 St. Cyprian's Clarence Gate, near Baker Street in London, is one of the city's ecclesiastical hidden gems. The architect, John Nenean Comper, designed this building at the turn of the 20th century and came back throughout those first decades of the 20th century to improve the building, to augment it in various ways, to build up layers of stained glass and painted decoration. Comper was Scottish, living between 1864 and 1960, dying in his mid-90s. He received his architectural training in London with the architects George Frederick Bodley and Thomas Garner. Bodley's building, All Saints Jesus Lane, has a choir screen too, but rather different from this one. The screen here is very much a rude screen, with the image of the crucified Christ, larger than life, suspended between his mother the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. John the Evangelist. They're flanked by unusual-looking angels, a feature of many of Comper's screens, like the one at St. Mary's Wellingborough. They're standing on wheels, they have multiple wings, they're extraordinary creatures and they're based on Ezekiel's vision in the Old Testament. Comper believed that it was really important to be able to take what he saw to be the best aspects, the most beautiful aspects of late medieval Gothic, and combine them to create something truly new and utterly bespoke. Here, in the details with these green backgrounds of the fan vaulting that support the Rudloft, there are a series of little emblems, seas and bishop's mitres. Those seas with the swords represent St. Cyprian, as does the mitre, due to his role as bishop. Those emblems change going right the way across the rude screen. On this side of the screen, a chapel dedicated to Christ and his resurrection. On the other side of the screen, separating the main body of the nave from the chancel and the sanctuary, creating a series of wholly intensely sacred thresholds, the Lady Chapel on that side, with a series of female saints, including Joan of Arc, only made a saint in the 1920s, running in the panels below. Comper for his iconography as well as for his technique and colour scheme was particularly inspired by late Gothic East Anglian rude screens, some of which still survive in places like Ranworth. Like the Ranworth screen, this screen connects the horror and the tragedy of the crucifixion as this prayerful, contemplative theological emblem to the reality of Christ's incarnation in its first moments of the Annunciation. Members of the congregation passing through the screen pass through the Annunciation itself. The Archangel Gabriel is on this side in the lower panel and the Blessed Virgin Mary is on this side. The Annunciation happens in the lower region of the screen across the same space as the monumental crucifixion with Mary and John on either side. Comper is making a connection here too between the vast range of saints across the bottom of the rude screen including prophets and that wonderful angel figure. And his high altar, particularly its frontal and the raridos behind, painted in shimmering gold with scenes from the Old Testament and the New, many of which are unusual in their combination and their execution. Together with the stained glass window and the extraordinary panel over the top of the altar, creating a canopy emphasizing its holiness, Comper created a coherent theological scheme that focuses attention on the relationship between crucifixion and resurrection. The images and the figures here are as visceral as they are beautiful. The incarnation from its very beginnings up until its culmination in the resurrection and ascension is the primary theme of Comper's scheme for St. Cypherian's Clarence Gate. The links between Comper's rude screen here at St. Cypherian's and the high altar which Comper called an English altar because of the riddle posts with angels holding candles aloft at the tops of them and the way that that connected for Comper to an earlier English medieval style of altar design for worship which was also common in other parts of Europe. What Comper is doing here with this English altar and its iconography is a direct response to how he handles the rude screen and the rude loft. What we have here is an image that takes us right through from the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve through into Christ's resurrection. Here on the frontal which is painted linen with this fringe down along the bottom in silk. We have Adam and Eve at that crucial moment in the garden. The serpent itself with a woman's face that mirrors Eve's own. The drama, intense. There are some parallels in other examples of much earlier Western art here. The most interesting I can think of being Albrecht Dürer and Kranach. And here we have this profoundly beautiful touch, this deadly touch of the fruit from the tree of knowledge between the hands of Eve who hands it to Adam and Adam who receives it as she plucks another from the tree on the far left. This tree is dead at the root as opposed to the vibrant life in green that flows around it and then flows directly up into this extraordinary tree of life changing its species and augmenting its meaning. The tree now is the tree of the cross. Christ's crucifixion with saints on either side also connects to the bottom section of that rude screen. On the far left the angel Gabriel and the Blessed Virgin Mary at the moment of the enunciation reiterated again here on the Raridos and on the far right something quite unusual. The far right shows a resurrection appearance of Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Christ's moment of conception and Christ's moment of life after death in the glory of the resurrection, framing the crucifixion. There's a connection too that Comper is making between the iconography of the rude screen, the frontal, the Raridos and the overall coherence of this English altar and Comper's design for the stained glass window which focuses on Christ's glorious and extraordinary resurrection. That resurrection is being witnessed on the right by the women coming to the tomb on the left by some of the apostles. On either side they are flanked by saints. And then in the central panel above something that is less coherently chronological flowing through from resurrection there's then a reiteration of that early moment in Christ's life, the infant Christ cradled by his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Overall Comper's scheme here nits together the theological significance of that rude screen in relation to the Eucharist, to that holy sacrifice of the bread and the wine made the true body and blood of Christ on the altar. Comper connects this to the scheme for the altar itself and the window above it. Without the rude screen at St. Cyprian's Clarence Gate it would be difficult to be able to make those connections between the precious and the miraculous nature of the sacrament of the Eucharist and the quality of Christ's life and death in relation to Christian believers and their sense of contemplation, compassion and sanctification. Indeed their sense of thankfulness as far as their encounter with Christ is concerned. Here in St. Cyprian's Comper is bringing together the glory of Christ's resurrection and the tragedy of Christ's crucifixion by using a combination of medieval language which was both controversial and increasingly popular in Anglo-Catholic circles of patronage and participation within the early 20th century Church of England.