Mary Adshead: To the End of Time
Title: To the End of Time
Artist: Mary Adshead (1904–1995)
Location: St Francis, Luton (C of E)
Date: 1962
The entire east wall of the parish church of St Francis, Luton, is taken up by Mary Adshead’s dynamic mural, To the End of Time. At its apex is Christ’s bowed head; surrounding the cross are the symbols of the four evangelists, and at its base are scenes of the modern world. Adshead had had a number of commissions for church murals, but this was only the second where she worked alongside the architect, in this case Peter Dunham. The design has its congregation in mind: St Francis was built for a post-war housing estate intended for the workers of the nearby Vauxhall Motors factory (which also contains murals by Adshead), and the lowest part of the mural takes as its theme scientific and technological development – the ‘problems of our generation’, as Adshead put it. On the left, an astronaut joins other figures looking upwards – in hope and appeal – to the cross; on the right, distorted buildings and bodies form a scene of horror – the aftermath of an atom bomb – from which an infant looks out blankly towards the viewer. Adshead’s design was aimed, she said, ‘to give a sense of the strength and permanence of Christianity from the life of Christ to the present day. It stresses the continuity’. The evangelists form a bridge between the hopes and anxieties of the 1960s and the monochrome Christ above, and, in their vigour and visual complexity, draw the contemporary congregation into this relation.
Mary Adshead (1904–1995, British) was born and grew up in London. She studied in Paris and then at the Slade School of Art, where, joint with Rex Whistler, she won the Summer composition prize, which led to a mural commission for a boys’ club in the East End undertaken while they were both still students. It was as a muralist that she became best known, with a succession of commissions over the next decades, many of which have been replaced or destroyed – Selfridges restaurant, Piccadilly and Bank underground stations, Vauxhall Motors, as well as private houses and churches; she also designed postage stamps. Adaptable in style and technique, she studied mosaic making in the 1960s, and late in her career produced a large mosaic mural for an underpass in Rotherhithe, London. She helped organise the Society for Mural Painters as well as the Artists’ Refugee Committee for artists fleeing persecution under National Socialism. Despite increasing problems with mobility, which she blamed on years of painting on ladders, she continued working until her death at 91.
Further Information
Mural
Permanent display
See Mary Adshead’s To the End of Time mural on the Ecclesiart map here.
Other artworks in churches by Mary Adshead: Christ in Glory, St Mary and All Saints, Plymstock, Devon; mural of St Dunstan, St Peter, Plymouth; windows, St Michael and All Angels, Borehamwood; painted reredos and Nativity paintings, Lady Chapel, St Columba, Anfield (made for St Christopher, Withington, now demolished).