The Temptation of Saint Guthlac
Loughnan Pendred (1902-1980)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1939
Materials
Oak
Measurements
783 x 263 x 248 mm
Place of origin
Cambridgeshire
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 514594
Summary
Oak, The Temptation of Saint Guthlac, Loughnan Pendred (1902-1980), 1939. A wooden sculpture of Saint Guthlac of Crowland (c. 673-714), being tormented by two demons. The saint, wearing a tunic with cowl, is seen screaming as he is assailed by the naked demons, one of which stands before St Antony, whilst the other reclines on the ground and tries to grasp hold of Antony’s habit. The saint’s raised right hand would originally have held a scourge, which he is about to bring down on the demon fleeing him, which raises its hands to protect its head. The sculpture was carved from a single piece of oak in 1939 by Loughnan Pendred (1902-1980).
Full description
This expressive wooden sculpture shows Saint Guthlac (c. 673-714), a hermit saint who made his home at Crowland in Lincolnshire and so has become known as Guthlac of Crowland. Before the Norman Conquest, Guthlac was the most popular hermit saint in England after Saint Cuthbert. Guthlac was of Mercian royal blood and grew up to become a successful soldier. After nine years he experienced a deep conversion, which decided him to give up his secular life to become a monk at Repton, the most prestigious abbey in Mercia. He eventually decided to leave Repton to take up the life of a solitary hermit. Guthlac went to Crowland on what was then an island in the midst of the dankest area of the Fens, accessible only by boat. Arriving on 24th August 699, the feast day of his patron Saint Bartholomew, he dug out an ancient Celtic barrow to create an oratory and cell. Guthlac took as his models Christ in the desert, Saint Anthony in the wilderness, and Saint Cuthbert on the Farne Islands. He lived in utter solitude and poverty. According to the monk Felix, who knew Guthlac and wrote his life a few years after his death, the hermit ‘spent the whole of his solitary life wearing garments made of skins. So great indeed was the abstinence of his daily life that from the time when he began to inhabit the desert he ate no food of any kind except that after sunset he took a scrap of barley bread and a small cup of muddy water.’ In his solitude, Guthlac was attacked by Britons who had taken refuge in the Fens and was also assailed by devils offering temptations, but Guthlac was sustained by visions of angels and of his patron, Bartholomew the Apostle. When he knew that his end was close, Edburga, abbess of Repton, sent to Guthlac a shroud and a leaden coffin, whilst his sister Pega came with other disciples of Guthlac to attend his burial. The cult of Guthlac began when a year later his coffin was opened and his body was discovered to be incorrupt. A shrine was created at Crowland, to which Pega gave Guthlac’s psalter and his scourge, which he is said to have received from his patron Saint Bartholomew. In the twelfth century Guthlac’s shrine was transferred to the abbey church built on the site of his cell and was much embellished. It was destroyed at the Reformation. The most important source for Guthlac’s life is the near contemporary account by Felix, which borrows heavily from accounts of the Egyptian saint and hermit, who retired to the desert to live in solitude as a hermit for many years, becoming known as the father of monasticism. Notably in the context of the Anglesey Abbey sculpture, Antony Abbot was also tormented by demons. Felix wrote vividly of the demons that assailed Guthlac: 'They were ferocious in appearance, terrible in shape with great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, filthy beards, shaggy ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horses' teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, pigeons breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries. For they grew so terrible to hear with their mighty shriekings that they filled almost the whole intervening space between earth and heaven with their discordant bellowings.' Felix also noted that the demons spoke Welsh which in fact helped Guthlac, who also spoke the language and was able to remonstrate with them and eventually drive them out. In the sculpture, Guthlac originally seems to have held a scourge, which is said to have been given to him by his patron Saint Bartholomew, to use as a defence against the demons and to do penance with. Loughnan Wildig Pendred (1902-1980) was the eldest son of the better-known Loughnan St. Lawrence Pendred (1870-1953), a mechanical engineer who was editor of The Engineer, a weekly newspaper for engineers, from 1906 to 1946. His mother was Laura Mary Pendred (née Wildig, 1880-1972). The younger Loughnan Pendred was a woodcarver and the crafts teacher at Bottisham Village College in Cambridgeshire, when the school opened in 1937. Bottisham is the next village to Lode, so no more than a mile or so from Anglesey Abbey. Loughnan is recorded as living in another nearby village, Swaffham Bulbeck, in the catalogue for the 1949 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, at which he exhibited (no. 1305) three oak panels depicting the Nativity, Adoration of the Shepherds and Adoration of the Kings, made by him for the Organ Gallery in the church of Saint Laurence, Affpuddle, in Dorset. Pendred also made the Crucifix in the war memorial shrine in the garden of peace at the East end of Saint Laurence, all these works the gifts of Sir Ernest Debenham. In 1952, Pendred exhibited at the RA slate reliefs of the Madonna (no. 1492) and of Eve (no. 1518) and by this time he was living in Cambridge. As the Anglesey Abbey sculpture and Pendred’s exhibits at the Royal Academy suggest, the great majority of his work was religious in its subject matter. He also made the carving of the ‘Pelican in her Piety’ for the Great Court of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the sculpture of the Virgin and Child in Great St Mary’s Church, Cambridge and a rood screen for St James’s church, Stretham in Cambridgeshire. One secular work, which Lord Fairhaven would have been very familiar with, was the ten feet (three metres) long relief the Harvest Panel, commissioned for the new Bottisham Village College by its first headmaster, Henry Morris, on its opening in 1937 and still hanging in the school today. Lord Fairhaven was in fact Chairman of the Managers of the new Bottisham Village College, presiding over the opening on 6 May 1937, by the Right Honourable Oliver Stanley, President of the Board of Education. Among other close links with Bottisham, he was a magistrate and Broughton Hall, the former village hall in Bottisham, was used as an annex to the school from 1938 until the 1980s (Tom Hickman, Finding Fairhaven. A search for the shy lord of Anglesey Abbey, privately printed, 2017, pp. 77, 152, note 5). In March 1938, one of two memorial services for Lord Fairhaven’s mother, Cara, Lady Broughton, was held in the church of the Holy Trinity, Bottisham, in which in 1941 he had a memorial tablet to his mother installed (Finding Fairhaven, pp. 69, 74). He subsequently commissioned his friend the architect Sir Albert Richardson to build a memorial chapel to Lady Fairhaven in Bottisham church, which was consecrated in 1952. Lord Fairhaven would therefore certainly have known Loughnan Pendred and as Chairman of the Governors must have been involved in the commissioning of the Harvest Panel at the College. He may have commissioned the sculpture around this time, as it was acquired by him directly from the artist in 1939 (information from the artist’s family). Jeremy Warren 2020
Provenance
Bequeathed to the National Trust by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) with the house and the rest of the contents.
Credit line
Anglesey Abbey, The Fairhaven Collection (The National Trust)
Makers and roles
Loughnan Pendred (1902-1980), sculptor previously catalogued as by Loughnan St Lawrence Pendred (1870-1953), sculptor
References
Christie, Manson & Woods 1971: The National Trust, Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge. Inventory: Furniture, Textiles, Porcelain, Bronzes, Sculpture and Garden Ornaments’, 1971, p. 154.