Artist Charles Lutyens Remembered

By his wife, Marianna Lutyens

My husband, Charles Lutyens, who has died aged 87, was responsible for one of the largest mosaic murals in the British Isles by a single artist – a work entitled “The Angels of the Heavenly Host” created in the 1960s for the interior of the newly consecrated church of St Paul’s in Bow, London.

At 800sq ft it took him five years to complete, from 1963 to 1968, and was made from tesserae of 700 different colours he ordered from the Venetian island of Murano and which arrived at the church unsorted in vast crates. During the half-a-decade he spent aloft scaffolding at Bow, he felt that the art world was moving on without him, shifting into abstraction while he was putting one little mosaic next to another.

Charles always worked big, whether in mosaics, painting or sculpture, and he was himself a big man with an even larger presence. One of his other notably large works was a 15-ft wooden, iron and steel sculpture, “Outraged Christ”, which in 2011 was part of a retrospective exhibition of his work held at Bow and was later exhibited at Gloucester Cathedral before taking up residence at Liverpool Cathedral, where it is admired by thousands of visitors.

A great-nephew of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, Charles was born in London to Ernest Lutyens, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, and his wife, Naomi (née Harben), a publicity officer at The Old Vic theatre in London. After going to Bryanston School in Dorset, he studied oil painting and sculpture at the Chelsea, Slade and St Martin’s schools of art in the capital.

At the end of his studies, in 1958, Charles joined the Fabyc community (standing for “families by choice”), a group of people living together on the kibbutz model in London. He lived there with his first wife, Ariane Laparra, and their two sons, Niels and Paul, and remained after their divorce in 1961. We got married in 1970 and eventually moved away from the community to Oxford in 1978.

After art school, Charles had trained at the Hertfordshire College of Art and Design for a diploma in art therapy, and he began as an art therapist at the Barnes Unit at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, thereafter working in the city at the Littlemore Hospital, then at Harlow House in High Wycombe.

All the while he worked at his art in his studio in Charlton-on-Otmoor in Oxfordshire. Throughout his career he exhibited in mixed exhibitions and held one-man shows at the Wildenstein & Co gallery in New York, St Martin’s gallery in London and the Hollerhaus gallery in Munich. His work has been bought for private collections in Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Zimbabwe and the US.

He is survived by me, by our children Joanna and Ben, by Niels and Paul, five grandsons and a great-grandson, and by his sister, Gillian.

This article was originally published in The Guardian.