Campion Hall’s remarkable art collections are mostly due to the inspiration of one man, Fr Martin D’Arcy (1888-1976), who was the Master of the Hall for a long period in the mid-twentieth century. D’Arcy has been described as ‘perhaps England's foremost Catholic public intellectual from the 1930s until his death’. He was a friend to many of the leading writers of the English twentieth century: Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene.

He was also a man of acute sensitivity to the visual arts. He was educated at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, which inherited the collections formed in exile by the English Jesuits from the late sixteenth century onwards. As a schoolboy, D’Arcy saw precious items that had been saved during the turbulence of the Reformation period taken abroad, including vestments from the chapel of Henry VII, and a rich collection of works of art reflecting the worldwide activities of the Society of Jesus. These collections educated his eye and nourished his imagination, and also impressed him with the power of art to communicate, inspire and move people to devotion.

When he became Master of Campion Hall, D’Arcy resolved to fill the hall with art whose primary purpose was (and is) to promote dialogue. It is also a collection, which aimed to communicate something of what it meant to be English, Catholic, and a Jesuit. So there are portraits of the Catholic Stuarts, one of the finest assemblies of baroque religious art in England, and works of art related to the activities of the Jesuits worldwide, from Ibero-America to the Far East.

This is one of the most distinguished early-modern paintings in the Campion collections, but there are many other fine works of southern European art from the Mannerist and Baroque periods, including canvases by Palma il Vecchio and Guido Reni, as well as an exceptional sculptural group in polychromed wood, almost certainly originating in Seville in the early seventeenth century, showing St Ignatius and his Companions.

One major purpose of the Collection was to start conversations and, at a time when there was considerable mutual suspicion between religious confessions, to introduce a mostly Anglican university to Catholic traditions. Additionally, D’Arcy said, ‘Many reasons have impelled me in this pursuit. One is that the Jesuits have so often been denigrated – at times quite unfairly – for their lack of taste… beyond these considerations is that of the vast importance beauty does and should play in the Catholic faith… Art is man’s contrivance of making real to himself what reason leaves in the abstract’.  The writer and actor Robert Speaight wrote of D’Arcy,  ‘He thought of Campion Hall as a shrine of Christian civilisation’.

Campion Hall still makes occasional acquisitions, which relate directly to one of the existing themes of the collection, in particular, Jesuit and Catholic world art, and English Catholic art of the mid twentieth century.