His father, who came originally from Trerice, St. Columb, Cornwall, carried on a printing business in Bridge Street, Vauxhall, where Christian, his second child, was born on 28 November 1845.
In 1869 for the first time one of his works (a portrait of his sister) was hung at the Academy Exhibition, to which he was an intermittent contributor until the year of his death, when he was represented by an 'Interior of Downside Abbey'.
In 1870 he was received into the Roman Catholic church, and began his long connection with the firm of Lavers, Barraud and Westlake, for whom he designed a number of stained windows.
In 1899 he began the execution of his commission for certain mosaic decorations at Westminster Cathedral, the work by which he was chiefly known until the posthumous exhibition of his paintings and watercolours at the Goupil Gallery in 1912.
He worked at Newlyn in Cornwall for some time, and though never a member of the school associated with that locality he contributed an account of it to The Art Journal in April 1890.
The eldest, Mark Lancelot (1887–1935), a painter of portraits and subject pieces, exhibited occasionally at the New English Art Club.
The unpleasant technique (opus sectile) employed for some of these, in accordance with Bentley's instructions, has hardly done justice to their fine design and courageous colour.
[1] The defect was probably due to misapprehension, common among all modern ecclesiastical authorities, with regard to the functions of mosaic decoration.