shewhomust | Graven images

Although Ushaw College is only four miles west of Durham City, and is loosely detached to the University, although I have walked and driven past it many times, until yesterday I had never been inside its gates. Main reason why I've never visited it: it is primarily a seminary whose task is to train catholic priests: I don't have any contacts there. Main reason why I have long wanted to visit it: it consists of a wonderful collection of elaborate nineteenth century gothic buildings, many by Augustus Welby Pugin and his son Peter Paul Pugin.

If the thought of me yearning to enter a catholic seminary is not incongruous enough, Ushaw is currently hosting an exhibition of the Methodist Art Collection. I associate Methodism with unadorned chapels, stern simplicity and emphasis on good works and the Word - including that Commandment which forbids representational art. I was surprised to learn that the Methodist church owns a collection of, specifically, modern art; and more susprised still to read the explanation (at the exhibition, and I cannot now find the information online, so this is from memory) that this is not the result of random bequests. At its core are the strategic acquisitions of one enthusiast who believed that his church should be buying modern art, and persuaded them to supply him with the funds to do so. Thereafter, when he was in London for church meetings, he would head down Bond Street and shop.

My taste in visual art is somewhat random, and I am out of sympathy with must of the subject matter of the collection. The big names - the Elizabeth Frink sketch for a Pietà, the Graham Sutherland Deposition, even a tiny Eric Gill Annunciation - did not appeal to me. But I liked a Patrick Heron study of an altar, the chalice, crucifix and candle a still life in cool dark blues and greens; John Reilly's Cain and Abel has the artfully naïve simplicity of a children's book illustration, Cain short and blocky, hard at work cultivating his little patch, Abel tall and snooty, and his sheep flowing around him and over the surrounding hills; and two paintings by Eularia Clarke. In Storm over the Lake, Christ is seen just beginning to calm the raging waters, while the waves wash over the boat above him in a great pyramid of foaming breakers and drowning faces; while in The Five Thousand he vanishes of the top edge of the picture, preaching to the crowd who sit around him on the grass eating their miraculous fish supper, as is traditional, from the newspaper.

The chapel was wonderful too: every surface was coloured or painted or gilded, all glass was stained, all woodwork was carved, there were misericords and angels in profusion, and it ought to have been chaos, but it all worked together in richness and harmony.