was my pastor, who leant a crosier. Since it is the habits that establish the saints as Benedictines, I was striving for the greatest possible authenticity.”

She was especially delighted with the many-creased wimple, which came from the Benedictine Sisters of St. Emma’s Monastery in Pennsylvania[link]. “The folded wimple provided a sober geometric frame to offset the features of the face, much like the gold setting of a precious stone.” Gwyneth found herself meditating on how a veil and wimple emphasize the face, and hence the person. “Scholastica demonstrates the way a nun’s habit brings her heart into focus,” Gwyneth says.

Revealing the heart was part of why Gwyneth chose to depict St. Scholastica gazing outward at the viewer. “We know much less about Scholastica than we do about Benedict,” Gwyneth explains, “so I wanted to supply a visual intimacy that could foster devotion to her.”

The outward gaze also seemed consistent with the written portrait of Scholastica in St. Gregory the Great’s Life. Gregory recounts that Scholastica begged her brother to prolong his last visit to her before she died (a death he does not seem to foresee). Benedict protested that (in fidelity to his rule) he had to return to his monastery, but Scholastica prayed to God and immediately a thunderstorm erupted, forcing him to spend the night “in holy conversation about the spiritual life” (Life XXIII.4, trans. Carolinne White, in Early Christian Lives, London: Penguin, 1998, p. 199). Gregory writes that “it was by a very just judgement that her power was greater [than Benedict’s] because her love was stronger” and “God is love” (Life XXIII.5, p. 200; 1 John 4:16). After spending the next three days at prayer in his cell, Benedict saw his sister’s soul “penetrat[ing] the mysterious regions of heaven in the form of a dove” (Life XXIV.1, p. 200).

“In Gregory’s story I glimpsed Scholastica’s warmth,” says Gwyneth, “a warmth like that I’ve experienced in the hospitality of Benedictine sisters today, and that attests to a great charity. The Rule is at the service of love, for the Lord is love.”

In contrast to his sister, Benedict looks downward toward his Rule in Gwyneth’s portrait. “I wanted to show the marvelous stability bequeathed to the Benedictines and the world by his Rule. The flower of the Rule is charity—typified in St. Scholastica—but the root of Benedictine charity is the Rule.” To manifest this stability, Gwyneth recalled the Gothic jamb statues of Chartres in her depiction of Benedict’s hands holding his Rule. “There’s a solidity and simplicity to this part of the picture especially, but also in the symmetrical composition of both portraits, which hearkens back to Gothic and even Romanesque architecture. In a Baroque painting, everything would have been composed along diagonals,” she explains.

The handling of the paint, however, is decidedly Baroque, in the tradition of Rubens, Velazquez, and Tiepolo. The brushwork is fairly loose, especially in the crosiers. “Loose strokes are especially effective at representing metal,” says Gwyneth. The gilt crosiers, which are used by abbots and abbesses as well as bishops and form part of the traditional iconographies of Benedict and Scholastica, recall the celestial glory that saints anticipate during their lives and help communicate to us through their memory and intercession. “The sparkling crosiers function almost like haloes,” Gwyneth suggests.

In addition to placing the crosiers in opposite hands, Gwyneth sought other ways to dynamically unify the paintings. “I wanted the composition of the two paintings to complement but not repeat one another. They are twins, not a matching pair.” One of the solutions Gwyneth found was highlighting the landscape behind Benedict and the stormy night sky above Scholastica. The device also fits Gregory’s anecdote about the siblings. Benedict and his Rule rise like a palm from the soil; Scholastica hovers like a dove, inviting us to mystical conversation with Love.

“Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven.”

The Evidence of Things Unseen

According to an ancient tradition, for forty days–from the Easter Vigil through Ascension Thursday–the Paschal candle is lit in the sanctuary as a symbol of the presence of the Risen Christ on earth. Then, after the chanting of the Gospel at the principal Mass of the Ascension, the candle is ritually extinguished, leaving behind a wisp of smoke reminiscent of the cloud which received Jesus out of the Apostles’ sight (Acts 1:9).

Extinguishing the Paschal candle perfectly symbolizes the drama of the Ascension: the forfeiting of bodily sight for the gift of spiritual vision. Indeed, though faith in Christ’s coming and faith in Jesus’s divinity preceded the Ascension, it was the Ascension that made faith a necessity for all of His followers. Henceforth, the sight of the Incarnate God gives way to faith in His return and in His continued presence behind the sacramental veils.

Both the imagery of the Second Coming and of the Sacraments appear in a new painting of the Ascension by sacred artist Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs. “This commission helped me to understand the centrality of the virtue of faith to the mystery of the Ascension,” she says. As she planned the painting, she sought visible ways to convey “the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1). “How do you paint the birth of faith? That was my question,” she says.

As Lightning Out of the East

Immediately after the ascending Christ disappears from view, two “men in white”—angels—address the Apostles: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen him going into heaven” (Acts 1:11). This angelic address, which opens the Introit for the Mass of the Ascension, was decisive for Gwyneth: “I realized that in addition to announcing the necessity of moving from sight to belief, the angels foretold the visible manner of the Second Coming.” She decided to conform her depiction of Christ’s Ascension to the scriptural hints about His return.

“As lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall also the coming of the Son of man be,” Christ teaches in Matthew 24:27, and indeed there is something of the force, shape, and color of lightning in the robes with which Gwyneth has ensconced Christ in her Ascension. Certainly her depiction shows Him coming “with much power and majesty” (Matthew 24:30), revealing Himself as “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” (Apocalypse 19:16). She depicts Christ in profile, a classic pose for regal and imperial portraits, especially those on coin. Christ’s robes are a fiery gold, as though woven from marigold flowers. “Gold is an unusual choice for an Ascension,” Gwyneth admits. Artists often clothe the ascending Christ in Paschal white, or sometimes in red and blue, a reference to the hypostatic union of human and divine natures in the single person of Christ. Instead, Gwyneth chose fiery gold to express Christ’s Second Coming in judgement as King of the Universe. “Gold alludes to Christ’s regality,” she explains, while “fire alludes to the ‘everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels’ (Matthew 25:41).”

The Burning Bush

Fiery gold also alludes to the sacramental mysteries, wherein Christ keeps His promise, “behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Matthew 28:20). Christ’s golden robes recall the golden vestments which may be substituted for white ones on the most important feasts, including the Ascension. In the Mass, gold not only ensconces the alter Christus in the form of vestments, but also Christ on the altar in the form of the golden chalice. The suggestion of fire recalls the holocausts of the Old Law, which were types of the perfect Sacrifice of the New Law which is renewed in each Mass, and also the burning bush of Exodus 3, a type of the Blessed Sacrament.

Gwyneth’s Ascension also alludes to the Mass by depicting the white-clad angels who address the disciples as monk-acolytes pouring water from a cruet into a scallop shell and from the shell over a globus cruciger (a globe mounted with a cross; a traditional symbol of the temporal power of Christian regents) into a crystal basin. The cruet and basin reference the Lavabo rite after the Offertory, while the water flowing from the shell over the globe symbolizes Christ’s Great Commission to the Apostles at the moment of his Ascension to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Matthew 28:19).

Thus Gwyneth’s Ascension at once anticipates Christ’s return in glory and attests to His continuing presence in the Sacraments until the end of time.

Inspiration from the Artistic Tradition

Gwyneth also turned to the artistic tradition for her Ascension. She was initially drawn to the medieval device of including only Christ’s feet at the top of the painting. “Leaving most of Christ off the visual plane is perhaps the most stark way to communicate the gulf between earth and Heaven that Christ bridges and the gulf between seeing and believing that the Christian must bridge,” she suggests. When the commissioner requested that the full figure of Christ be the central feature of the painting, Gwyneth turned to other artistic devices.

Giotto and Fra Angelico, for instance, place Christ entirely above the Apostles on a heavenly cloud, so that the viewer sees two separate planes of existence vertically juxtaposed. Rembrandt and Ford Madox Brown further emphasize the divide between the ascending Christ and the world below by casting the world in deep shadow and Christ in brilliant light. In Madox Brown, the contrast is marked even further by keeping Christ’s legs in the shadowy realm of the earth while his torso breaks through the clouds into Heaven like a man leaping from a pool of water, or a baby being born.

Gwyneth was inspired by the Madox Brown Ascension in her lighting scheme. All of the figures around Christ are lit by Him, while Christ is lit from within. (The interior lighting is especially evident from the glow emanating from Christ’s heart and wounds.) Thus the lighting helps to establish the distinction between Christ’s heavenly glory and the world below, whose light Christ is (John 8:12). Indeed, the manner in which the light of Christ illuminates the disciples in Gwyneth’s painting illustrates how Christ kindles the light of faith in the Christian. Practically speaking, the device of lighting all the figures from Christ was a challenge, Gwyneth notes, “since I worked with each model individually. There were some mistakes along the way.”

She did not follow the tradition of placing Christ high above the disciples because she was limited to a height of about nine feet, and wanted her figures to be about life-size. Instead, she drew inspiration from an Ascension by Giovanni Azzolini, an early Baroque painter in Naples and Genoa. In Azzolini’s painting, Christ is depicted having just left the ground, but clearly distinguished by his voluminous and weightless robe. Gwyneth incorporated a similar device: “Christ’s swirling robes illustrate his supernatural radiance, functioning something like a halo,” she explains.

An Ascension for a School Cafeteria

Though Gwyneth’s Ascension is very much in the tradition of large altarpieces, it was commissioned not for a church building but for the cafeteria of a parish school. She was conscious that the painting’s primary audience would be children.

“Giving children access to original art is very important for their formation,” she says, “so I was thrilled to be able to paint for that audience,” especially given the paucity of original art in most people’s lives today. She goes on to explain: “Art involves the formation of matter; it’s a powerful analogy for the formation of virtue, used for instance by Plotinus in his likening moral development to a sculptor who slowly reveals a beautiful sculpture latent in the raw stone. Even apart from consideration of the subject matter, or how the subject matter has been treated, original art communicates the triumph of spirit in ordering chaos.”

Gwyneth is not concerned about the chaos of the cafeteria leaving food on the painting. Oil paints on canvas are very durable, and she has (as always) covered them with a protective varnish. “Wiping the surface with a damp cloth should remove most grime,” she says, “but for anything more serious the top layer of varnish could be removed and replaced by a professional art restorer without any lasting damage to the painting.” Indeed, Gwyneth, a mother of three, notes that from the perspective of protecting the artwork, oil paintings are one of the safest options. “My house is full of them,” she notes.

She thinks that designing her Ascension for a bustling school cafeteria imparted a dynamism to the composition and the color. “If I had been painting for a convent chapel, for instance,” she says, “I would probably have chosen a quieter composition and color scheme, to better harmonize with the contemplative nature of the space.”

Designing a painting for its home is one of the “great advantages of working on commission,” Gwyneth notes. She visited the cafeteria before designing her Ascension in order to note the scale, the light, and the color of the wall on which it would hang. Since the wall is grey, Gwyneth began with a grey underpainting and harmonized the edges of the painting towards a grey hue. The goal is to suit the painting to the space so well that it appears to emerge naturally.

Painting During Quarantine

The painting phase of Gwyneth’s Ascension coincided with the local quarantine in response to the Covid-19 coronavirus. Though her own work was largely unaffected by the quarantine—“perhaps it was even a little helpful for staying on task,” she suggests—Gwyneth found herself more convinced than ever of the importance of sacred art in the home.

“St. Louis Catholics were blessed to have our churches remain open during the quarantine, but like so many others around the globe, we were deprived of Mass,” Gwyneth recalls. “Initially, we tried watching livestreamed Masses, but we were reminded how poor a substitute for reality the virtual world provides. I found that I prayed better while meditating on a religious painting in person than while trying to unite myself spiritually to a livestreamed Mass.” She speculates that this has something to do with authenticity: “Real things put us in touch with Reality better than substitutes. I hope that those who are still isolated due to coronavirus or any other reason can discover the joy of original art in the home.”

Having extra time alone gave Gwyneth the chance to experiment with crafting maquettes—figurines made of wire, clay, and drapery carefully folded into shape with fabric stiffener. The maquettes could be arranged and lit to help work out the composition and block in the major areas of light and shadow. “It’s a traditional practice that I hope to experiment with more in the future,” she says.

Longer periods between sessions with models also afforded Gwyneth extra time to build up layers of color, glazing opaque hues with transparent ones to lend an chromatic intensity and depth uncommon in modern painting. “With each painting I complete, I become more and more aware that there’s no substitute for glazing, especially for drapery,” Gwyneth says. “The effect changes with each new skin of paint, and the end result is much more luminous and subtle.”

Though the painting was completed in early June, a backlog at the frame shop due to the long shut-down has delayed the installation of the painting. It is set to arrive at the school cafeteria in late August—along with the students.

The Birth of Faith

When the students, faculty, and parishioners see Gwyneth’s Ascension in person, they will surely be drawn first to the dazzling figure of Christ. In this they will imitate most of the other figures in the painting—Our Lady, St. John the Beloved, and St. Mary Magdalene—each of whom gazes rapturously at Christ ascending. The eyes of the angelic acolytes are cast down, absorbed in the everlasting celestial liturgy. Only one figure—St. Peter—looks out toward the viewer, inviting his gaze.

“I wanted St. Peter, the first of the Apostles to confess that Jesus was the Christ, the rock of the Church, to look away from Christ and to the viewer. It’s a sign of his faith and his leadership,” Gwyneth explains. “He doesn’t need to see Christ anymore; he believes. Of course, Our Lady, the Magdalene, and St. John believe too, but they have contemplative vocations, with mystical vision. St. Peter, on the other hand, and Peter’s Successor in each generation, is the supreme teacher of faith and morals, the one who must confirm his brethren (Luke 22:32) and hand down the Faith unaltered and entire even to us in 2020, even to the consummation of the world.” Thus St. Peter turns to face the viewer, inviting us to believe with him and assuming his role as Christ’s visible head on earth.

Like the extinguishing of the Paschal candle, then, Gwyneth’s Ascension is a symbol of the faith—in the Second Coming, in the Sacraments, and in the Church—that was born when Christ ascended gloriously into Heaven.

• Valentin de Boulogne, The Last Supper, ca. 1625-26. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica
• Caravaggio, The Betrayal of Christ, 1602. Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland
• Gerrit van Honthorst, Christ before Caiaphas, ca. 1618. London, National Gallery
• Rembrandt, Judas Returns the Thirty Pieces, 1629. Great Britain, private collection
• Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Road to Calvary, 1564. Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum
• Master of the Parlement de Paris, The Crucifixion, ca. 1490. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum
• Titian, The Entombment of Christ, c. 1520, Louvre
• Giovanni Bellini, Pieta, ca. 1471-74, Vatican City, Pinacoteca Vaticana

Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.

He has put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the lowly.

—Luke 1:52

Tradition attributes several paintings and sculptures of Our Lady to St. Luke, among them the Salus Populi Romani, which Pope St. Gregory the Great carried in procession during the plague which ravaged Rome in 590, and the original, Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe. The evangelist and patron saint of artists also crafted an exquisite portrait of Our Lady in the first two chapters of his Gospel, which provide many details unavailable elsewhere.

Twice St. Luke states that Our Lady “kept all these words in her heart.” After the adoration of the shepherds, who have recounted the words of the angels announcing and singing the praises of the Savior’s birth, Luke tells us, “Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart” (2:19). Twelve years later, after the boy Jesus is found in the Temple and asks whether Mary and Joseph did not know “that I must be about my father’s business,” we are told that “they understood not the word that he spoke unto them” but that “his mother kept all these words in her heart” (2:49-51). Luke’s repetition draws attention to both episodes, where Our Lady meditates first on the words of angels and then on the words of her Son. In the clarity of her Immaculate Heart, free from the darkening of the intellect that accompanies sin, the Seat of Wisdom nonetheless pondered over the words of angels and kept the inscrutable words of the Lord.

The extraordinary humility and interiority of the Blessed Virgin attested by these verses is one of the themes of a new Madonna by sacred artist Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs. Stylistically indebted to the 17^th century Marian devotional images of Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato, particularly his Madonna in London’s National Gallery, Gwyneth’s Madonna also incorporates brushwork inspired by Titian and drapery influenced by 15^th century Flanders.

“The Sassoferrato Madonnas are studies in regal interiority. Beneath her lapis lazuli robes and her flawless classical face, the Virgin is always deep in mental prayer,” says Gwyneth. “I wanted to portray the same idea: the exaltation of the humble of which Our Lady sang in her Magnificat, and the beatific repose of dwelling in perpetual contemplation of the Word.”

Preparing to Paint

Relying on the National Gallery Madonna as a concept sketch, Gwyneth began by securing fabrics and a model. Then she completed two three-hour graphite sketches with the model. After seeing the first sketch, the patron asked for a more dramatic inclination of the head. “The greater the angle of the head, the greater the challenge of convincingly rendering the foreshortening,” says Gwyneth. Thus, there was less latitude for the model to move her head during and between poses. “Fortunately,” Gwyneth says, “I was working with an excellent model. The dramatic inclination forced me to improve as a painter.”

Gwyneth also completed a color study with the model. She describes the colors, inspired by Sassoferrato, as “the bluest blue and the reddest red.” To achieve their chromatic intensity, Gwyneth used combinations of a saturated, opaque hue overpainted with a saturated, transparent hue. She chose cobalt blue topped with ultramarine and cadmium scarlet topped with alizarin crimson. Other hues were added where necessary to convey the effects of light. In Sassoferrato’s day, ultramarine was extremely costly, because it was made from ground lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan. It tended to be reserved for sacred figures, especially the Blessed Virgin. The pigment became much more widely available in the 19^th century when a synthetic alternative was developed. “I think you can tell the difference,” says Gwyneth. “It’s still a lovely color, but it does not have quite the same splendor.”

After completing graphite and color studies, Gwyneth stretched and gessoed her canvas and transferred her composition from the second graphite study using homemade charcoal paper. She prefers using charcoal to graphite for transferring designs because of its lack of wax. “Charcoal erases very easily,” Gwyneth explains, “and mixes with the surface of the oil paint. It’s more delicate, leaving no distracting lines underneath.” After transferring the design, Gwyneth went over the lines with a bit of watercolor. “It’s more permanent than charcoal, but not as harsh as graphite,” she says. Next Gwyneth blocked in broad areas of neutrals.

Painting with Drapery and Model

Gwyneth began to paint the drapery first. She built a mannequin and carefully placed fabric to create sumptuous folds. “The drapery is crucial because it conveys the transfigured state of Our Lady as Queen of Heaven,” says Gwyneth. “This is very far from a historical depiction of a poor woman from Galilee. Her humility would come into play in the face and hands, but in the drapery, I sought to convey only glory.” In preparing and painting the drapery, Gwyneth looked to Flemish paintings by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van Weyden. “There’s this wonderful Northern Renaissance sense of gravity acting on fabric, she explains. “It conveys both the luxuriance of the materials, but also the perpetuity of heavenly glory. They dipped their fabrics in starch to keep them in place; I simply painted them without a live model.”

After developing the fabric on the canvas, Gwyneth brought back the model and worked directly from her to paint the face and hands. Between sessions with the model, Gwyneth idealized from imagination. “I think that’s the only way not to paint a portrait. You have to paint without the model in front of you,” says Gwyneth. “Then, when it starts to look unnatural, you use the model again to bring it back to nature. The goal is not to disfigure, but to transfigure. As a painter of sacred subjects especially, I’m aiming for a supernatural beauty, not an unnatural beauty—which is another name for ugliness anyway.” Gwyneth’s method was taken for granted in the Renaissance and Baroque eras, but is rare today. “On the one hand, there are artists who are trained in classical realist ateliers to paint like the French academics. They simulate nature, without surpassing it. On the other hand, there are artists who are convinced that only Byzantine distortion is legitimate for sacred art. There are very few trying to strike the Renaissance and Baroque balance. That’s what I’m trying to do, and trying to encourage young painters to rediscover,” says Gwyneth.

In modeling her paints, Gwyneth departed from Sassoferrato, turning to Giorgione and his pupil, Titian. “Sassoferrato used a heavier application of opaque paint,” explains Gwyneth. “I became interested in varying the opacity and layering the paint in several levels. It’s a technique developed especially in Venice in the 15^th century, and brought to mastery by Titian in the 16^th. The paint quality trades some of the gemlike nature of a smoother surface for a much more sophisticated rendering of light.” The technique is especially suited to rendering lace, which Gwyneth chose for the Madonna’s veil in another departure from Sassoferrato.

The Triumph of Humility

For the hovering crown of roses, a reference to the symbolism of Mary as the Mystical Rose, Gwyneth used a single rose posed to catch the light in various ways. “Our Lord wore a crown of thorns; it seems appropriate for Our Lady, who interiorly shared in His Passion and now shares in His Triumph, to wear a crown of roses,” she says. When the patron vetoed the rose crown, Gwyneth painted over it and tried a crown of stars. When that crown also failed to please, Gwyneth removed the wettest layer of paint, revealing the remnants of the rose crown. “I really liked the almost spectral appearance of the roses when they came back from oblivion,” she recalls. The patron did not, so Gwyneth painted them out again and introduced the suggestion of a halo. “Fortunately, at that point it became apparent that the patron and I had different visions.” She was concerned about overworking the painting, so she approached him about completing the painting on her own. “It was very amicable, and I think fortuitous,” she says. Gwyneth quickly removed the halo, restoring the rose crown a second time. “I added a little more paint, but essentially the effect comes from painting it out twice. It’s a much more complex image than it otherwise would have been.”

As a final highlight, Gwyneth included a brooch on Our Lady’s mantle. “It’s meant to be lapis lazuli set in gold,” she says—a reference to Sassoferrato’s ultramarine. Gwyneth also intended the brooch to reference the jewels that have been offered to images of Our Lady by the faithful over the centuries. “Today there is a trend to denude images of Our Lady of their ornaments. I was so sad to learn that the Salus Populi Romani was stripped of her crown and jewels in the 1980s. I wanted to do something to rectify these attacks on Our Lady’s exaltation,” Gwyneth says. “As she herself put it in her Magnificat, God ‘hath regarded the humility of his handmaid . . . He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble’ (Lk 2:48-52). What God has exalted, we must exalt too. I hope my Madonna conveys the same expression of the triumph of humble prayer.”

Loss & Recovery

In 1326 the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to a cowherd named Gil Cordero on the bank of the Guadalupe River in Extremadura, Spain, and revealed the existence of a statue that had been hidden in a nearby cave after the fall of Seville to the Moors in 712. The statue of the Virgin and Child was recovered, along with a document attesting to its history. Reportedly carved by St. Luke the Evangelist, the sculpture had been venerated in Patras, Constantinople, and Rome, before being sent by Pope St. Gregory the Great to St. Leander, Archbishop of Seville in the late 6^th century.

After being restored to veneration in the 14^th century under the title Our Lady of Guadalupe, the image played a pivotal role in Spanish history. In 1340 she became a patroness of the Reconquista when Alphonsus XI of Castile entrusted himself to her before his victory in the Battle of Salado. Thereafter the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe enjoyed royal privilege as one of the country’s great religious centers. Queen Isabella la Católica alone made twenty pilgrimages. It was at the monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1492 that she and King Ferdinand vouched their support to Christopher Columbus for his voyage to the Indies. Columbus himself carried an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on his first voyage and returned to pay her homage upon his return to Spain. Before setting out for the New World in 1513, Hernán Cortés also made a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and in 1521 he carried her image on his standard during the conquest of Mexico.

Ten years after the conquest, in 1531, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to an Aztec convert named Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill, the site of human sacrifice to a mother goddess until the arrival of Cortés, and asked for a church to be built there in her honor. As proof of the authenticity of the apparition, she had Juan collect Castilian roses in his tilma, a traditional Aztec cloak made of cactus fibers, to bring to the bishop of Mexico. When the cloak was unfurled before him, it revealed a miraculous image of the Virgin as a pregnant mestiza, part Spanish like the roses, part Aztec like the cloak. She was immediately recognized as a symbol and protectress of Mexico, the nascent mestizo nation. Our Lady of Guadalupe, as she asked to be known, accomplished the conversion of eight million Aztecs by the end of the decade. Today she remains beloved especially by the Mexican people and the Mexican diaspora. The basilica which houses her image is the most visited Catholic shrine in the world.*

A Commission to Replace a Poster

The history of Our Lady of Guadalupe was very much on the mind of sacred artist Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs as she fulfilled a recent commission to copy the tilma image for a church in California. Studying the image itself, she was struck by its graphic excellence. “It strikes me graphically as more a symbol than a painting—which of course it is, by the will of Providence,” Gwyneth says. The drapery and the sunrays are highly stylized. The palette consists of muted versions of the primary colors: rose for red, teal for blue, and gold for yellow. These qualities make the image easily recognizable in reproduction, even at great distances, in small sizes, or in disparate media. “It’s an image that was designed for reproduction,” she says.

Gwyneth knew that the miraculous production of the original would make any copy elusive. She was also awed by the importance of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the designs of Providence: “God raised up Our Lady of Guadalupe to help restore Spain to the Faith, bring that Faith to the New World, and convert a whole people. It’s hard to overestimate her importance. I felt very strongly the importance of communicating that significance through a successful painting.”

Gwyneth felt certain, however, that almost any painting would be preferable to the photographic print currently hanging in the church. “The main problem with a photo of a painting is that it destroys the sculptural reality of the paint and the dynamic nature of how the colors of the paint respond to changing lighting conditions,” she says. Gwyneth was able to capture something of the tilma’s texture with her linen canvas, and she was able to use real gold, as in the original. “A skilled painter can match color much more closely than even the best camera or printer. But gold in particular can’t really be captured accurately with photography, because gold changes so much with the light,” she explains. She argues that the importance of gold in many sacred images is an important reason to prefer a painting over a photograph. Of course, she acknowledges, photographs are useful for accurately capturing proportions—indeed, unable to travel to Mexico, Gwyneth relied on photographic references for her own copy.

Copying with paint rather than with a camera also enabled Gwyneth to capture the original across time rather than at a single moment in time. Gwyneth says she did not intend to recreate the image as it appeared in 1531 or at any other moment in time, something that would have been impossible, but also reductive of the providential importance of the painting across time. Nonetheless, Gwyneth did have to make important decisions about where to depart from the image as it appears today. Any painting ages, but Our Lady of Guadalupe has seen a great deal of violence, especially in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Her crown was removed, possibly by order of a bishop, in the 1880s, and her face has been reworked several times.

As soon as Gwyneth learned about the removal of the crown, she knew she wanted to include it. “Denying Christ’s sovereignty—and by extension, the queenship of Mary—has been an essential feature of secularist ideology since the Enlightenment. The faithful have responded by insisting on the kingship of Christ and the queenship of His Mother,” she notes. In Mexico during the Cristero War of the 1920s, faithful Catholics resisted the government’s increasingly aggressive secularization with the battle cry, ¡Viva Cristo Rey! ¡Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe! In 1925, Pope Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King for the last Sunday of October. In 1945, Pius XII declared Our Lady of Guadalupe Empress of the Americas and in 1954, he established the feast of the Queenship of Mary for the last day of May. “To combat secularism today, I think there’s an urgent need for more depictions of Christ as King and Our Lady as Queen. In particular where an image has been defaced by having its crown or jewelry removed, we need to restore them,” Gwyneth argues.

The space available in the church—a niche with a window that may have originally housed a side altar, dictated the size of the copy. 40 by 24 inches, or about 1/3 the size of the original, Gwyneth’s copy is also proportionally taller than the image on display in Mexico today, to allow for the crown. The proportions are probably closer to those that would have been on display for most of the image’s history.

The Painting Process

After stretching, sizing, and priming her linen canvas, Gwyneth brushed the entire surface with a medium gray color. Due to its high value, a white canvas can throw off the painter’s sense of the relative values of colors applied to it. Using charcoal transfer paper, Gwyneth then transferred the composition from a poster reproduction to the surface of the primed linen.

She then applied broad fields of color in the background, the mandorla (the almond-shaped indicator of sanctity surrounding the Virgin), and the mantle. Since the original tilma surface of cactus fibers is much rougher than linen, Gwyneth needed to give the painting plenty of texture. She achieved this by using a dry brush technique with abundant scumbling. Mixing little oil into her pigments and applying paint to only the tips of her brush, she applied many layers of closely related colors. This leaves gaps in the layers of paint so that various hues can be seen in the finished surface. After filling in the major fields of color, she turned to the smaller areas, using wetter and smaller brushes. She worked gradually, returning to most areas several times to add depth and apply detail after allowing previous coats of color to partially dry.

For the face, Gwyneth elected not to copy one of the several captured in photograph, but to try “to create the most beautiful face I could out of the various faces she’s worn.”

When the rest of the painting was complete and had had some time to dry, Gwyneth began applying gold. She had originally considered gold leaf, but decided against it both because of the risk of decay and the difficulty of application on canvas (gold leaf is typically applied to specially prepared wooden panels). Gwyneth was also concerned that gold leaf would lend too flat an appearance. She turned instead to shell gold, which she first used on her 2018 painting, St. John Fisher. Unlike gold leaf, which is solid gold that has been hammered into thin sheets, shell gold is made up of gold particles suspended in gum arabic. The particles are visible on the surface, and some of the underpainting comes through. This resembles the tilma image and allows the artist a great deal of control. “You can vary the effect of shell gold by varying the underpainting and the quantity applied,” Gwyneth explains. She used orange hues under the shell gold where she wanted a more fiery appearance, as on the lining of the Virgin’s mantle.

The final step was adding crisp, dark brown outlines, as in the original. “The image really popped when I added the outlines. They’re extremely effective in lending power to the image from a distance,” Gwyneth says.

Preparing an Empress for Veneration

After painting was completed, Gwyneth selected the most authentic Spanish colonial frame possible within the budget. The frame, she says, is an important way to integrate a painting into its surroundings: “Sometimes, one must strike a balance between the painting and its context, but this time, the architectural context was already in continuity with the painting.” The church for which the painting is destined has a Mission Revival exterior and some Spanish colonial interior elements as well.

Gwyneth hopes that her completed copy of Our Lady of Guadalupe makes up for some of the insult and sacrilege committed against the Empress of the Americas. Today, Our Lady of Guadalupe is bereft not only of her painted crown, but also of her shrine. In 1974, she was removed from the Baroque church built on the spot she had requested and deposited in a concrete brutalist structure. “It’s a revolutionary building, designed to break with the past,” says Gwyneth. “That’s a total betrayal of the Virgin of Guadalupe. As her history attests, she’s a testament to the continuity of the Our Lady’s love for her people across time, space, and cultures. I hope that someday she will be re-enthroned in her proper, worthy home in the old basilica.” Until then, at least one contemporary copy has re-crowned the Virgin of Guadalupe as queen.

* For the history of the Old and New World Virgins of Guadalupe, see:

• Joan Carroll Cruz. Miraculous Images of Our Lady. Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books. 1993. Pages 290-98 and 407-09.
• Jacques Lafaye. Quetzalcóatl et Guadeloupe: la formation de la conscience nationale au Mexique (1531-1813). Paris: Gallimard. 1974.
• Stafford Poole. The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 2006.

“If you blur your eyes or view the painting from afar, the emblems disappear; what remains is the figure of a man wearing white robes against a blue-grey background, standing in warm light.”

This is how sacred artist Gwyneth Thompson-Briggs sums up her new painting of St. Hugh of Lincoln, the 12^th century Carthusian monk who was plucked from the obscurity of the Grande Chartreuse to become bishop of Lincoln and advisor to the Plantagenet kings Henry II and Richard Cœur de Lion. Gwyneth designed the painting to capture what she sees as the essence of St. Hugh.

“I think he was essentially a Carthusian monk who would have preferred to remain obscurely at prayer in the monastery, but a monk whose natural talents and fidelity to the divine will led him to the fruitful exercise of high spiritual and temporal authority,” Gwyneth says. In her reading, St. Hugh’s life might be divided into two phases or movements.

First there was the movement toward an ever more radical abandonment of the world to know only “Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). After living first in the world, then with his father among Augustinian canons regular, Hugh became a Benedictine novice at fifteen, rising to become prior of a monastery. Soon after, when Hugh was in his thirties, he discovered the Carthusian Order. Founded by St. Bruno in 1084 in a remote Alpine valley, the Order combines the eremitical and the cenobitical versions of monasticism. As a Carthusian choirmonk, Hugh would have lived out the Order’s motto—Stat crux dum volvitur orbis (the Cross stands steady while the world turns)—by singing Matins, Lauds, the conventual Mass, and Vespers in common, and spending the rest of the day alone in his cell praying the Office, meditating, studying, and tending a small garden.

After the renunciation of the world came Hugh’s progressive return into it: first as procurator at the Grande Chartreuse, the Order’s motherhouse, then as prior of a struggling new charterhouse in England that King Henry had founded in lieu of going on the crusade imposed as his penance for murdering St. Thomas of Canterbury, and finally, through Henry’s influence, as bishop of Lincoln. But like his Lord, Hugh returned from his forty days in the desert having vanquished the world, the flesh, and the devil, ready to supply others in their own battles for salvation. Amidst the noise of medieval politics, St. Hugh spoke the wisdom derived from a life lived in the perpetual silence of interior prayer.

An anecdote told by an anonymous 19^th century Carthusian illustrates Hugh’s relationship to prayer and politics. One feast day when Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, and another Hugh, Bishop of Coventry, were expected in audience with King Henry II, the brother bishops found themselves together in choir at a conventual Mass. The Bishop of Coventry omitted the solemn tones proper to the day, and began speaking the Introit. The saintly Bishop of Lincoln interrupted him, chanting the Introit from the beginning with the proper solemnity. When the Bishop of Coventry protested, “We must make haste, for the King will be waiting for us, and he is in a great hurry,” St. Hugh retorted: “I can’t help that; we must do homage first to the King of kings. No secular employment can dispense us from what we owe to Him; and our service today should be festive, not restive.” (Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, page 235; see citation below.)

In order to worship God more perfectly, it was St. Hugh who began rebuilding Lincoln Cathedral in the new Gothic style after the earthquake of 1185. After his death in 1200, his tomb there became a center for English pilgrims drawn by the charity of a man whose love for God in the liturgy overflowed into rebuking kings and curing the tumors of children. Another King Henry, Tudor, destroyed the shrine, lest “the simple people be moch deceaved and broughte into greate supersticion and idolatrye.” The shrine’s gold, silver, and precious jewels were safely deposited in the royal treasury.

The Commission

When approached about painting St. Hugh, Gwyneth was unfamiliar with the saint. The patron, an American, was interested in commissioning an image for his home to foster his family’s personal devotion, but also to promote St. Hugh’s cult more broadly.

Gwyneth was immediately intrigued by the idea of painting another saintly English bishop after her 2018 painting, St. John Fisher. “The more I researched St. Hugh, the more I recognized the timeliness of his witness,” she explains. “The crisis in the episcopacy keeps worsening; we have so few models of good bishops. St. Hugh, like St. John Fisher, can help remind us all—but perhaps especially today’s bishops—what saintliness looks like in a bishop.” The life she found most helpful was published at the Grande Chartreuse in 1890 by an anonymous monk and translated into English by the Jesuit Herbert Thurston in 1898 under the title, The Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln.

In addition to reading about St. Hugh, Gwyneth researched artistic depictions of St. Hugh. Usually depicted as a bishop, artists have given Hugh several attributes; among them a chalice with the Christ Child, based on a Eucharistic miracle; and a swan, based on well-attested accounts of a pet swan from Hugh’s episcopal estate at Stow. Gwyneth was particularly influenced by a 1632 canvas by Vincenzo Carducci depicting St. Hugh divested of his pontifical finery, wearing the simple robes of a Carthusian. From it she developed the idea of depicting Hugh in Carthusian robes but holding a bishop’s crosier. Before developing her design, she also studied several fine depictions of anonymous Carthusian monks, including the Portrait of a Carthusian by Petrus Christus and one by Moroni. “I conceived the painting after the manner of the paintings of anonymous Carthusians,” she says, “but with the attributes of St. Hugh the bishop and wonder-worker superimposed.”

Preparatory Drawings & Color Studies

After Gwyneth and the patron had agreed on the design, Gwyneth set about collecting props and models. She decided against intruding on North America’s only charterhouse, in Vermont. Instead Gwyneth used artistic depictions to pictorially adapt a habit generously lent by the Dominican Priory in St. Louis.

As for her Holy Innocents, Gwyneth followed countless artists in making an asset of having small children in the house: “Anyone who’s seen a Rubens knows he had lots of children—baby fat abounds in his paintings, whether of cherubs or antique beauties.” For St. Hugh, Gwyneth found a model who looked at once austere, intelligent, and playful. Hugh was known for his wit, which more than once charmed a king incensed by the bishop’s probity. “Any man who kept a pet swan had to have a sense of play,” Gwyneth observes. She made sketches and color studies of both models, noting that “one of them was particularly skilled at holding the pose.”

For the chalice and crosier, Gwyneth consulted images of Gothic crosiers and chalices (the Chalice of Abbot Suger is one of her perennial favorites), but elected to use simpler models. “I didn’t want the astounding beauty of the objects to distract from their roles in the painting,” she says. Ultimately she relied on the generosity of a local rector and sacristan, who allowed her to sketch and paint in the sacristy. The crosier was borrowed from the statue of another saintly bishop from the Alps, St. Francis de Sales, but the chalice was authentic. She chose a neo-Gothic chalice to match St. Hugh’s rebuilding of Lincoln Cathedral in what was then known as the “French” or “modern” style. Back in her studio, Gwyneth used a wineglass double with her model.

It was Hugh’s swan that proved most elusive. After overtures to the zoo proved fruitless and the price of taxidermized specimens from Russia proved prohibitive, Gwyneth connected with the Audubon Center in West Alton, Missouri. They invited Gwyneth to sketch from two stuffed trumpeter swans and to attend the annual trumpeter swan convention during the November migration season. Since Hugh’s swan was not a trumpeter but its Eurasian counterpart, the whooper swan, Gwyneth adapted a sketch from one of the Audubon specimens with photo references.

The preparatory drawings do not always depict the objects as they will appear in the finished painting. Rather, as Gwyneth sees the object better by drawing it, she discovers how to adjust the object’s position, shape, or value range. Gwyneth liked the sketch of the crosier, but realized that the angle was too distracting for the final composition. The chalice, on the other hand, was closely translated into the painting.

“Ideally, I’d have all the elements in the same place at the same time, but that’s often impractical or impossible. Perhaps there’s an analogy in filmmaking, where scenes are rarely shot in chronological sequence, but according to location or an actor’s schedule. One has to constantly remember how one scene relates to all the others,” Gwyneth says.

In translating an element from a drawing to a painting, something is lost and something is gained, she says. “There’s a freshness in the initial engagement with an object that is always lost through repetition. That’s one advantage to direct painting,” where the artist paints without preparatory drawings or underpainting. To suit the contemplative St. Hugh, Gwyneth chose to work in a more deliberate manner, contemplating each object and bringing them together incrementally on the canvas. Seeing an object over the course of time allows the artist to distinguish what abides from what changes, in continuity with the Carthusian motto. “Especially in observing the habit on the model over the course of several days, I began to see the dominant drape that underlies the constantly shifting folds,” Gwyneth says. “Similarly with the chalice, the slight movement of the hands and the passage of the light through the window lend a peripatetic sparkle, but long looking establishes the dominant glow.”

The Painting Process

Gwyneth chose cotton duck canvas to take advantage of the texture of the cotton, especially for the habit. After priming the canvas, she applied undercoats to set the overall value range—the pale gold of the habit against the blue background. She then tried to build up all areas of the painting simultaneously. “I worked in several rounds—a bit on the figure, then the chalice, the Christ Child, the swan, the crosier, then a bit more on the figure, the chalice, etc.” Through this process of progressive development, Gwyneth established unity, always one of her primary concerns.

“Unity in painting is partly the fruit of spatial and tonal composition, but no matter how unified the design, the artist always needs to adjust during the painting process,” Gwyneth says. “I find that if I let myself get carried away bringing one area too close to a finish, I wind up having to rework it—thus destroying the freshness of the finish—to unite it with the other passages.”

Attention to unity was especially important in this painting because of the variety of elements that might compete for attention. Gwyneth sought to establish unity partly by organizing the areas of focus along a diagonal from lower left to upper right—moving from the swan to the chalice with the Christ Child to the face of the saint and finally the crook of the crosier. Each element was designed to have a strong light/shadow pattern, establishing each as a focal point as well as bringing each into relation with the others. Gwyneth also sought to organize the focal points into a hierarchy of importance by varying the degree of contrast and finish and through placement along the diagonal. At the heart of the painting is the chalice, then the saint’s face, while the swan and crosier are closer to the margins and less fully developed.

Tonally, Gwyneth established unity by working with a limited spectrum of hues—from white to gold to silver to black—except in the background. Getting the color of the background right was one of the most challenging parts of St. Hugh, especially as the relationship between the background and the habited figure was the central idea Gwyneth wanted to convey. “The color of the habit dictated the color of the background, but finding exactly the right color took time. When the background was too light, the habit didn’t stand out, but when it was too dark, the shadows in the habit and the emblems didn’t stand out. When it was too blue, the chromatic intensity distracted from the figure, but when it was too grey the whole painting appeared drab. It was a long exercise in finding the perfect middle tone,” Gwyneth recalls.

A crisis arose toward the end of painting when Gwyneth realized she had to shift the angle of the crosier to make it less distracting. Unable to work from her preparatory drawing, Gwyneth was at the point of scheduling another visit to the sacristy when she remembered a battered old umbrella stroller in the basement with an appropriately hooked handle. She covered it with aluminum foil to reflect the light and set it up in her studio. “There wasn’t a lot of usable visual information, but that might have actually helped me to subordinate the crosier in the hierarchy of focal points,” she says. The patron had requested some allusion to St. Hugh’s protection of the Jews of Lincoln from persecution by King Richard, so Gwyneth inserted a star of David in the center of the crook.

The last strokes were those of the subtle nimbus. Gwyneth sought to represent St. Hugh’s holiness spherically, “like heat waves radiating from the fire of charity within him.” She particularly wanted to avoid the “plate model” of halo found, for instance, in Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. “Unlike the two-dimensional haloes that persisted in much Trecento art even after the development of spatial extension, Masaccio’s haloes exist in three-dimensional space, but they have always struck me as distractingly close to state dinner plates,” Gwyneth explains. “I wanted to show the atmosphere around the saint distorted by his holiness.”

One often overlooked element in painting is the selection of the frame. When possible, Gwyneth likes to select a frame before she begins painting, just as she selects models, fabrics, and props. “The frame is at once an extension of the painting and its primary mediator into an architectural setting; it’s very important to select a frame that supports and does not overwhelm a painting. Some paintings are suffocated by their frames, like a Victorian debutante corseted into a satin ballgown.” For St. Hugh, Gwyneth selected a wide gold frame with a little masculine detail, at once suggestive of saintly glory and Charthusian austerity. “Gold is almost always best for a saint,” says Gwyneth, who admits to regret that she was never an Indian bride.

A Saint and his Swan

St. Hugh’s swan appeared at the episcopal manor of Stow on the day of his enthronement as bishop. It did not resist capture by the people of the manor, who offered it to Hugh on his first visit. Immediately, the swan ate from Hugh’s hand and became attached to him. “It was sometimes seen to bury its head and its long neck in the wide sleeves which St. Hugh wore, as though it were plunging them in limpid water, giving utterance all the time to cries of joy,” recounts Hugh’s biographer. It slept in his chamber, was his constant companion during every visit to Stow, and even prophesied his death.

After Hugh’s death a poet compared Hugh to his swan: “The Saint, in life as pure as thy white breast / In death as fearless, lulled with a song to rest.” Hugh’s biographer agreed: “No other inscription or device could so well express the sanctity and purity of the Saint in his labours on earth and the serenity of his death, as this graceful and realistic symbol, taken in this case not from a mere legend, but from authentic history.” (Life of St. Hugh, pages 141-147.)

Gwyneth depicted the swan nestling into the crook of Hugh’s arm, in continuity with the eyewitness account quoted above and in parallel with the bishop’s crook in the upper right of the painting.

To contrast the softness of the swan’s feathers with the smooth shininess of his eye and beak, Gwyneth used disparate techniques. For the feathers, she applied very little paint to the end of her brush’s bristles. When applied, this leaves many thin, broken streaks of color on the canvas, approximating the appearance of fur. For the harder surfaces, she used a wetter brush, adding linseed oil to the paint. “Out of the tube, the paint has the consistency of toothpaste. For clean, smooth lines—appropriate for depicting hard, smooth surfaces, you mix the paint with a thinner of oil or turpentine until it resembles heavy cream,” Gwyneth explains.

The Chalice and the Christ Child

If Gwyneth achieved her effect, after the initial impression of a Carthusian monk standing in warm light in an austere monastery, the viewer of St. Hugh of Lincoln should be captivated first by the chalice and the Christ Child emerging from it. The emblem alludes to one of several Eucharistic miracles involving the saint, when a young cleric was sent by God to ask St. Hugh “to urgently draw the attention of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the state of the clergy in England. Reform is grievously needed, and the Divine Majesty is deeply offended by innumerable abuses.”

God had assured the young man that his credibility would be established by telling St. Hugh what he was to see at Hugh’s pontifical Mass. At the consecration of the Mass, the man saw “a little child, very small but of Divine and entrancing beauty, resting in the Bishop’s hands.” Immediately after Mass, the cleric approached St. Hugh and told him what he had seen: “the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, under the form of a little Child, whom you twice raised above the chalice.” St. Hugh redoubled his own efforts at clerical reform in the Diocese of Lincoln, but was unable to convince the Archbishop of Canterbury to attend to the reform of the whole Church in England. (Life of St. Hugh, pages 340-345 and 357.)

“The story is extremely timely,” Gwyneth notes. “I think it offers a pattern of true reform: reform rooted in the centrality of the Eucharist.”

Gwyneth’s treatment of the chalice was especially inspired by consulting Baroque depictions of armor, including some paintings at the St. Louis Art Museum. “When St. Paul tells us to put on the armor of God,” she says, “I see an allusion now to the chalice; perhaps others will too.”

In person, the chalice has a subtle sculptural quality distinct from the rest of the painting. She achieved this through the use of impasto—thick globs of paint—in the lights, a technique exploited beautifully by Rembrandt and Frans Hals in the 17^th century. Using impasto is always risky, says Gwyneth. “You can’t fiddle with it or you lose the vitality; it becomes mere globs of paint rather than bringing something else to life. It has taken me a long time to feel confident enough to employ impasto.” Painting the chalice became Gwyneth’s favorite part of this painting.

St. Hugh holds the chalice with large, Mannerist hands, his thumbs and forefingers touching according to the ancient position of the priest’s fingers from the Consecration to the Ablutions.

Gwyneth elected to direct the Christ Child’s eyes outward toward the viewer, in distinction to Hugh’s own eyes, which are averted. “Hugh is not thinking of himself, of course, but of God,” Gwyneth explains. “But I wanted the Christ Child to address the viewer, drawing him into the contemplation of St. Hugh.”

St. Hugh in the Heavenly Chartreuse

Gwyneth’s St. Hugh of Lincoln is an invitation to contemplate the great saint anew in order to follow him in conforming our lives to Christ. From the initial impression of a Carthusian monk standing in a sunlit monastery down to the shining gold detailing of the chalice, the painting challenges us and our age to reevaluate our priorities in the light of St. Hugh’s.

The perspicuity of St. Hugh’s vision of what matters is also visible in his face. “He has a sense of calm seriousness, but also a sense of humor,” says Gwyneth. “Although he is not smiling, it is a face that could smile, that does smile.”

Yet it is important to Gwyneth that St. Hugh is not smiling. “Today we are accustomed to seeing our relatives and even our prelates grinning at us from portraits. In the past this was never so,” she notes. The smile is necessarily a momentary gesture, something fugitive. It becomes uncanny when captured in perpetuity. The saint lives always in contemplation of eternal things. The gravity and profundity of his vision, Gwyneth argues, ought to be on display in all his depictions.

Stylistically, too, Gwyneth sought to convey a supernatural vision. She describes the painting’s style as a “simplified naturalism.” Every element is taken from the observation of nature, but every form is simplified. The idea is that the viewer should not get lost in the curiositas of postlapsarian vision that analyzes things independently of God; instead he should have his vision renewed, seeing all things in the light of God through the holy vision of St. Hugh.

The saint is cast in a warm afternoon light that gently gilds his white habit. “It’s a transfigured vision, the sight of a visionary,” says Gwyneth. The light was inspired by the light in Perugino’s Vision of St. Bernard in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Gwyneth’s St. Hugh of Lincoln is indeed the portrait of a Carthusian monk standing steady at the foot of the Cross while the world turns, but a Carthusian monk translated into the heavenly Chartreuse.

Browse preparatory drawings for St. Hugh of Lincoln in the Shop.