Church and Patronage in 20th Century Britain: Walter Hussey and the Arts. By Peter Webster

Abstract

Walter Hussey is principally known for an extraordinary sequence of commissions of contemporary art and music, first for St Matthew’s Northampton and then for Chichester Cathedral. These read as a roll-call of post-war artistic and musical life: Marc Chagall, Henry Moore, John Piper, Graham Sutherland in the visual arts; Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Gerald Finzi, Michael Tippett, William Walton in music. In this book Peter Webster reviews Hussey’s work as a patron between 1943 and 1978, placing him in his immediate theological, cultural, and aesthetic context. As such, Hussey is a lens through which Webster helpfully and critically views relationships between patrons and artists in the twentieth century while also exploring ways in which the Church of England met with forces of cultural change in the arts and religious life of the nation. At points this wider focus feels forced on Webster as, while Hussey’s career as a patron is relatively well self-documented (with the exception of letters sent by him to those he commissioned), the broader picture of his role as incumbent and as Dean proves somewhat harder to flesh out. Webster views Hussey’s focus on the arts as one that dominated his ministry to the exclusion of much else and as undertaken by means that could not provide a model for later developments.