On 26 February 1911, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederic Shields
(born 1833) died, having spent the last twenty years of his life
devoted to the decoration of the Chapel of the Ascension in
Bayswater, London. Conceived of in 1887, completed in 1910,
bombed in 1944 during the Blitz of World War II and demolished
in 1969, the Chapel represents changing Victorian precepts of
religion and faith as well as attitudes towards public art and
decoration on the eve of the modern age. Designed by the
architect and aesthete Herbert Horne (1864-¬1916) and modeled on
thirteenth-century northern Italian church architecture, the
chapel design was a reflection of the British rediscovery of the
Italian Renaissance during the Victorian period. Shields’ use of
the marouflage technique, mimicking continental fresco schemes,
reflects a national desire to raise public British art to a
level of “high art,” which would ensure it a place in the art
historical canon. In May 1882 the Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederic
Shields (1833-1911) was