Although it was mid-September, Graffius had prepared
me to dress warmly because of dampness and drafts.
We spent the day moving through the long halls and
common rooms dodging neatly dressed, muffler-
wearing students going to class. I realized in the chilly
atmosphere that housing a collection in a building as
old as Stonyhurst—part of its dates to the late 16th
century—presents challenges of conservation and
storage that we at LUMA cannot begin to imagine.
Graffius kindly pulled objects out of collection
storage for me to look at while talking me through a
chronicle of the medieval and Renaissance Church.
Each new object she showed me had one more story
testifying to the history of the Society of Jesus and the
oftentimes thorny history of the Jesuits in England.
It is important to put the objects in the D’Arcy
Collection that had come from Stonyhurst into
context. Provenance is the “holy trail” of ownership
in the history of a work of art. It is through
provenance that we can validate authenticity and
are provided clues to the interconnected weave of
ownership from maker to buyer from the past to
the present day. Beginning in the late 1960s and
throughout the 1970s, founding director Fr. Donald
Rowe, S.J. began building the D’Arcy. His hope was
to assemble a collection that would provide Loyola
students with a contemplative respite from their
studies. Objects in the D’Arcy with ties to Stonyhurst
include the Collector’s Chest by Wenzel Jamnitzer
(1570)
and the four late 16th-century carved wood
Evangelists. How did these pieces come from Hurst
Glen to Chicago? Like many private English schools
in the ’60s and ’70s, Stonyhurst was in need of funds
and willing to part with objects whose provenance
was not integrally related to the history of the school
or the house itself. A satisfactory measure would be
to sell the materials to another branch of the Society.
And so these beautiful objects came to Loyola and
are now part of LUMA.
Stonyhurst was founded in 1593 by English Jesuit
exiles in the Channel port of St. Omer in the Spanish
Netherlands. Anti-Jesuit sentiment caused the school
to move several times in the mid-18th century—first
to Bruges in 1762 and then to Liège in 1774. The
Jesuits fled the advance of a French revolutionary
army for this reclusive corner of England in 1794,
becoming tenants of an alumnus, Thomas Weld. The
scion of a steadfastly Catholic, old Lancashire family,
the Shireburns, in whose ancient 17th-century pile he
settled his former teachers.
A modern curriculum, designed to strengthen the
Church and reassert Catholic orthodoxy during the
confusing and seriously difficult times in Europe,
was a distinguishing element in the new order of the
Society of Jesus, established by Ignatius of Loyola
in 1540. According to Maurice Whitehead—an
historian at Swansea University and editor of
Held in
Trust: 2008 Years of Sacred Culture; A Catalogue of
an Exhibition from the Stonyhurst College Collections
(2008)—
by the 1700s, there were 760 Jesuit schools
established to educate young men throughout the
world. The school at St. Omer was started specifically
for English Catholics; Catholic institutions were
banned under the Protestant Elizabeth I. Jesuit priests
slipped back into England to minister to the faithful,
known to the Protestant authorities as recusants (as in
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