Very recently I had what was a new experience for me: selecting images to illustrate a new book, on a remarkable Anglican patron of the arts, Walter Hussey. Before now, most of my work has been concerned with ideas, which are arguably rather difficult to illustrate convincingly, and there was no opportunity to illustrate my book on Michael Ramsey, save for the cover. But this new book is about patronage of the arts, and about an individual, his personality and the crucial importance his relationships with others had in his success as a patron. The publisher allowed some twenty images, and so there was an opportunity to be grasped.

I don’t intend to go into the laborious details of securing the necessary copyright permissions for these images (although there were times at which I wondered whether the effort was justified). Here I am interested in the curious interaction, largely obscure to me before, between text and image in the telling of a story. Hussey died in 1985, and his various appearances on television are hard to track down, as are recordings of his voice. But my various interviewees gave me remarkably consonant accounts of his personality, which also matched the picture that his extensive papers suggested. Included in the papers are a perhaps unsually large number of portrait photographs of Hussey at various ages. How far can one usefully read a photograph as indicative of personality?

Take the first image above, for instance, undated but probably taken in the early 1930s when Hussey was only recently ordained as a priest. He is perhaps 25 or 26 years old, having progressed straight from school at Marlborough College to Keble College Oxford, through theological college at Cuddesdon to a church in Kensington. The very thin sources for this period show a young man of puppyish enthusiasm for his particular interests, but also very earnest and not a little naive. Is this reflected in the picture? Possibly; but other readers may see quite different things.

For me, the second image (left) is a much clearer capturing of certain elements in Hussey’s make-up. By this time, probably in the early 1950s, Hussey has achieved what might have been thought impossible for the vicar of a provincial parish church. In the space of four years, he commissioned works of art from Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland, poetry from W.H. Auden, and new music from Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley and Gerald Finzi, amongst others. Hussey, never very much prone to self-doubt, is very probably at a high point of confidence in his largely lone quest to bring the Church of England into a closer relationship with the contemporary arts. He is in demand as a speaker, as a member of committees, and in the print and broadcast media, and his growing network of critics, artists and musicians are telling him how important and remarkable is his project. Part of that success was his boldness, directness, persistence and charm, and the friendships that he was able to develop, notably with Britten and Sutherland. Gone is the awkwardness of the younger man; in this picture, a cliche finds new life: Hussey here is at the height of his powers.

The last image is of Hussey as he neared retirement as dean of Chichester, photographed by a local magazine in his study (he retired in 1977). Clearly posed (although it isn’t clear by whom), it coincides with the time at which Hussey is working towards his final projects, and arranging his retirement. The gaze is cast sideways, as if in thought, which alludes to a cliche, of the saintly figure contemplating higher things. He is posed in front of a case of books (another cliche, of the scholarly priest) although there is little evidence that he read much or very deeply. Behind him is a maquette of the Henry Moore sculpture for Northampton, made nearly 30 years before, which remained his favourite commission (it was on the cover of his memoir Patron of Art). While all very fine works in themselves, some of Hussey’s last commissions, from William Walton, Lennox Berkeley and Marc Chagall have a valedictory quality: gifts from old men to another old man. In the book I argue that, although Hussey is often held up as an example of what the churches could do (and should do now), the understanding of theology and culture on which it was based had by this point in time run its course. By the time this picture was taken, Hussey had reached the furthest extent of what he could achieve. The photograph is a summation of a career nearing its end.