Legacy

Abstract

The book ends with a reflection on the nature of Hussey’s model of patronage. Hussey did inspire others during his career, and immediately following, to commission new works for churches. But Chap. 9 argues that Hussey’s success was, in large part, due to his personal qualities: his work was not as a distant, demanding patron but as a friend and collaborator, and as an unofficial chaplain to those with whom he worked. As such, his way of working was not easily codified into a model that could easily be transferred to other contexts, and the more public and institutional way in which the churches have come to work in the very recent past is perhaps an acknowledgment of this fact. More fundamentally, it argues that Hussey’s work was based on a catholic understanding of the relationship between national religion and culture, formed before the Second World War but given new impetus by it, which became hard to sustain as both the arts and the position of the churches changed during the long Sixties. Those in present day churches who would see a live tradition of ecclesiastical patronage have needed to look elsewhere for their justification.