Ninian Comper’s alabaster altarpieces in Britain and America: queer desires, holy spaces

ABSTRACT The Scottish architect John Ninian Comper (1864-1960) designed two alabaster altarpieces - one for the Lindsey Chapel in Boston and the other for the St Sebastian Chapel at Downside Abbey - in the aftermath of the Great War. This article contends that in both cases, the use of alabaster as well as the homosocial and homoerotic charge of the altarpieces' subjects are both visually and theologically queer. The figure of St Sebastian, which in the Downside altarpiece has links to Oscar Wilde and Renaissance art in the National Gallery, as well as the 36 female saints in the Lindsey Chapel, express and invite queer desire while simultaneously inspiring devotion in the context of the Eucharist. By interlacing theological and art historical perspectives, Comper's work in these two contexts is illuminated afresh both within and beyond the zones of transatlantic twentieth-century Anglo-Catholicism.