The Church of England is so short of money that it is selling the Bishop of Durham’s Zurburáns. Estimated to fetch £20 million, these 12 Spanish masterpieces are expected to cover half the Church’s current account deficit for one year. What happens after they are gone and the money is spent is not revealed. The Church Commissioners will presumably turn their gaze on the Chichester Lazarus, the Canterbury Black Prince effigy and the Hereford Mappa Mundi, yet again. After that, they may start flogging statues from the west front of Wells and gargoyles from anywhere they can reach with a hammer.
Anglican apologists are fond of incanting that “one must have sympathy with the Church of England in its financial predicament”. Not me. The Church has blown one of the great property estates in England, yet refuses to join with other Christians to sort out the chaos now enveloping all church property. Last week saw a scene of startling cynicism, the leaders of the British Churches pledging a “covenant” before the Queen to seek out Christian unity. They have been seeking it for decades and systematically not finding it. Emissaries are now in Rome, supposedly negotiating points of contact with the Pope. They have as much hope as Henry VIII’s envoys in the matter of Anne Boleyn.
It is two decades since the Anglicans tried to reunite with the Methodists and gave up the struggle. Talks with Roman Catholics also foundered, creating more disunity within Anglicanism than unity outside it. The German Lutherans have made their peace with Rome, achieving in five years what the Church of England could not achieve in 500. Separate churches continue to be built the length and breadth of Britain. Towns and villages are littered with concrete evidence of disunity. Except in new settlements such as Milton Keynes, there is no one House of God, rather a scattered estate of underused buildings. Britain’s Churches manage their property worse even than the Ministry of Defence, a body also struggling to unite three proud faiths, Army, Navy and Air Force.
Rather than unite, the Church is to sell one of its most valuable possessions, the set of paintings by Francisco de Zurburán now hanging in the Long Dining Room at Bishop Auckland, residence of the Bishops of Durham. By the Sevillian contemporary of Velázquez and El Greco, the paintings are 8ft-high portrayals of Jacob and his 12 sons, in a variety of apparently Spanish costumes. These full-length figures stand silhouetted against a bright sky, like a cast of actors in a haunting carnival. Some are dressed as beggars, some as farmworkers, some in chieftain’s costume. Over them broods old Jacob, stooping and barefoot, carrying in his lined face the wisdom of age. They fill a room filtered with sombre northern light. It is one of the most moving small galleries I have ever visited. The whole is vastly more than the sums of its parts.
The pictures were probably painted in the 1630s for shipment to South America and are believed to have been seized en route by pirates and brought to England. They were purchased in 1756 by the Bishop of Durham, Richard Trevor, for £124. One of the 13 is a copy, Benjamin, the original having been acquired by the 3rd Duke of Ancaster. It hangs forlorn in the gallery of the chapel at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire, separated from its brothers and surely meriting reunion. The complete set was exhibited to great excitement at the National Gallery in 1994. They can be viewed at Bishop Auckland, in the room beyond the great ballroom, its windows tinted pink “to improve the ladies’ complexion”.
The pictures were left by Bishop Trevor to the bishopric, not the diocese. This is apparently why the Church Commissioners can seize them and carry them off south. While no decision has yet been made on the timing of a sale, the decision is confirmed in the commissioners’ latest annual report. The paintings are dismissed as a “nonincome producing asset” and therefore unjustifiable. No mention is made of other candidates for this damnation.
Nothing better illustrates the contempt with which Metropolitan Britain holds the North than that a disposal of such masterpieces could be contemplated. Nobody would wrench them from a London wall. The Church Commissioners would regard it as sacrilege to sell Westminster Abbey’s Charter of Offa or the Lytlington Missal, or Henry Moore’s Virgin and Child from St Paul’s. I could list a hundred works in southern churches that would fetch excellent prices at Sotheby’s. To the Church, as to other public bodies, north of the Trent is peasant territory. The Culture Department subsidises the National Gallery to show its Zurburán free, yet is happy for £3.50 to be charged to visit the ones in Bishop Auckland.
There is nothing wrong in treating art objects as marketable. If pictures cannot be bought and sold, collections will not be renewed and will ossify. But some works are integral to their settings. Zurburán’s biblical images seem powerfully appropriate to their episcopal castle overlooking the rugged ravine of the River Wear. To steal them to compensate for some dud London property speculation is cruel indeed.
Northumberland has Britain’s most under-appreciated attractions. The Zurburáns rank among the jewels of the region, with Durham Cathedral, Alnwick Gardens, Bamburgh Castle and the ruins of Holy Island. They embody the dignity of a region slowly recovering from half a century of decline. They are part of its past and thus of its future as a place of discovery and resort. If they are not “income-producing”, it is the job of their custodians to make sure they are. What brings income to a region is not a single item but a mix of attractions, a variety of appeal. Bishop Auckland is part of that mix. Without its Zurburáns it is a byway.
Under draconian Charity Commission rules, such works if sold must go to the highest bidder and gain the maximum return. No big museum could resist making a bid. Local museums such as the Bowes or Tyneside’s Laing Gallery could not afford these works. They would almost certainly go to a national museum at home or abroad. Big art is always the enemy of small galleries. The North East would be stripped of one of its prize assets, and all for half a year’s deficit on current account.
Go to any small town in England and you will see each Sunday a bizarre sight. It is of tiny crocodiles of worshippers coming out of half a dozen buildings, each dedicated to the same God under the same Christian rubric. Herculean efforts are devoted to keeping roofs on these buildings, cleaning them, organising rotas and flowers and raising money. Few church buildings are truly historic or merit preservation. Most are relics of 18th and 19th-century sectarianism, kept alive by family tradition and local class distinction.
Were these institutions rich, as once they were, there would be no problem. Most are now poor, some desperately so. Absurd amounts of money go to sustaining properties that should long ago have been sold to endow united churches and those who minister to them. Nowhere in Europe has such a proliferation of church buildings as Britain, many of them sad, gloomy structures, rarely used and blighting their surroundings.
As my colleague Ruth Gledhill reported this week, senior Anglicans are eager to merge dioceses to save money. Plans are afoot to abolish Bradford, Portsmouth and nameless others. It is senseless for London to remain split in two. Diocesan expansionism — there are five dioceses in Yorkshire alone — has proved wasteful and bureaucratic. Each one costs its parishes between £2 million and £6 million in contributions. Savings here alone could match a set of Zurburáns, year after year. What is outrageous is that English Churches should sign high-profile Covenants of Unity as if they were meaningless Blairite targets, yet do nothing to realise the “unity dividend” of unrealised property assets. The Church of England, which clings to Establishment, should take the lead. It should not choose the easy option of selling its family silver.
The Zurburáns remain the glory of the North. Like the apes of Gibraltar and the ravens of the Tower, they embody the spirit of place. Their departure would signal Northumberland’s demise. In the North they should stay. The Church should show more respect and look elsewhere to endow its extravagance.