While rightly reminding us of the underrepresentation of female artists, Katy Hessel also reminds us to look for art where we might not expect to see it (Great art surrounds Londoners – if they bother to notice it, 24 July). She uses as examples the Boris Anrep mosaics at the National Gallery, where you will see Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford as well as Virginia Woolf and Margot Fonteyn. Anrep also created a front panel for the altar at Notre Dame de France church in London, just off Leicester Square. This was later covered over and replaced by a Jean Cocteau mural, but fortunately is now restored.
Hessel also reminds us to look up at the Barbara Hepworth sculpture on the John Lewis store on Oxford Street in London, but not far from this are two other examples that are easy to miss. The Time Life building on New Bond Street has a stone screen of Henry Moore sculptures. And at Zimbabwe House on the Strand there are a set of desecrated naked male and female figures by Jacob Epstein; commissioned when the building was constructed for the British Medical Association in 1908, they caused a furore that the BMA resisted, but in the 1930s the Rhodesian high commission had the offending bits hacked off.
Ian Skidmore
Welwyn, Hertfordshire
• In addition to the hidden art in London’s galleries and museums that Katy Hessel refers to, the capital’s churches are full of wonderful art from the medieval to the modern – including stained glass, sculpture and paintings. Like thousands of churches, chapels and meeting houses in villages, towns and cities around the UK, these are free to enter, mostly open during the week and a vital part of our cultural history that is available to all.
Philip Rutnam
Chair, National Churches Trust
• I hope critics as well as fellow satirists will read Martin Rowson’s heartfelt apology (Bite the air in Britain and you can taste the prejudices that haunt us. I’m sorry I became part of that, 26 July); I was shocked by Jonathan Jones’s concluding words in his review of Grayson Perry’s exhibition: “He is the philistine’s Blake, the idiot’s intellectual and the artist Britain has now chosen for its own” (English self-mockery without insight or depth, 24 July). Harsh words directed at the British public, perhaps, but also a personal attack on an artist.
John Bailey
St Albans, Hertfordshire
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