Chris Eldon Lee reviews the exhibition ‘Heavenly Lights’ at Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery until January 15th 2017.
She is, say her fans, the greatest artist ever born in Shropshire. She was also a motorbike-riding, cheroot-smoking, feminist nun, who was once arrested as a German spy …. hardly the sort of character to slip off the radar. And yet she’s largely forgotten, even in her home town of Shrewsbury, until now.
Marga Rope was born here in 1882 and lived to be 70…but at the height of her artistic success she locked herself in a convent and worked behind closed doors for the rest of her life; creating sixty church windows across three continents.
The ethereal beauty of rays of light streaming through coloured glass has been recognised for a Millennium as being a particularly mystical and mercurial art form; for it all depends on the position and intensity of the sun. It’s also a particularly industrial art form, involving the manufacture of clear or tinted glass to which paint is delicately applied before being exposed to the ferocity of a kiln; Then the glass is cut and assembled between strips of hammered lead. It’s tough work. But Shrewsbury’s Marga Rope took the art to a new level, particularly with her exquisite painting of saintly faces. Previously, stained glass figures had bland, stereotypical faces. Marga, like the creators of the Chinese Terracotta army, based her characters on real people; though we don’t know who they were.
Take her stained glass panel of The Bible story of Judith for example, discovered in a bathroom in Church Stretton and on public display at last. Judith is painted as a strong, assertive, noble-faced woman. Leading her army in Syria, she’s seduced an enemy general with her womanly charms and then decapitated him whilst he slept. The head is cradled by her beautiful companion who is pale and compassionate in comparison. Marga has Judith looking quietly satisfied, having achieved a victory in war no man could possibly match.
There are comical works too. A light box illuminates a work from her student days at Birmingham Art School (in 1905) and depicts animals and birds in human clothing going off to market; an owl, a cat, a rat and a parrot, all with expressions of expectation. It’s great fun – but when I tell you a sister piece in New York has recently tripled in value, it’s clear Miss Rope is finally being taken seriously.
Amongst the glass – transported to Shrewsbury Museum by the most expensive courier company available – are some striking black and white sketches (charmingly called cartoons) of forthcoming projects. A full sized portrait – as forthright as a half-timbered house – adorns one wall. It’s a working drawing of a female figure showing how the leading might work. She has a huge, healed scar across her throat, which makes her recognisable to the initiated as Saint Winefride. The owner had no idea of its value or provenance and had thrown it out into a skip during a house clearance. Luckily it was rescued.
It was Bishop Moriarty of Shrewsbury’s Catholic Cathedral who gave Marga her big break in 1910. He commissioned the Great West Window which she filled with portraits of Winefride, Edmund, Thomas More and others.
But the afternoon sun was streaming through the tall Baptistery Window and I was drawn towards its fabulous hues; brilliant blues, rich reds and verdant greens.
It’s topped with an aerial view of a white dove in flight; the Holy Spirit descending. Below are images of an Ark on a storm tossed sea, choir boys in song, a prancing deer and a Holy Citadel…all woven together by a figure of eight of rushing blue/white streams; the dappling of the sun emphasising a sense of movement.
Marga Rope was a true pioneer and she should be up there with fellow Salopians Charles Darwin and Mary Webb. Her pious lifestyle kept her away from public glare. Indeed, there are only four known photographs of her. But now her story is finally being told, she is elusive no more.