3-082-272 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Decoration of St. Paul's Cathedral: a mosaic by W. B. Richmond, A.R.A., 1895. 'Of St. Paul's, the great achievement of Sir Christopher Wren, round which his seventy or more churches clustered, it is scarcely needful to speak. Its splendid position, its magnificent proportions, and its unbounded capabilities of decoration, now in slow process of being satisfied, are too well known. Mr. Bodley's reredos - the subject of less artistic criticism than of legal dispute; Mr. Richmond's mosaics, and the Wellington monument, by Mr. Stevens, have been frequently before our readers in one form or another. Important as the additions of recent years have been to our great metropolitan cathedral, much remains to be done to give it internally that distinction which the oldest Protestant cathedral in the richest capital of the world should display, and no better epitaph could be written on the nineteenth century than that "before its close it completed St. Paul's Cathedral".' From "Illustrated London News", 1895.