A former episcopalian priest and teacher, I am now busy researching the Bible in art . . . . . . .

 

Phillip Medhurst was born in Leicester, England in 1948. Educated at Alderman Newton’s, a state-funded grammar school, he won an open scholarship to read English at Wadham College, Oxford. After graduation he went on to read Theology as part of his training for the Anglican ministry. On ordination he served in the South London parish of Abbey Wood while qualifying as a schoolteacher at Goldsmiths’ College. For ten years Medhurst pursued a career as a teacher in holy orders in both state-funded and private schools. After a brief stint as a chaplain at Malvern College, Medhurst was received into the Catholic Church (as a layman, with his wife and two children) in 1988. He then spent another ten years supervising the religious life of Catholic Schools in the West Midlands before retiring from schoolteaching to devote his time to writing and fine art.

 

Maintaining that education for education’s sake is essentially virtuous, Phillip Medhurst has also sustained a belief in the power of Beauty to reveal higher Truth. For this reason, he has pursued an interest in artistic productions which by one means or another are placed in the wayfare of Everyman. This has led to him sharing on Wikimedia Commons (among other public religious art) Bible illustrations and the architectural sculpture created by Walter Gilbert and associates (q.v. on Wikimedia).

 

Phillip Medhurst's evangelistic endeavour

 

Many of the prints in the Bowyer Bible have been made available online via social media by Revd. Phillip Medhurst (b.1948). For Medhurst the two great Bibles are not objects of academic study. Instead, he sees himself as carrying on the work of Thomas Macklin and especially of Robert Bowyer, namely, to spread abroad the Word of God as mediated by artistic genius. The 21st century phenomenon of the internet provides an opportunity undreamt-of by the two publisher-collectors to do this; and so Medhurst sees himself as carrying on the work they began. At the time of their uploading to archive.org (2026) these images are the only photos of Loutherbourg's drawings to be readily found anywhere. Anyone wishing to view the originals must go to Bolton and ask for the volumes of the Bowyer Bible to be taken down from the case and opened one at a time. Since the engravings in The Macklin Bible, all of which are now available online, are of an exceptional quality, there is little incentive to do this. (See eg. Manchester Digital Collections from the University of Manchester: a copy of a Macklin Bible in the John Rylands Library has been placed online.)

 

Medhurst's purchase and collation of prints illustrating the Bible ("The Phillip Medhurst Collection"), now housed at Belgrave Hall Leicester, was made possible by (and was within the terms of) the Kevin Victor Freestone Bequest. See

 

www.flickr.com/groups/the_phillip_medhurst_collection_of_...

 

and

 

www.flickr.com/groups/phillip_medhurst_bible

 

Medhurst’s own art, most notably “The Genesis Sequence” and “In Memoriam Robert Ujj”, is also publicly accessible, for which search “Phillip Medhurst” at Flickr. See

 

www.flickr.com/groups/the_art_of_phillip_medhurst

 

Medhurst currently lives in Calais.

 

For a complete inventory of Medhurst's published (printed) works see

 

www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2/278-8495134-9442731?u... www.amazon.co.uk/Phillip_Medhurst