Drawn into your Presence.

St James’ Church, Park Hill, Clapham, SW4 9PB

September 16th-October 18th.  Part of National Heritage Open Days Festival, 2026.  Free.

 

 

This is a very interesting and, in some ways, unique exhibition curated by Jim Grover and Ruth Grover.  It links three distinct periods of Christian religious imagery.  The genesis of the show was the return to St. James’ Church in Clapham of an Imperial Family Bible dating from the mid-nineteenth century.  Such a bible would have been a treasured possession of an aspirational Victorian family, much like a complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica was in the mid-twentieth century.  The bible was a huge tome, running to well over 1000 pages in large type and weighing over 9 kilos.  It would have cost two months worth of an ordinary working man’s wages.  In amongst the text were engravings of biblical scenes – 38 in the original edition rising to 73 in the final edition.

Photographs of these engravings are the lynchpin of the exhibition.  Jim Grover, an award-winning documentary photographer who has had many exhibitions in London and elsewhere, recognized the artistry involved.  He carefully photographed the engravings with a Leica digital camera and his high-resolution prints, several times larger than the originals, are revelatory and astonishing in the detail they display and the expressiveness they convey.

The engravings – steel plate engravings to be precise – are all reproductions of paintings by the great artists of the Renaissance such as Leonardo, Titian and Raphael.  Typically, the engraver would have journeyed across Europe to sit and work in the church or gallery concerned, or he might have received a drawing by an intermediary draughtsman.  In either case the task was then to reproduce the image on steel plate, using a hardened steel burin to etch out the markings.  It was an exhaustive process, sometimes taking several years to create a single piece.  Engraving was the principle means by which great paintings situated in Italy could be appreciated by the European public at large.  Colour, light and texture was represented by lines, dots and cross-hatching.

What is noticeable is that the engravers did not slavishly strive to reproduce the paintings exactly.  They made artworks in their own right.  Take, for example, Christ taken down from the cross.  In Daniele da Volterra’s painting the male figure at the left edge is wearing off-white.  The engraver, William Holl, to strengthen his composition, changes the garment to near black.

One is tempted to say, in a good few cases, that once the engravings have been enlarged like this the images come across more strongly and more dramatically than the original paintings.

Complimenting the biblical scenes in the engravings are Jim Grover’s own contemporary black and white photographs of church work in the Diocese of Southwark which covers most of south London.  Thus we have scenes of prayer, of taking communion, of administering to the sick.  The links Grover makes between old and modern are sometimes straightforward; sometimes rather tenuous.  My personal favourite is the shot of a burial, ‘In accordance with customs.’

So, images from the twenty-first century accompany those from the nineteenth based on those from the sixteenth.  The exhibition is arranged around three side of St. James’ Church, the modern 1950’s building which replaced the original one bombed in the Second World War.

To explain the engraving process more fully Alice Clanachan, Curator of Prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum, will give a presentation, The Art of the Engraver, at St James’ Church on Saturday 10th October, between 5 and 6.30pm.

Whatever one’s religious persuasion, this exhibition provides a tremendous opportunity to see fantastically crafted images and insights into an artform and aspects of history which are often overlooked.

Graham Buchan © 2026.