Meppershall Chapel

Frederick (commonly F.L.) Griggs(1876-1938), was a distinguished English etcher, architectural draughtsman, illustrator and early conservationist, associated with the late flowering of the Arts and Crafts movement in the Cotswolds. He was one of the first etchers to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy.

Born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, he worked as an illustrator for the Highways and Byways series of regional guides for the publishers, Macmillans. In 1903 he settled at Dover's House, in the market town of Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds, and went on to create one of the last significant Arts and Crafts houses at 'New Dover's House'. There he set up the Dover's House Press, where he printed late proofs of the etchings of Samuel Palmer, amongst others. He collaborated with Ernest Gimson and the Sapperton group of craftsmen in architectural and design work in the area.

'Fred' Griggs converted to Catholicism in 1912, and set about producing an incomparable body of etchings, 57 meticulous plates in a Romantic tradition, evoking an idealised medieval England of pastoral landscapes and architectural fantasies of ruined abbeys and buildings. His best known etchings include <em>Owlpen Manor</em> dedicated to his friend and near neighbour, the architect-craftsman Norman Jewson, <em>Anglia Perdita</em>, <em>Maur's Farm</em>, <em>St Botolph's, Boston</em> and <em>The Almonry</em> (the last two are in Te Papa's collection). Collections of his etched work are held in major public collections worldwide.

Griggs was one of the finest and most respected etchers of his time. He was an influential leader of the British etching revival in the Twenties and Thirties, and "the most important etcher who followed in the Samuel Palmer tradition" (K.M. Guichard, British Etchers, 1977). He occupies a pole position in the Romantic tradition of British art: he links the world of Blake, Turner and Samuel Palmer to a younger generation of neo-Romantic artists, including Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Robin Tanner.

In a review of a Griggs exhibition in the Fine Art Scoiety, London, Roderic Dunnett singled out 'Meppershall Chapel (1915) with its merging and juxtaposition of sacred and secular, [is] where one sees the evolving suggestive power that characterises his best work. They are massive, looming, possibly threatening, certainly disquieting edifices which embrace and merge the natural and the man-made and transform the observed into the visionary ("realism brought to the aid of idealism", as Griggs wrote in a letter to Russell Alexander). In particular, the artful distribution of light by the finest delicate touches (owing something to forerunners such as Palmer, but above all observed from nature)'.

Meppershall Chapel is a 12th century structure near a village in Bedfordshire. It is used for storage and is on private land. Built and dedicated to Thomas a Becket, it became an important place of pilgrimage for those too ill to make the journey to Canterbury. A papal letter of 1291 promised penitence to those who made the pilgrimage with "remission of one year and forty days penance". By Griggs' time, it had long been a picturesque semi-ruin. Its Becket and pilgrimage associations clearly appealed greatly to him, and he brilliantly romanticised it.

See:

Roderick Dunnett, 'The saviour of the lost world', <em>The Independent, </em>15 October 1999, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-saviour-of-the-lost-world-737732.html

The Virtual Library, Meppershall Timeline, http://virtual-library.culturalservices.net/webingres/bedfordshire/vlib/0.digitised_resources/meppershall_timeline.htm

Wikipedia, 'F.L. Griggs', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._L._Griggs

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art  August 2018