“They do face you with your own shortcomings and there’s no question of denial, at all. It’s a process of knocking down and building up again, which I think some people find difficult to deal with because they are particularly vulnerable.”The Servants of the Paraclete was founded in 1947 by Father Gerald Fitzgerald, a priest from the Archdiocese of Boston, in the United States. It has about 30 priests at Stroud, and there is a waiting list. Our Lady of Victory hit the headlines in 1993 when Fr Sean Seddon, a 38-year-old Roman Catholic priest, was sent there to try to forget about his six- year romance with a teacher. On learning that his lover had lost their baby, he committed suicide by throwing himself under a railway station near the retreat.Fr Conroy believes the majority of residents at Stroud are alcoholics on the Chemical Dependency Programme, based on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“In the case of child abuse it would be assessment rather than treatment,” he added, “because most people realise that paedophilia is not a condition they can treat successfully.”He said Stroud is not an alternative to the courts. And every so often someone stages a full-dress defence of the form. The Flowers East Gallery currently has an exhibition called “British Figurative Art Part 1: Painting – The Human Figure”. It recognises that painting the human figure, in whatever form, has become a beleaguered activity – beleaguered by the other kinds of painting, and the other kinds of human image-making, that have become available. Figurative painting means painting the human figure after photography and the cinema and collage, after radical distortion and abstraction and modernism. It means painting the human figure after the enterprise has become doubtful.

And although, each time the Turner Prize comes, people ask where the figurative painters are, the problem was there long before the sort of art that now wins Turner Prizes was in the ascendant.
But the figurative painters keep at it, and while they don’t get such vigorous support from the public art institutions, many of them do well enough sales-wise. Every so often there’s a revival, like the wave of New Figuration that came out of Glasgow 10 years ago. As such, it could cover most paintings in the Western tradition But really it has a more restricted meaning The term is newish, and so is the classification. Nobody was called a figurative artist before the middle of this century. Nobody before then had felt the need to corral together all the sundry types of human subject painting – portrait, nude, everyday-life scene, narrative, fantasy – into a single type. Corrals are usually defensive operations, and so is this one.