Sister Wendy Beckett, who died this past Boxing Day aged eighty-eight, was as extraordinary as she was unexpected. A nun who spent much of her life in silent contemplation, she found celebrity in the 1990s as a quick-witted and unflinching art writer and presenter of art history documentaries. She commented on everything from Egyptian tomb paintings to Japanese prints, but it was her dialogue on romantic paintings that most captured the public’s imagination. “Her specialist subject,” wrote one critic, “is sex, not religion.” Debunking narrow preconceptions of the religious life in order to engage a broad audience, she memorably stood in front of Stanley Spencer’s Self-portrait with Patricia Preece (1937) for a bbc program and enthused about the “wonderful wallpaper” before pausing to appreciate the “lovely and fluffy” pubic hair of the artist’s lover.

Wendy Mary Beckett was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1930, and moved to Scotland as a young child when her English-Irish father, a banker, accepted a place at the University of Edinburgh to retrain as a doctor. It was at the family home in the nearby village of Colinton, when she was about four years old, that she discovered her faith. She had just returned from Mass to a breakfast of sausages and the sound of the local military band parading outside, she later recalled, when she became conscious of God: “I realised then that God was there and life was going to be wonderful.” She returned to South Africa soon afterwards