A small and barely visible figure is at the centre of Margaret Rope’s huge work, her Great West Window in Shrewsbury Cathedral. It shows, in miniature to the other figures around it, a bishop kneeling (see pic right).

Historians of Art will recognise it as a so-called ‘donor portrait’, an element that is seen mostly in medieval paintings.
So…. what’s it doing here? And why are there three other such donor figures in other windows in the cathedral?

Donor figures

These figures are as described. In the era before widespread literacy, if the person who paid for a religious painting to go into a church wanted to ensure everyone knew s/he had commissioned it, they would ask the artist to ensure they were represented in the painting.
To give a show of humility and to not distract the observer from the message, the donor figure is often in miniature compared to the sacred scene. The ‘classic’ donor figure in medieval art is small, and shown, kneeling in prayer, facing the saints above him in the picture. deliberately made small, so that they don’t distract the observer from the subject and message of the windows

However, all too soon, the more arrogant donors couldn’t resist having themselves feature larger and larger – until by the late fifteenth century, the donor can be life-size. The Virgin & Child by van Eyck is the supreme example of this (see pic below).

The arrogance of donors even increases with the Renaissance when, not only do the donors want to be as life-size, but they often want their features to be placed on saints in the pictures…!

Shrewsbury

The fashion for donor figures dies out by the eighteenth century – yet, here we are, in the years after 1850, with four such figures in glass in Shrewsbury cathedral… Why?
In this instance, one can fairly say they are a bit of an affectation. Shrewsbury is a neo-Gothic, neo-medievalist cathedral (built 1856) bearing a lot of influence from those arch medievalists, the architect Augustus Pugin and his son Edward. So, what is more appropriate in such a building than a few nods to an actual, real medieval quirk – the donor figure?

Thus, in the Great East Window (by Hardman, 1856), the donor-figure is that of the contemporaneous Canon Charles Cholmondeley (see pic above).
In the second instance, in the Three Saints Window (1880s) in the north aisle (see pic above), there is however a surprising mix-up in the meaning of the kneeling figure. Here is another bishop of the diocese, but he is not the donor of the window – rather, he is the window’s dedicatee. The artist either has ignored the whole point of a traditional donor figure, or been asked to fudge it….

Marga-Moriarty enterprises
Yet, the third such figure is, again, not the donor of the window but its dedicatee.
In Margaret Rope’s St Laurence Window, made circa 1920, one can see, to the left of the saint’s feet, a portrait of Mrs Sarah Moriarty. We know it is her because of the bottom inscription – which tells us it was put up as a memorial to her by her children, Mary Agnes Moriarty and Ambrose Moriarty (who was dean of the cathedral at the time).*

And finally, to the fourth such figure in the cathedral – Marga’s kneeling figure in the Great West Window (1910). This is, yet again, a commemorated person, not a ‘donor’; and again, this window is a Marga-Moriarty enterprise.
The figure, Bishop Webster of Shrewsbury, did not commission the window – in fact, he’d already died in 1908. The window is another tribute ordered by Canon Moriarty, his nephew.
Marga enjoyed the idea of medievalism, and, one suspects, would have had no problem with including these two figures at Moriarty’s request.

Moriarty
But… in a way, there is a depiction of the donor in the Great West Window – only it is not in the usual tradition. Moriarty is in the window, but not as we’d expect.

In the later nineteenth century, stained glass artists had revived the Renaissance idea of placing life-like portraits of donors onto saints in windows. To have oneself depicted in one’s own church as, say, St Augustine or St Chad, seems at odds with the modesty that is often associated with Victorian times, but it was the fashion then for a good period.

And, in Marga’s west window, we see this. The central standing figure is Bishop St Thomas Of Canterbury (see pic right) – who has Canon Moriarty’s features!

This gives rise to the two rather strange scenarii.
First, whenever Moriarty gave a sermon from the altar of the cathedral, he, often as not, was facing himself (as St Thomas) in the great window at the other end of the building.
Secondly, Bishop Webster appears to be kneeling in supplication of St Thomas (aka his own nephew, Moriarty). Didn’t anyone at the time find that rather odd…?

And – did Marga mind doing this? Possibly not: Moriarty was her mentor and her main encouragement. (It may even have been her idea, who knows?)
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* FOOTNOTE
The scholar Roger Hall has wondered whether the original idea of the window was as a memorial to Father Charles Whitefoord. Father Whitefoord was a priest at Shrewsbury Cathedral who went to serve as a chaplain at the front in World War One, and was killed there. He is, rather obliquely, mentioned in the window (see our article, The Curate At War). St Laurence, as a martyr burned to death, is an apt figure by which to remember someone who was killed expressing their faith in a place of war.
Mr Hall points out that the design for this window also actually featured in the Royal Academy’s War Memorials Exhibition in 1919. He wonders therefore if – for some reason – it was later decided to have the window dedicated to Mrs Moriarty instead.

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