The vast majority of artists who shaped the architecture and design of Catholic churches in Britain and Ireland are men. But there are many women – some now celebrated, some neglected – who also made their mark. In recognition of next week’s International Women’s Day, we salute the contribution of ten of them
Gertrude Martin
Mosaicist, 1881-1952
Westminster Cathedral – one of the most significant Catholic churches ever constructed in Britain – was conceived from the very start as a showcase for mosaic art. Both its architect John Francis Bentley and its first incumbents, Cardinal Vaughan and Cardinal Bourne, intended it to be Britain’s masterpiece of the Byzantine revival that had begun in late Victorian times, bringing an artform more associated with the sun-kissed cathedrals of Ravenna, Venice and Milan to grey London.
What is less widely known, however, is that much of the mosaic art on show at the cathedral today – dancing colours transforming the cavernous space once described as “Cardinal Vaughan’s railway station” – was the work of a remarkable woman.
Gertrude Martin, born into a family of Irish extraction, was studying commercial art when she heard that the mosaicist George Bridge was recruiting a team to work on the initial mosaics for the newly finished cathedral. She applied, and was soon assembling the tiles in the Holy Souls Chapel, before moving to the Chapel of St Gregory and St Augustine. From the start, she later told a journalist, she loved the work. “Each piece is treated differently; one takes a different point of view each time,” she said.