Pioneering conservation project to preserve ‘remarkable’ wall paintings at England church

[Church of England] Church murals painted over a century ago by a leading war artist have been assessed and analyzed as part of the first stages of a pioneering conservation project backed by the Church of England and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Master-level students in wall painting conservation from the Courtauld Institute of Art spent six weeks of field work in the Lady Chapel of St. Jude’s in Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London examining wall paintings by the artist Walter Starmer.

Starmer was a World War I artist, stained-glass artist and children’s book illustrator when he was commissioned in 1919 to commemorate the war’s fallen in the Lady Chapel of the church through images of women of the Bible and female saints and heroines from Christian history.

The six master’s students are the first to take part in a pioneering project backed by the Church of England’s expanded conservation grants scheme, which is aimed at supporting the training of experts in skilled crafts, such as wall-painting conservation.

The church has been on the Heritage At-Risk Register since 2015, and its wall paintings are in need of cleaning and conservation.

The students have been examining the original techniques used to create the paintings and assessing the factors affecting their condition, including the structure and architecture of the church. This has included detective work examining photographs from the church archives over the last century in an attempt to track changes since it was built.

The project is the first stage of a collaboration over several years between St. Jude’s and the Courtauld.

Read more about the project here.