SerpApi.Org
A remarkable new bronze sculpture of an angel has been installed in the Houses of Parliament to commemorate the lying in state of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall, when a quarter of a million people filed past from September 14 to 19 2022.
Eleanor Crook, born in 1966, spent four days observing and sketching the setting, the military and royal vigils that kept watch day and night, and the queue of mourners paying their respects. They were shown live on television and were a fascinating sight not hypnotic but endlessly varied and touching.
The sculptor found inspiration in the carved wooden angels of Westminster Hall: “I imagined one of the Medieval carved angels, high above in the architecture, swooping down to take a closer look at the Queen lying in state.”
Crook is fascinated by mortality and has made works reflecting the history of anatomy and pathology. I find some of these hard to look at. But her experience has made her new work physically convincing. It draws on traditional conventions in Christian art that make it satisfyingly legible.
The 5ft 6in sculpture is called May Flights of Angels Sing thee to thy Rest. These words were spoken by the King in a message broadcast the day after his mother’s death. They are based on Horatio’s words over the body of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play.
“It is the work of a message to the future,” the sculptor says, “so that people whom we will never meet will know how it felt to be present at this historic moment, this shared loss.”
There is a war memorial angel at the entrance to Westminster Hall that strikes me as static and lifeless. Eleanor Crook’s angel is caught in movement, alighting from flight. The features of its face remind me of medieval stained glass. The feathers of the angel’s wings recall the swan-feather plumes on the helmets of the Gentlemen at Arms standing vigil at Elizabeth II’s coffin.
The angel holds a heavy orb with a cross in one hand and a spindly lily frond as a sceptre in the other. These parts of the sculpture, cast using the lost-wax technique, were fashioned with the beeswax drippings from candles that stood around the coffin.
An arresting feature of the angel is the window-like space in its breast. The edges have a ropelike hem. It is like a window in a medieval reliquary through which a revered relic would be visible.
But in the heart of this angel, the object represented is the late Queen’s coffin, covered by the gold, red and blue of the Royal Standard. Around the opening are gemstones, standing for her children and grandchildren who stood vigil. The stones are uncut, and this cabochon treatment of jewels again takes its cue from medieval tradition.
The artist has depicted faces under the skirts of the angel’s cloak. She did this in a conscious reference to medieval religious artworks in which saints shelter believers under their cloaks.
“The overwhelming decorative elaboration of the Palace hardly invites yet more decorative sculpture,” Eleanor Crook declares. “Yet, it offered a challenge to raise my game of visual intricacy and symbolic allusion.” That she has done.
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The Norman Porch, on the route taken by the monarch at the State Opening of Parliament, takes its name from an intended decorative theme which was never accomplished.
Instead, among the rich marbles stand pale busts of Victorian-looking statesmen. The angel holds its own.
Inscribed round the hem of its robe, cast in lettering of a style used by Augustus Pugin, one of the architects of the Houses of Parliament, are the words of its title: “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
