Thursday 17 November 2011

Bosanquet window


We went to Rock the other day.I had not been there since I was young. It was a delight to see the church again . It is a fairly decent,small Norman building with many artistic and intellectual associations.(David Jones, Ben Nicholson etc from the time when Helen Sutherland lived here). The intellectual links come from the Bosanquet family who were archaeologists, administrators and active in charitable work.The church has an excellent late window by Leonard Evetts from 1991.This window commemorates four members of the Bosanquet family.Robert Bosanquet and his wife Ellen, his son Charles and his wife Barbara.The older Bosanquets are remembered in the left hand panel where you can see a Minoan double axe, a Greek temple and a circular Greek motif-RCB excavated in Crete.In the right hand panel reference is made to CIB's activities as first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Newcastle by display of the university's coat of arms.CIB's birth in Athens is hinted at by the appearance of the owl from the rebverse of an Athenian tetradrachm.I have not worked out the significance of the eagle yet It may relate to Barbara Bosanquet who was American. In that case the images at the top of the left hand panel would relate to her mother -in-law.(PS Will get a better picture when I visit next).Here is a detail of Athena's owl-it gives abetter impression of the window.

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