Modern Mosaics
SIR,—Having read your art critic's notice of the replicas of the Ravenna mosaics at present exhibited by the Arts Council at the New Burlington Galleries, I am impelled to remind him of an earlier pioneer in this revival than Professor Bovini and his small group of collaborators, to whom he gives the entire credit. It must be thirty years since Boris Anrep, abandoning his early experiments in various forms of painting and drawing, began a prolonged, profound and I believe solitary study of all the best early mosaics to be found in Italy, Greece and Turkey. Deeply versed before that in all branches of early Russian iconography, he was able to combine this tradition with the influence of his new studies in a series of works done in this country up to the outbreak of the Second World War. These include many decorations in private London houses, the well-known floors in the Tate and National Galleries, extensive though less familiar mosaics on the walls of apses of the Greek Orthodox Church in Bayswater, the Cathedral of Mullingar, and at a chapel in Stirling. In all these works, which increase in freedom and brilliance as Anrep proceeded, the adoption of early Byzantine style and technical idioms is funda- mental—one might say axiomatic—even in the treatment of modern subjects.
The most accessible of his later and better work is the second series done in the Greek Church in Moscow Road, Bayswater, a few years before the war. It is a pity they are so little known.—Yours faithfully,
Coombe Bissett, Salisbury.
HENRY LAMB (R.A.).
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