Patrick Comerford
For the past two years, an icon of Christ from Rethymnon has been on display in our main room in in Stony Stratford and the two icons in our kitchen include one from Romania of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, and a copy of an icon of Saint Alban, the first martyr in England.
It was interesting to see the original icon of Saint Alban in St Albans Cathedral earlier this month. But the cathedral also has a series of modern icons from 2021 made by Peter Murphy and telling the story of Saint Amphibalus and Saint Alban.
Peter Murphy was born in Leeds in 1959, and moved to Liverpool and later to Durham. He went to the Jacob Kramer College of Art and the University of East London, and then trained with the iconographer Guillem Ramos Poqui in London.
In his icons, Peter Murphy uses traditional techniques from mediaeval religious painting, including egg tempera paint and gold leaf. He is a former vice-chair of the Society of Tempera Painters and is a member of the British Association of Iconographers. He runs workshops and courses in Britain, Canada, Greece, and Italy and leads tours in Italy and Sicily.
Peter’s icons has been commissioned for a number of churches and cathedrals, including St Albans Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey and Hereford Cathedral, and has been employed by a number of museums for special exhibitions. He has recreated a triptych by Simone Martini for the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and created a mural of 10 scenes from the life of Benedict Biscop for Bede’s World Museum in Jarrow.
He is the chief tutor at the Saint Peter’s Centre for Sacred Art, in Saint Peter’s Church in the heart of Canterbury, and a visiting tutor in Byzantine iconography and early Italian painting and gilding techniques in the Edward James Foundation at West Dean College, Sussex.
Peter Murphy’s icons of Saint Amphibalus and Saint Alban, close to the Shrine of Saint Amphibalus in St Albans Cathedral, tell the story of Saint Amphibalus and how he was saved by Saint Alban.
These new icons are based on the Life and of St Alban and Passion of Saint Amphibalus, created at St Albans Abbey in the 1200s by Matthew of Paris.
The icons were a gift to St Albans Cathedral in 2021 by Sir Martin Smith and his wife Elise. He has had a 40-year career in the financial services sector, including investment management and banking. He chairs the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and has been involved with the Royal Academy of Music, the Glyndebourne Arts Trust, the Ashmolean Museum, the Science Museum and English National Opera.
He founded the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford in 2008 and is a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Lady (Elise) Smith is the founder and President of the Tetbury Music Festival.
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