By ANDREW LAMBIRTH [The Spectator] – I must admit I’d never heard of the Methodist Art Collection, so when I discovered it was temporarily on show at St Peter’s Church in Sudbury (until 21 August), I hastened along. The collection was inaugurated in the early 1960s by a Methodist layman, Dr John Morel Gibbs, who had noticed the generally poor quality of religious art and church furnishings, and who hoped that a more imaginative approach could be encouraged by a top-quality art collection. To this end Dr Gibbs approached the Revd Douglas Wollen to purchase works of art, and the resulting collection travelled the country in the mid-1960s. In 1978 the works were installed at Southlands College of Education and inevitably became less visible. After various vicissitudes, the collection ended up on loan at Westminster College, Oxford, and an exhibition programme — as well as an acquisitions policy — was organised.

In this age of rampant secularisation, the making of truly effective religious works of art has become increasingly rare, and it comes as scant surprise that most of the best work dates from the first half of the 20th century. Graham Sutherland is represented by a severe, angular ‘Deposition’ (1947), the figure reduced to bone and empty cage. There’s a rather harrowing ‘Crucifixion’ from the 1920s by William Roberts, a congested and suitably troubled composition; a rather good early oil painting by Patrick Heron from 1950, ‘Crucifix and Candles: Night’, very graphic and atmospheric; a large (by this artist’s standards) Albert Herbert painting of Epiphany; a smallish but intense gouache by Ceri Richards of the Supper at Emmaus, which is a study for the altarpiece at St Edmund Hall, Oxford; and a large watercolour by the inimitable Edward Burra, depicting ‘The Pool of Bethesda’, where Jesus told the crippled to walk, a scene depicted here as sinister and alarming in mood rather than healing and optimistic.

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