In a quiet corner of Dorset is a village church with a surprising link to the Crystal Palace. That structure, built to house the 1851 Great Exhibition, was a marvel of modern engineering, so new in its modular construction that the issue of its decoration caused a national furore. In the run up to the opening 175 years ago, architects, artists and interested amateurs contributed to what The Builder called the ‘Great Paint Question’. Periodicals including the Illustrated London News and the Athenaeum speculated about how best to colour the iron beams and girders of Joseph Paxton’s vast glasshouse (Fig 1). The man officially tasked with creating the paint scheme was Owen Jones and, four years earlier, it had been he who designed the interior of St Bartholomew’s Church in Sutton Waldron.
Fig 1: When Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition in May 1851, Owen Jones’s interior decoration was hailed a success.
The survival of an entire paint scheme by Jones is rare enough, but its importance goes far beyond that. In his use of the primary colours at Sutton Waldron, Jones demonstrated the theories that would inspire his application of red, blue and yellow to the Crystal Palace. St Bartholomew’s, therefore, offers a unique insight into how one of the most significant buildings of the Victorian age would have looked.
Unlike his well-known contemporaries A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin and William Morris, Jones is no longer a household name. Described by contemporaries as a shy, unprepossessing man, the Great Exhibition ‘summoned him from the comparative seclusion of his ordinary professional engagements… and suddenly made his name one of the most famous and most severely criticised among all the celebrities of his time and country’. There was no bigger job and no more important stage on which to present his views on applied polychromy.
Fig 2: Jones used primary colours at Sutton Waldron, too, as in the chancel roof, designed to look like a star-spangled sky.
The ultimate success of his work in 1851 dramatically changed his career trajectory, placing him at the heart of mid-19th-century debates on British design and art education. Born in 1809 and trained as an architect, Jones was instrumental in the creation of the V&A Museum and is best remembered as the author of classic design text The Grammar of Ornament, continuously in print since 1856. This book, consulted by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Comfort Tiffany, brought Jones international fame.
It might seem strange then, that Jones’s input is not mentioned in the very detailed account of the consecration of St Bartholomew’s Church, published by the Sherborne Mercury in November 1847. We know he was responsible because the church appears in a handwritten list of Jones’s work held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It must be that he was employed as a sub-contractor to the church’s architect George Alexander; he had yet to become worthy of notice. A decade later, the situation was very different when Jones was called in as an expert to consult on the decoration of Carlisle Cathedral in Cumbria, following a dispute between the architect Ewan Christian and the cathedral chapter. They pursued his recommendation that the panels of the choir ceiling be painted ‘bright azure, powdered with gold stars’ and the effect of a star-studded blue sky can still be enjoyed in Carlisle Cathedral as it can in the chancel at Sutton Waldron (Fig 2).
Fig 3: The nave at St Bartholomew’s is painted in pale blue, with the arches and capitals picked out in Jones’s trademark sky blue.
St Bartholomew’s replaced an old Saxon church that had fallen into disrepair (Fig 5). Rebuilding became possible after the dynamic rector Anthony Huxtable married Maria Sarah Langston in 1840. Daughter of the late John Langston, merchant banker and politician of Sarsden House in Oxfordshire, she brought considerable wealth to the partnership and the couple spent £3,000 on their new church.
This was a substantial sum for a 200-seat church with a nave and single aisle. St John’s, Notting Hill, London, designed by George Alexander during his brief partnership with John Hargrave Stevens in 1845, cost more than twice as much, but was far larger, with seats for 1,500 worshippers. Much of the Huxtables’ budget must have been dedicated to the interior and it is this that differentiates Sutton Waldron from contemporary churches built by Alexander, including two in the immediate vicinity at Enmore Green, Shaftesbury (1843), and St Mary’s, Motcombe (1846).
Fig 4: Borders of Biblical text are a key feature of the interior of St Bartholomew’s and the harmonious colour palette extends to the stained glass by James Powell & Sons.
Alexander (1810–85) came from Corsham in Wiltshire. According to research by the late Andrew Saint, he was made an early fellow of the RIBA in 1840 and enjoyed a productive decade before giving up practice for the sake of his health. Although his churches differ externally, including examples in Romanesque style and the Decorated Gothic of Sutton Waldron, there is a notable affinity among interior spaces where the nave columns and capitals belong to a simplified late-Georgian tradition. The unadorned capitals at Holy Trinity, Ramsgate (1845), Kent, and St Mary’s, Motcombe, are frank in their plainness. The same lack of architectural sculpture at St Bartholomew’s gave Jones a blank canvas for his two-dimensional patterns; his skill in exploiting the moulded forms of the chancel arch belies its inherent simplicity.
The big question has always been how Jones came to be involved. The two architects clearly knew each other; they were the same age, moved in the same circles and, in the early 1840s, lived one street apart in the terraced houses of London’s Adelphi, the now lost neo-Classical development by the Adam brothers of 1768–72. Jones and Alexander also shared an interest in Islamic and Ancient Egyptian architecture, which was unusual enough to bring them together. After completing his training, Jones spent three years abroad. He was fascinated by remnants of coloured decoration on ancient Athenian monuments and continued to record the presence of polychromy when he joined pioneering Egyptologists exploring along the Nile in 1832–33. Far less is known about Alexander’s foreign adventures, but, in 1837, he exhibited, at the Royal Academy, a sketch drawn in Egypt and four years later contributed information about the architecture of Cairo to a meeting of the RIBA.
Fig 5: St Bartholomew’s was rebuilt on higher ground above the old, crumbling Saxon church, so it could be seen for miles around.
Jones journeyed on from Egypt to Istanbul. In 1834, his final destination was in Granada, Spain, and the 14th-century Alhambra palace. During a six-month stay there, Jones, with his French companion Jules Goury, accurately surveyed the Moorish building, detailing the extent of surviving decoration and revealing historic paint colours beneath layers of whitewash. This research was the basis for the two-volume Plans, Elevations, Sections and Details of the Alhambra, published in 1836–45. It remains a seminal work in the Western appreciation of Islamic design and the first name in the list of subscribers that begins every copy is that of Alexander. There can be no doubt Alexander knew and understood Jones’s preference for primary colours when he commissioned him to work on St Bartholomew’s. Importantly, Jones had detected a system behind the Alhambra colouring that he believed could be applied to other buildings and, at Sutton Waldron, Alexander gave him an opportunity to try it out.
Jones’s goal, here and in the Crystal Palace, was to create an overall harmony by combining blue, red and yellow in the relative proportions of eight, five and three discovered through the experiments of contemporary chemist George Field (Fig 8). Blue is the dominant colour in the nave at St Bartholomew’s, the pale tone of the walls accented by what might almost be called Jones’s signature sky blue on the arches and capitals (Fig 3); the same shade appears repeatedly in his later designs for interiors, wallpaper and stationery products. A very similar blue is also depicted in views of the Great Exhibition hall.
The full impact of the red is reserved for the chancel, where the red walls focus attention towards the altar. At the Crystal Palace, Jones achieved the same effect by adding red fabric hangings to break up the vast interior space into individual courts and create backdrops for the objects being exhibited. In both buildings, the yellow, which at St Bartholomew’s has become gold, is a highlight colour.
Jones would later formalise his views on form and colour into a series of 37 ‘Propositions’ to preface The Grammar of Ornament. The painting of the trefoils on the stone altar rail at Sutton Waldron exemplifies Proposition 21: ‘In using the primary colours on moulded surfaces, we should place blue, which retires, on the concave surfaces; yellow, which advances, on the convex; and red, the intermediate colour, on the undersides; separating the colours by white on the vertical planes.’
The nave and chancel are unified by Biblical texts stencilled in decorative borders (Fig 4). These were probably specified by the Revd Huxtable who was an active supporter of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and made all seats at Sutton Waldron free; there were no paid-for pews. The Sherborne Mercury states that the inscriptions were painted by Mr Henville of Blandford, but it is tempting to suggest he was following the designs of Jones, especially in the most decorative capital letters, which have a kindred feeling with printed works Jones was producing in the 1840s.
To achieve the quality of colour plates he wanted for his Alhambra volumes, Jones pioneered the technique of chromolithography and set up his own presses, which he then used to create a new form of illustrated gift book for publishers, such as John Murray and Longman. The stylised border around the Agnus Dei on the St Batholomew’s pulpit is particularly noteworthy in this regard for its similarity to Jones’s decorative work in J. G. Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads of 1842. Other repeating patterns in the church, stencilled in blue or blue and red (Fig 6), are so in tune with Jones’s preference for stylised natural forms and his belief that ‘All ornament should be based upon a geometrical construction’ that they could really be by no one else.
The predominance of primary colours extends to the chancel floor laid in rich patterns of Minton encaustic tiles (Fig 7). These feature an unusual amount of blue, which, as the most expensive colour to produce, was usually employed sparingly. Jones may have had a hand here, having previously worked with Minton, but Alexander had already used the firm’s tiles at St John’s, Notting Hill, so it is hard to be certain. The east window, representing the Saviour and the four Evangelists, was by Hudson of London and the rest of the stained glass was crafted by James Powell & Sons. The Sherborne Mercury was impressed: ‘The useful is blended with the beautiful throughout all the arrange-ments, and so completely do they harmonize that the one does not appear subservient to the other. Nothing is superfluous, nothing required; it is complete and unique in itself; and we feel that we shall not exceed the truth in saying it is the most beautiful village church in the diocese.’
Changes in fashion led to much of Jones’s chancel decoration being painted over in the 1920s, but sufficient survived for the 1972 Dorset Pevsner to recognise St Bartho-lomew’s as ‘probably the most important surviving scheme of this pioneer of High Victorian design’. The full extent was uncovered in the 1980s and 1990s then, last year, the church was closed for a National Heritage Lottery Fund programme of repair work by Opus Conservation. It is now a glory to behold, an amazingly complete and vivid interior that deserves all the care its current congregation have given it.
See more about the church and its service times at the Iwerne Valley Benefice website. With special thanks to Roderick Swift and Ian Pinder.
This feature originally appeared in the May 20, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.