A £100,000 project to restore a 'unique' pre-Raphaelite mural in Hoylandswaine started in March. Ed Elliot met conservator Francis Downing to find out how work is progressing.

Scaffolding inevitably hides the majority of the east wall inside St John the Evangelist Church but, two months after the restoration process began, evidence of John Roddam Spencer Stanhope’s ‘The Ascendancy of Christ’ is starting to appear.

Christ’s face, at the top of the mural, is clearly visible to churchgoers, giving a tantalising taste of a painting which has been covered for more than 50 years.

The artwork was created in the late 1860s but painted over about a century later to save it from damp.

However, thanks to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, it will now return to as close to its former glory as possible.

Trained in Italy, conservator Mr Downing has more than more 40 years of experience restoring paintings up and down the country, as well as abroad, and has been charged with leading the ambitious project.

“It’s been a long hard road but we’ve persevered," he says. "We started this project some time ago and got hands on in March.

"The biggest problems we had was to decide: ‘Is there something there?’ We weren’t absolutely certain there was something there or what condition it would be in."

Work to test whether a full-scale restoration project would be successful started in 2009, and it was an old photograph, owned by a Hoylandswaine resident, which provided clues as to where particular parts of the painting would be, leading to a starting point for

uncovering Roddam’s work.

The mural has been protected by four layers of paint – three emulsions and a coat of oil paint – and Mr Downing has also discovered that parts of the work have been retouched, some time before 1961, and, unfortunately, 'not very professionally’.

"Any retouching I do must not be to the artist’s work. My respect must be to the artist’s work and that’s my intention."