St Mary's Church

St. Mary’s Bourne Street is an Anglican Church, built in 1874 and located near Sloan Square in London.

The high quality and varied decorative furnishings surrounding the modest architecture, for what was originally a servant’s church, display an upturn in wealth since the church’s inception. Well maintained gothic, neo-classical, renaissance, baroque and contemporary ecclesiastical art and adornments are visible throughout the church.

Campbell Smith & Co have had the privilege of reattending the church in November 2021, following conservation and restoration works to a series of liturgical objects several years prior, to undertake a scheme of conservation cleaning, and sensitive restoration to a carved wooden liturgical sculpture.

The statue of St Ignatius, belonging to the Society of Retreat Conductors, was due for conservation and maintenance, with heavy and disfiguring accumulation of church grime; soot, dust, grease, and successive layers of overpaint and discoloured varnish. We cleaned the sculpture, consolidated flaking gesso and paint, repaired loss, and in-painted over the repairs. Conservation grade photostable media was applied over the robe to lift the colour; matched to the original scheme, identified through close examination of the piece. All paint media was applied over a separation layer to ensure the preceding paint layers were protected for future treatment.

The halo was found to be gilded originally, so it was deemed appropriate to regild as part of the finishing of the object.