Touring the country in his campervan in 1987, Creffield set up his easel in front of his subjects from 4am (to avoid the tourists), working till dusk. He understood that these grand religious edifices had been built by medieval laymen on an intimately human scale, and wrote of the act of drawing them as a kind of ‘embrace’, at once spiritual and physical: ‘“Architecture is a gesture”, says Wittgenstein. Each cathedral is a gesture – I respond with my gesture and the drawing is a mutual embrace.’ 

They were a means of measuring himself against these sacred buildings – a challenge distinguished from his cityscapes, in which architecture plays a more profane role. The cathedral drawings hold not only an intimate appreciation of the process of these buildings’ construction, but also of the meanings they have taken on in the national consciousness over the intervening centuries – not least through the depictions of Turner or John Piper. Creffield went on to challenge himself anew by depicting the great gothic buildings of France. As the Booker-prize winning novelist Howard Jacobson wrote, ‘his cathedrals tremble like lovers; his lovers are as mysterious in their nakedness as cathedrals.’