The Bloomsbury Group has long been a fascination of mine and a subject of one of my first Letters from England. A group of writers and artists, who came to prominence at the beginning of the twentieth century, two of its key members Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell were commissioned to paint Berwick Church.
And every spare inch has been painted in unmistakable Bloomsbury style – an unusual enterprise in an English church, which lost so many of its painted churches to the excesses of the Protestant Reformation.
So looking like something from Italy, it stands proudly in East Sussex.
They used locals and friends as models, draping them in bedsheets and lying them across armchairs, legs in the air in angelic flight!
If not perfect, this work of the war years, has a poignancy and strange beauty of its own.
On the theme of angels, I leave you with a scene from Wim Wenders 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire. What can I say about this great film? A truly unique classic.
