The Stations of the Cross
After the times of persecution, when it became safe for Christians to travel,
many believers visited the places in the Holy Land where Jesus lived, died and rose again.
The climax of such pilgrimages would be in Jerusalem, where a procession would tread the Way of the Cross
(often carrying great cross-timbers), and would relive in imagination the events of the first Good Friday.
The procession would pause at intervals (to ‘make station’) and remember,
with prayer and thanksgiving, repentance and re-commitment, the various incidents of that day.
Many people, of course, could not make this journey, and in later times the custom arose of re-enacting such a pilgrimage,
either on one’s own or in a group, before a series of representations of the key moments of the story of the Passion of Christ.
This was especially done in churches during Lent and Holy Week,
and was as valuable an aid to devotion as the great Passion Plays and music.
In many ways it was it was particularly ‘a people’s devotion’.
In more recent centuries, the series of representations has crystallised into a scheme of fourteen pictures.
Nearly all of the subjects are based on the Gospel text, but a few are inferred,
and one is a pious fiction whose value is symbolic rather than historical.
In recent years, a fifteenth ‘station’ has often been included,
to complete the story of the pain of Good Friday with the glorious victory of Easter.
The panels are of New Forest larch, prepared with a gesso ground,
and the painting is done in egg tempera with occasional 22-carat gold leaf.
An ‘invisible’ clear varnish cross spans all but the fifteenth.
The work was completed in the year 2000.