The Hereford Screen
George Gilbert Scott, made by Skidmore's Art Manufactures Company (1811 to 1878) · 1862
A wall of ironwork more than ten metres high and eleven wide fills the end of the ironwork gallery on the top floor, glittering with brass, copper, enamel and mosaic. Five arches carry a parade of painted iron foliage, and above the central arch Christ stands with angels on either side. It was designed by the Gothic Revival architect George Gilbert Scott for Hereford Cathedral, to divide the nave from the choir, and it was made in Coventry by Francis Skidmore's firm. Shown at the International Exhibition of 1862 in London before it went to Hereford, it was hailed as the grandest work of modern ironwork ever made.
The screen is a triumph of Victorian industry pretending to be medieval. Look at the iron leaves, which were beaten and cast in hundreds of pieces and painted in reds, greens and gold, at the columns of polished stone, and at the panels of glass mosaic and enamel on copper set into the arches. The figures of Christ and the angels are made of copper, beaten into shape over wooden forms, and the whole structure weighs around eight tons. Every element was mass produced in a factory and assembled like a machine, yet the effect is of a shrine.
By the nineteen sixties, taste had turned against such things. The screen was removed from Hereford in 1967, taken apart, and stored in pieces in a museum in Coventry, where it rusted for years. The V&A acquired it in 1984 and spent more than a decade restoring it, with the help of over a million pounds and thousands of hours of work, before putting it up in 2001. It is the largest single object in the museum, and a reminder that the Victorians who founded this place built on this scale in their own time.
Did You Know? When the screen was reassembled in 2001 the conservators had to identify and clean more than thirty thousand separate pieces.
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