I can’t remember the last time I visited the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead but a re-visit was long overdue and I was so pleased to see the exhibitions and collections there. There’s a lot to see, including a fine collection of ship’s models, but the stand out part for me was the collection of Della Robbia.

Only produced in Birkenhead from 1894 to 1906 the Della Robbia collection remains so striking that just entering the room it’s housed in lifts one’s spirits. It is replete, of course, with Unitarian connections not least through Harold Rathbone, the founder of the pottery and a member of the well-known Unitarian merchant family of that name. Harold Rathbone became an artist, studied at the Slade and in Paris, and set up the pottery in Birkenhead in 1894, a conscious revival of the work of Luca Della Robbia the 15^th-century Florentine sculptor. His portrait was painted by William Holman Hunt and he looks every inch the sensitive Victorian artist influenced by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones and the whole panoply of Arts and Crafts and Pre-Raphaelite artists amongst whose circle he moved.

Unusually for a modern gallery there is not a single label on any exhibit. In a way it is nice not to have the distraction but there is such a wealth of material it would be helpful to be given some background information. Nevertheless a lot of the production was geared towards a religious purpose and some of it was prominently Unitarian and this I recognized right away.

It is good that some of the decoration from the Liverpool Domestic Mission is there and quite prominently displayed. The Mission building closed in the early 1970s and it must have migrated to the Art Gallery then.

The display on the wall in the Art Gallery is laid out exactly as it was in the Domestic Mission building. It is also the same as the decoration in the Memorial Church, Manor Road, Wallasey which is still in situ. The text illustrated by the panels – And what doth the Lord require of thee / But to do justly and to love mercy / & to walk humbly with thy God – is a good one for Unitarians.

There are other panels that almost certainly have a Unitarian connection and two plaques after Edward Burne-Jones’ ‘Six Days of Creation’ may also have been part of the decoration at the Domestic Mission.

In the first catalogue for his pottery Harold Rathbone described his Della Robbia as ‘particularly applicable for church decoration on account of its silhouetted distinctiveness and architectural effect…it is a matter of congratulation, if of some wonder, that the honour of introducing this tender and attractive method of adornment has, in churches of the British Isles, we believe, been left entirely so far to ourselves.’

The exhibition in the Williamson Art Gallery is an impressive collection of this creative work that remains so vibrant and also so redolent of the art of that time and the religious impulses that were most closely connected to it.