At The Tablet, the arts have been centre-stage from the very beginning. In the first ever issue, dated 16 May 1840, sandwiched between a lecture by Thomas Carlyle (then in the final year of his life) and a finance column (“Money in the English market is still abundantly easy”) is a column headed Art and Artists. Like all the articles in the paper that week it was unsigned – this was not the era for publicity-seeking journalists, and the only attributed piece of writing in the entire edition is a letter to the editor from Daniel O’Connell, the architect of Catholic Emancipation on which the paper was built, welcoming the publication that would continue in print his work in politics.

Art and Artists laid out, like many of the pieces in that inaugural issue, the lie of the land on which this new newspaper would stand, and the topics it would be concerned with. And central to everything, even 300 years after it took place, was the Reformation. “The Fine Arts have been struggling to escape from that false position into which the great moral convulsion that marked the commencement of the designated period had thrown them,” says the author. “There are more statues in one building, the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster, than have been produced in all England since that period, up to our day.”
And yet – presumably partly because there would be many column inches to fill, across the years, decades and centuries that lay ahead – the writer was optimistic about change. “There is a revival, in arts, in literature and in religion, that links together the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries … the arts must revive with the Church that was their nursing mother …”