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Glass has [. . .] long been the Cinderella to her sister arts, wearing their cast–off clothes, instead of her own fairy wardrobe, and walking in a lower place, instead of hand in hand with them, as in the old times. -- Fras. W. Oliphant, A Plea for Painted Glass (Oxford: Henry Parker, 1855), p. 25.
Though it is still being produced in many studios and workshops in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, continues to be installed in churches, synagogues, inns, restaurants, and some private homes, 4 and attracts amateurs as a craft hobby, stained glass is not a widely appreciated or well understood medium today. Among the throngs of visitors to our public art museums, a fair number are likely to have a general knowledge of painting since the Renaissance and to have developed particular and informed tastes.
Figure 1. Marc Chagall. Cathédral Saint Étienne. Metz, France.
Some may have heard of and even seen the stained glass works designed by celebrated modern painters such as Chagall, Matisse, Braque, Léger, Jacques Villon, John Piper, and the writer and painter Jean Cocteau, (Figs. 1, 2) or the decorative formal designs of famous turn-of-the-century architects such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright. (Fig. 3) But though there is probably a general awareness of the stained glass in the churches and great cathedrals of the Middle Ages, only a small number of museumgoers, primarily students of the Middle Ages or serious travellers in Europe, will have a clear or informed knowledge of these.
Figure 2. F. Léger. Window at Central University of Venezuala. Caracas. Figure 3. Frank Lloyd Wright. Window of house in Buffalo, N.Y. Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum.
Above all, very few can be counted on to know the names of the numerous artists engaged in the production of stained glass since the revival of the medium in the nineteenth century or indeed to have much familiarity with their creations. Even the name of Tiffany probably evokes images of lamps and vases rather than of his grander and more ambitious windows. “Windows were the main emphasis of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s work,” one reads on the cover of Alastair Duncan’s beautiful Tiffany Windows (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980). “Yet today Tiffany windows have never been seen by the public, and until now no book on the subject has ever been published.”
Public ignorance in the matter of stained glass is especially striking in an age of ever expanding numbers of museum visitors and lively public interest in the arts, but it is not new. At the end of the nineteenth century, the heyday of stained glass’s revival as an artistic medium after its relative decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the highpoint of its great popularity as a decorative feature not only in public places but in bars and private homes, Henry Holiday, one of the revived medium’s most talented practitioners, already noted that while “a large number of persons in every civilized community frequent picture galleries, and most of these claim to understand something about the art of painting, [. . .] as regards stained glass, very few [. . .] know even what they like.” “The case is further complicated,” Holiday added, “by the prevailing vague impression that stained glass should be rather mediaeval. How mediaeval it should be, or why it should be mediaeval at all [. . .] is not clear, but that it should be mediaeval in some undefined way is a popular belief. Little wonder then that the amateur feels no firm ground under his feet when approaching the subject of stained glass.” 5 In a chapter entitled “The Craft Nobody Knows” of his 1937 book Adventures in Light and Color: An Introduction to the Stained Glass Craft the well-regarded twentieth-century American stained glass artist-craftsman, Charles Connick, recounts an imaginary conversation with a fellow-traveler in a train:
“Evidently you are a lecturer!”
“Not a professional, but I do lecture occasionally.”
“What’s your subject?”
“Stained glass.”
“Gosh-a-mighty, what a fine subject!
Nobody knows anything about it, nobody can check you up on it!” 6
Not much, it would seem, has changed since Holiday and Connick wrote in 1896 and 1937 respectively. In describing himself proudly as a “Master-Craftsman” Connick clearly did not intend in any way to diminish the standing of the “craft” he practiced. But when a modern twenty-first century scholar asks “Is stained glass a branch of the fine arts -- or is it a craft?” the question reflects continued uncertainty in the general public about what stained glass is and how it is to be thought of. 7 In addition, despite its presence in many nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century domestic and secular buildings, 8 despite its having engaged some of the most eminent modern painters, stained glass is still widely associated with the Middle Ages and, in our own day, with churches. “Some people love the way coloured glass images animate an interior. But modernists hate it,” Sally Rush, an expert on stained glass at Glasgow University, has observed. “Others associate it with a rather vulgar period of design, and there’s a common myth that all stained glass looks churchy and casts a dim, religious light.”9 Churches and, more recently, synagogues have in fact been the most consistent patrons of stained glass workshops. Factors related to the conditions in which stained glass is produced and employed have doubtless contributed to the still uncertain standing of the medium. Even in the early years of its nineteenth-century revival, there was reluctance to acknowledge it as an artistic rather than a “merely” artisanal practice. Charles Winston, a successful English barrister who devoted himself to the study of stained glass and became a generally recognized authority on it on the strength of his pathbreaking Inquiry into the difference of style observable in ancient glass paintings, especially in England, with hints on glass painting, by an amateur (1847), and of important later experiments in the chemical analysis of medieval colored glass that enabled him to rediscover the processes of its manufacture, deplored “a very unfounded prejudice in the minds of some persons against the claims of glass painting to be considered one of the fine arts, because some of its processes are necessarily conducted by artisans, as burning the glass, leading it together, and setting it up in its place, &c.” In contrast, Winston objected, “the sculptor is not thought less worthy of the title of artist, because he employs a number of assistant workmen to hew the marble roughly into shape, to prepare it for his own chisel, and to erect the statue when finished.” 10 But Winston readily conceded that in his own time there are many “purely mechanical persons who paint glass pictures at so much the square foot.” Good stained glass, however, “requires far greater knowledge than is possessed by a mere draughtsman. [. . .] If therefore we are anxious to cultivate glass painting as an art, we must encourage artists to practise it, by ceasing to countenance those mere artisans who at present make it their trade, and confine it to the lowest depths of degradation.” 11
In Henry Holiday’s words, easel painting is generally viewed as “art proper” while stained glass is “technical art” (12). Ideally, to be sure, the artist-designer – when there is one, rather than simply a group of artisans imitating the styles of the past -- works closely with the craftsmen who cut and shape the glass pieces, lead them, and compose them to his design. Christopher Whall, another prominent and gifted late nineteenth-century stained glass artist, close to William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement and thus hostile to the division of labor required by modern industrial production, insisted that designers should have direct, hands-on knowledge and experience of the handiwork involved and that, correspondingly, craftsmen should have experience in design, even if the specific talent of one lies in design and of the other in the actual cutting and leading. This was indeed Morris’s own view. 13 In point of fact, however, in the early decades of the Gothic Revival, until the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement began to be felt and -- in the words of a scholar of our own time -- “a new generation of artist glass painters learnt their trade not as apprentices but as students at art school where design and technical execution were taught as being fundamentally inseparable,”14 the two activities of design and handiwork were frequently quite distinct, with the designer having little to do with the material translation of his cartoon into glass.15 Especially at a time when artist-designers, such as Edward Burne-Jones, were still unfamiliar with the processes of cutting, staining, painting, and assembling the pieces of colored glass used in composing a window or panel, the input of the workshop’s craftsmen was often a determining influence on the finished product. In the early years of the William Morris studio, one scholar has observed, “a great deal of the translation of the cartoons into glass was left to the craftsmen of the studio.”16 Discussing the glass produced by John Hardman & Co., a firm that began to make stained glass at the urging of Augustus Pugin, the pioneer Gothic Revivalist of the first half of the nineteenth century, another scholar writes that Hardman’s operation was an awkward affair chiefly because it took place in different locations. Pugin was in charge of drawing the cartoons, and this operation was based at his home, the Grange in Ramsgate. The finished cartoons were then sent by post to Hardman, who oversaw the production of the windows in Birmingham. The windows were then installed by either Hardman’s journeyman or local glaziers. Pugin and his two pupils, his son Edward and his son-in-law John Hardman Powell, manned the cartoon room. Pugin initially drew the delicate sections, the face painting and figure groups, while the pupils did more repetitive work. To complicate matters, Pugin used Francis Oliphant (who had quitted his position as chief designer for Wailes in 1845 [i.e. William Wailes, whose studio dominated the stained glass market in the 1840s and 1850s – L.G.]) on a freelance basis to assist with designs. Oliphant17 worked mainly from his base in London and would send his cartoons to Pugin for approval, at which point they were quite frequently altered. [. . .] So in the late 1840s, when commissions were starting to flood in, a cartoon might be drawn in London, altered in Ramsgate, and then sent to Birmingham for production. Pugin [. . .] himself wrote in a letter of circa 1849: “Our great disadvantage is never seeing the work in progress. I make the cartoons & that is all, but I am sure that the old men watched everything & I predict that we shall never produce anything very good till the furnaces are within a few yards of the easel.” 18
Moreover, a reputable stained glass workshop might -- and usually did -- employ a number of designers, so that, even when the name of the workshop is inscribed on a stained glass panel or can be documented, it is often difficult to attribute the original design to any clearly identifiable individual.19 The neglect, loss, or destruction of the records of many workshops, due to company closures, bombing raids during WWII, or simply the lack of importance attached to stained glass as an artistic medium as distinct from painting and sculpture, has made attribution even more difficult. In our current culture of extreme individualism and belief in the artist as “loner, [. . .], genius, and ‘maestro’” -- in the words of a contemporary British stained glass artist -- such uncertainty as to the particular authorship of a work can be a significant handicap.20
Above all, painters made their mark as individuals thanks to the autonomization of painting, its emancipation from architecture and wall-painting or fresco, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the artist in stained glass, in contrast, the work of architecture remained (and still remains) the Gesamtkunstwerk -- as Sir Nicholas Pevsner, the eminent historian of architecture, put it in a striking critique of modern easel painting since the “bourgeois” art of seventeenth-century Holland and of the entire salon tradition – in which the stained-glass artist’s own work has its place, to which it contributes, and of which it is an inseparable part.21 Pevsner, it is worth noting, was echoing a view held not only by many of Stephen Adam’s mid- to late nineteenth-century contemporaries, such as the Glasgow architect James Salmon (2105-1888), who insisted in the mid-1850s that the selection of new stained glass windows for Glasgow Cathedral was “entirely an architectural question,”22 or various champions of mural painting in France and the United States,23 but by Gropius, the founder of the modern Bauhaus school and the hero of Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius. To Gropius “the complete building is the final aim of the visual arts,” the “noblest function” of which “was once the decoration of buildings.” He himself aspired to “conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day towards heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.” 24 The revolutionary Russian poet Maiakovsky also rejected an art that finds its ideal home in a museum, “a mausoleum of art where dead works are worshipped,” and called instead for “a living factory of the human spirit -- in streets, in tramways, in factories, workshops and workers’ homes.”25
Unlike easel painting, which became and remains – along, to a lesser extent, with sculpture -- the dominant mode of art in modern times, despite the rise of conceptual art and other forms designed to self-destruct, stained glass was only exceptionally, as in the popular panels or roundels created as gifts for special occasions in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially in Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, a stand-alone art. “Stained glass was never made for exhibition or sale,” the Scottish designer Francis Oliphant noted in his A Plea for Painted Glass of 1855; “it must have a purpose to fulfil, and a place provided for it.”26 And unlike painting and sculpture it is infrequently bought and sold or put up for sale at the great auction houses and, with some notable exceptions, is for good reason not usually well represented in our public museums. When it does come up for sale, it is almost always after the collapse or demolition of the building of which it was part. 27 As the eminent modern American artist in stained glass, Robert Sowers (1923-1990), wrote in 1981, “The best stained glass, whether ancient or modern, enters into an indissoluble relationship with its architectural setting, in which each vitally qualifies the form, luminous effect, and overall expressive import of the other.” For this reason, that is, because of its
refusal of autonomy, the art of stained glass is bound to frustrate the aesthetic expectations of the viewer whose primary orientation is to the pictorial tradition of European painting from c.1400 until our own time. Which is to say, the aesthetic experience of most viewers. [. . .] Until the recent wave of anti-museum activities the art world had become so highly museum-and gallery-oriented that it could scarcely credit as art anything that was not readily and regularly exhibited within its own special milieu. [. . .] In almost every respect stained glass is an outsider, a mode of expression that is all but exhibition- and event-proof. For stained glass windows are usually commissioned directly from the artist; normally bought and sold just one time, they also entail the commitment of a particular space to a particular work for an indefinitely long time. 28
An inevitable consequence of the dependency of stained glass on architecture has been that the medium has languished in those periods when architects did not favor it and preferred plain glass.
As noted, the mode of production of much stained glass was yet another obstacle to its being considered as art. The rapid population increase associated with the Industrial Revolution in England and Scotland led to the building of many more churches, construction of which was facilitated, in accordance with the Church Building Act of 1818, by government funding (£1 million in 1818 – the equivalent of about £65 million or $101 million in 2015). 29 In the context of the Gothic Revival, most of the new churches were built in Gothic style and this created a tremendous demand for Gothic-style stained glass windows. Windows were also required to replace those destroyed or damaged during the Reformation. Large workshops, employing up to a hundred and more workers, were set up to turn out such “medieval”- looking windows in quantity, and designs were copied and repeated in order to satisfy the many commissions from within Britain, as well as from abroad.30 In the words of Francis Oliphant, a “revived taste” for stained glass “brought an increased demand, and from a trade it became a matter of enterprise; and many embarked on it, whose previous pursuits were very uncongenial, and whose undertaking was commercial rather than artistic; and so a market was established for the article, and a price current quoted, like any other merchandise.” A modern scholar writes of “the mass-production methods of Gothic Revival glass” and “the factory-like processes of so many Victorian studios.”31 Stained glass was exported in large quantities from Britain to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In his 1877 essay Stained Glass: Its History and Modern Development, Stephen Adam himself, writing from the perspective of a new generation of artist-technicians trained in art schools rather than only as apprentices in a workshop, complained that “the country is overrun with ‘stock saints and evangelists’ of all sizes, at per foot prices, say a trifle extra if Peter has two keys; [. . .] Medieval glass, forsooth! This is no art. What can future historians term it? Let it be nameless.”32
Still, Adam himself, like nearly all stained glass artists, including those who took their art seriously and disdained the mere copying of old medieval designs, relied on commissions to keep his workshop going, and the work that resulted inevitably reflected the interests and desires of the individual or institution that commissioned it. As most stained glass commissions were from church committees and from individuals donating windows to a church in memory of a relative or friend,33 his work, like that of other stained glass artists of his generation, is overwhelmingly focused on religious figures and Biblical scenes and does not fundamentally depart from the representational conventions of the better ecclesiastical stained glass of his time. “How important a role was played by the client’s own ideas, in suggesting possible subjects and arrangements, in criticizing sketch-designs and proposing changes,” A. Charles Sewter observes in his comprehensive study of the William Morris studio, “remains largely a matter of conjecture. [. . .] It is likely that important decisions were reached in personal discussion when the client called at the firm’s premises, or a representative of the firm visited the building where the window was to be erected. [. . .] Always, of course, the client had the last word, and this fact alone is sufficient explanation of many inequalities of merit in both design and iconography.”34
A related constraint on the appeal of stained glass to art lovers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries may well be the narrative or symbolic thematics, most often Biblical or heraldic, of much of it, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- an inevitable consequence of the fact that, in spite of the growing popularity of decorative glass in domestic contexts, churches continued to be the principal source of commissions. As modern “high” art -- the efforts of Pugin and the German Nazarene painters notwithstanding -- has become ever more secular and, despite some notable exceptions, has moved decisively away from any representational function, viewers have become unaccustomed to the representation of religious figures and narratives in modern art.35 At the same time, the non-figurative, decorative element of most nineteenth-century stained glass windows may well strike the modern viewer as imitative of medieval designs rather than, as in the case, for example, of the stained glass designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright at the end of the century, anticipations of modern abstraction. (See Fig. 3) The decorative function of stained glass is in any case inescapable, not only in obvious cases like art nouveau domestic designs, but even when it represents episodes from the Bible and the Lives of the Saints, since -- as noted – it is an inseparable part of the architectural structure that it adorns, be it church, synagogue, theatre, bar, or home. In the eyes of Charles Winston, the already mentioned champion of the revived medium in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, this did not preclude its being art of the highest order: “Glass paintings are, to a certain extent, a species of architectural decoration; but not more so than fresco paintings, yet the greatest authorities have not considered a display of high art in a fresco incompatible with its decorative character.”36 In modern times, however, as the general expectation has come to be that art should be absolutely autonomous, like the modern artist himself, decorative work that lacks this autonomy (as distinct from the pure arrangements of color and line admired by Kandinsky) tends to be dismissed as “merely” decorative.37
Finally, it is possible that an essential feature of stained glass has contributed to its comparatively poor popular appreciation as an artistic medium. Whereas the material supporting the artist’s design or vision in painting and drawing (canvas, board, paper) usually plays at best a relatively minor role in the finished work of art and, until fairly recently at least, has not normally itself been an essential element of the viewer’s attention, the glass itself, together with the changing natural light that shines through it and illuminates it, is a determining -- and also constraining -- element in any stained glass window or panel. More precisely, it is a determining element in “authentic” stained glass, as that was defined by those nineteenth-century writers on the topic who, as we shall see later, distinguished “authentic” stained glass from works featuring pictures painted in enamel on the surface of large colorless glass panes, that is to say, works in which the glass, performing the same function as canvas or board, is no more than the material on which the artist projects a pictorial image.38 In this respect “authentic” stained glass bears some resemblance to sculpture, wood-carving, and architecture, inasmuch as in those arts the material with which the artist’s design or vision is fashioned is likewise an essential part of the work itself. There is simply no getting around the material the artist works with. Whatever the style or the particular vision to be communicated, the material is always powerfully present, defining and limiting at the same time. 39 True stained glass, it would seem -- i.e. glass which is colored through and through in the process of fabrication, rather than glass on which color is only painted -- does not lend itself to perspectival representation. On the contrary, even when it purports to represent depth, as in some of Tiffany’s windows, for instance, the viewer is always conscious of the flat pieces composing it -- and that flatness, both in the design and in the color, may well be in fact one of the strengths of stained glass as an art and could, one would have thought, have appealed to those familiar with modern art, characterised as it is by a similar flatness and absence of illusionism.
Even when it purports to represent real scenes, stained glass cannot be illusionistic, as painting can be. It has to be stylized, an art of signs and symbols. This was a central theme of Francis Oliphant’s A Plea for Painted Glass, published in 1855:
The power of glass [. . .] to convey colour is quite unique; no kind of painting can at all come up to it. [. . .] But we must not shrink from the restrictions while we dwell upon the advantages of our art. We cannot have the infinite gradations of our great oil colourists; we cannot round one colour imperceptibly into another. [. . .] We cannot have our colours otherwise than distinct and individual, for we paint not upon an unfeatured canvass, but upon the light itself; and all those brilliant qualities, so difficult of attainment in other departments of art, are here latent in the material, and ready to wake at the slightest touch of the magician who spreads our canvass for us, the great world-illuminator, the sun. [. . .]
This art will never surprise you by the lifelike appearance of its figures; all illusion is out of its sphere; there is no blood coursing under those uniformly tinted cheeks, or mantling in the lip -- nor are its personages arrayed in silk or serge, or domiciled in houses either of wood or stone; nor is aught, aught but what it is, and that is, glass. But there is a strange harmony between the limits of glass painting and its requirements, its powers. [. . .]
Its sphere is not so much to give an actual representation, as a beautiful and complete suggestion. Its pictures are not intended to delude us with an appearance of reality, but to flash upon us bright and palpable visions of the floating pictures in our own mind.[. . .] We do not recognise in the groups and figures of painted glass, portraits or subject-pictures, but a series of beautiful hints and suggestions, [. . .] a sweet embodiment of our own conceptions, and incitement to our own thoughts. 40
Yet another effect of the material composing stained glass works is produced by changes in the light shining through them and rendering them visible. As a result these works do not have the stability usually expected of works of art. As Charles Connick observed, “at best you can get only a hint of two or three moods of [a] window in two days spent before it, if one were sunny and one cloudy. You might get its infinite variety and its persistent message through the months from August to December.” In contrast, “the popular notion of stained glass has made a static thing of it,” one reason for this being “that windows have been confused with pictures and pictures are static.” Moreover, “the resemblance has been strengthened by illustrations of windows .[. . .] Only one illustrator, Viollet-le-Duc, has suggested that pictures, at best, can show only one fleeting aspect of a window. Even color photographs, like some of those reproduced herewith, are inadequate for that reason.”41
One may speculate at length on the reasons for the poor public recognition of works of art in stained glass. The fact itself seems unfortunately beyond dispute. In the largely Victorian and Edwardian city where Stephen Adam had his studio much fine nineteenth-century stained glass was lost as buildings, including many by notable Victorian architects, were wantonly demolished in the haste to rebuild and renew that marked the 1960s and 1970s. Thus when Park Parish Church in Glasgow’s elegant West End was demolished in 1968, no attempt was made to save the William Morris glass in the building. As late as 1997, when J.J. Stevenson’s Townhead Parish Church of 1865-66 was demolished, all the decorative work by the eminent Victorian stained glass artist and decorator Daniel Cottier was demolished along with it. 42 The dismantling in 2008 of the grand stained glass window by Robert Sowers which had been a prominent feature of the American Airlines Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport for almost half a century did provoke some protest, but went ahead all the same. Even scholars writing of architecture sometimes pay scant attention to the stained glass in the buildings they are writing about. Despite close collaboration of the great Glasgow architect Alexander (“Greek”) Thomson with his highly regarded contemporary Daniel Cottier, there is no mention of that collaboration and no illustration of the work produced by Cottier for some of Thomson’s most celebrated buildings in two outstanding, richly illustrated recent books on the architect. 43
Notes
Many of the following endnotes are unusually long. As in my recent study of Thomas Annan, the nineteenth-century Glasgow photographer, it has been my aim to keep the main text as uncluttered as possible while providing additional relevant information and quotations in the notes, along with abundant bibliographical indications to assist readers who might wish to pursue themes touched on in the text.
4 For a list of past and present glass artists in Scotland alone, see www.scotlandsglass.co.uk.
5 Henry Holiday, Stained Glass as an Art (London: Macmillan, 1896), pp. 1-3.
6 Charles Connick, Adventures in Light and Color: An Introduction to the Stained Glass Craft (New York: Random House, 1937), p 128. Cf. a recently expressed complaint that even “scholars have continued to overlook the material, symbolic, cultural experience and impact of stained glass in the nineteenth century,” despite the fact that, “during that period, the medium experienced an unprecedented revival, not only in ecclesiastical interiors but also in civic, collegiate, and domestic settings.” (Jasmine Allen, “Stained Glass and the Culture of the Spectacle, 1780-1862,” Visual Culture in Britain [2012], 13:1-23. Web. 6 June 2016.
7 Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Reflections on Glass: 20th Century Stained Glass in American Art and Architecture (New York: Gallery at the American Bible Society, 2002), p. 15.
8 E.g. the celebrated series of sportsmen figures by Tom Wilson in the Oyster Bar of Edinburgh’s Café Royal; see Painton Cowen, A Guide to Stained Glass in Britain (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), p. 233. On the immense popularity of stained glass decoration in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. private homes, see Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, “A New Renaissance: Stained Glass in the Aesthetic Period,” in In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement, ed. Doreen Bolger Burke et al. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Rizzoli. 1986), pp. 177-97, esp. 184-85, and Charles Connick’s account of a style of which he himself heartily disapproved, in his Adventures in Light and Color, chapters V and VI, pp. 120-28. Glasgow was no laggard in this development; see Lesley Gillilan, “Property: Top of the Glass Period. Features, 1: Stained Glass,” in the London newspaper The Independent (Sunday, 10 March 1996): “Glasgow has some of the finest domestic stained glass in Europe. [. . . ] If you walk the Victorian streets of the city’s West End, you can still see the leaded outlines of flowers, birds, rustic scenes, seascapes, heraldic crests and a polychrome of abstract and figurative designs, including pre-Raphaelite nymphs and more mythological maids.” (Figs. I:1, 19; II:1, 3, 7, 8) Likewise Iain Galbraith, “Always happy in his designs: the legacy of Stephen Adam,” The Journal of Stained Glass (2006) 30:101-17: “From around 1870, accompanying the rise of the wealthy middle classes was a boom in suburban expansion around the great manufacturing cities. The inclusion of stained glass decoration was almost de rigueur within the new villas, terraces and mansions forming these affluent suburbs.” (p. 109)
9 Cited by Lesley Gillilan, “Property: Top of the Glass Period. Features, 1: Stained Glass,” The Independent (London), Sunday, 10 March 1996.
10 Inquiry into the Difference of Style observable in Ancient Glass Paintings, especially in England, with Hints on Glass Painting, by an Amateur, 2 vols. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847), I, 281n. Vol. I of Winston’s Inquiry consists of text, vol. II of illustrations. All subsequent references to the Inquiry in the endnotes are to vol. I.
11 Winston, Inquiry, pp. 282-83 and footnote. In the same vein, Fras. [Francis] W. Oliphant in his A Plea for Painted Glass, being an Inquiry into its Nature, Character, and Objects and its Claims as an Art (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1855). It still often happens that the artist responsible for a stained glass window remains anonymous. For instance, in a recent publication featuring illustrations of handsome stained glass works intended to celebrate or memorialize the men of the R.A.F. during the Second World War (David Beatty, Light Perpetual [Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1995]) , no artists’ names are given.
13 C.W. Whall, Stained Glass Work: A Textbook for Students and Workers in Glass (New York: D. Appleton, 1914 [1st ed. 1905]), pp. 4-5, 67, 71, 112-13, et passim. On Morris’s view, see A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 22-23.
14 Sally Rush, “Ungrateful Posterity? The Removal of the ‘Munich’ Windows from Glasgow Cathedral,” in Glasgow’s Great Glass Experiment: The Munich Glass of Glasgow Cathedral, ed. Richard Fawcett (Edinburgh: Historic Scotland, 2003), pp. 47-65, on pp. 57-58.
15 This situation has changed recently in some prominent cases. “The painter who has to do the thinking out and creating ‘at one go’ may himself be the subsequent craftsman-maker, or the maker may be an inspired craftsman-interpreter who sees the point and interprets the ‘one-go’ idea as a creative translator,” the painter John Piper wrote in 1979. “Patrick Reyntiens and I have worked together on windows since 1950. He is himself a painter, and I have been specially lucky in this association because of his sensitive and inventive craftsmanship and his total understanding of the painterly approach. […] The list of artist-interpreter, double-harness, designer-makers of the last twenty years is a long one. It includes Matisse/Paul Bony, Léger/Jean Barillet, Braque/Bony, and Chagall/Charles Marq.” (John Piper, “Art or Anti-Art,” in Brian Clarke, ed., Architectural Stained Glass [London: John Murray, 1979], pp. 60, 63)
16 A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, p. 18. See also p. 14 on the free interpretation of the artist’s cartoons by the workshop of N.W. Lavers and F.P. Barraud. Burne-Jones’ contemporary, the American stained glass artist John Lafarge (1835-1910), claimed to have noticed “of the English artists in stained glass that [their work] had ceased improving, and [… ] that the cause of this was mainly” that “the designer had become separated from the men who make the actual windows.” (H. Barbara Weinberg, “The Early Stained Glass Work of John Lafarge,” Stained Glass [Summer, 1972], 67:5, cited in Frelinghuysen, “A New Renaissance” [see note 8 above], p. 188) In Lafarge’s view, “When [Burne-Jones] sent in his elaborated and final pretty drawing to the glass makers . . . their part began, and they gradually stamped their commercial British mark on his final work.” (Cit. Frelinghuysen, ibid.) Lafarge, we are told, “avoided this pitfall by personally taking his designs to the stained-glass studio and watching over every detail until they were finished to his satisfaction.”
17 [Present author’s note]. Francis Oliphant (1818-1859), who had studied at the Edinburgh Academy of Art, was himself the author of A Plea for Painted Glass, being an Inquiry into its Nature, Character, and Objects and its Claims as an Art (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1855); see above, note 11 and below, note 31. In this well-argued tract of 72 pages Oliphant deplores the low esteem in which stained glass is held. This, he claims, has given any one, skilled and artistically gifted or not, license to turn a hand to it. The result is much mediocre work which thus confirms the low value placed on the medium.
18 Jim Cheshire, Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 43-44. The passage from Pugin is cited in Stanley Shepherd’s University of Birmingham Ph.D, thesis of 1997, published as The Stained Glass of A.W.N. Pugin (Reading: Spire Books, 2009), p. 39.
19 In a “Postscript” to Iain Galbraith’s article “Always happy in his designs: the legacy of Stephen Adam” in The Journal of Stained Glass 30 (2006): 101-16, Martin Harrison notes that Adam’s employment of freelancers “who supplied cartoons to Adam in the 1890s,” as reported by Galbraith (e.g. Robert Burns, David Gauld and Alex Walker) “raises certain questions: had Adam become overloaded with commissions by this time? Or did he operate as the studio head, perhaps as a kind of ‘artistic director’? and might he, therefore, have engaged ‘outside’ designers earlier than this? The ramifications of the devolved design systems operating in 19th-century glass-painting workshops are, at present, incompletely understood. The evidence emerging, however, points to a highly complex situation, one which renders the attribution of figure designs, in particular, extremely problematical.” (p. 114) See also note 20 below.
20 The phrase quoted is from Brian Clarke, “Toward a new Constructivism,” in B. Clarke, ed., Architectural Stained Glass (London: John Murray, 1979), p. 13. Likewise, according to the stained glass artist Patrick Reyntiens (“Good Behavior and Bad Taste,” ibid., p. 43), identifying the designer or craftsman responsible for a window is usually difficult or impossible. Though a few names of medieval craftsmen are known, “windows, even by fairly well-known artists, are scarcely ever labelled, some are signed with a cipher, few are mentioned in the church guidebook.” (Lawrence Lee, The Appreciation of Stained Glass [London: Oxford University Press, 1977], pp. 31-32) Some windows, especially modern nineteenth- and twentieth-century windows do carry a name or an emblem of their maker. The French stained glass maker Eugène Oudinot, for instance, inscribed the name of their designer on the windows he produced for one neo-Gothic church: “E. VIOLLET-LE-DUC DIREXIT ANNO 1866.” (Laurence de Finance, “Viollet-le-Duc et l’atelier Gérente,” in Laurence de Finance and Jean-Michel Leniaud, Viollet-le-Duc: Les Visions d’un architecte [Paris: Éditions Norma, 2014], p. 126) But the reference is often, at best, to a studio or workshop rather than an individual. (John Herries, Discovering Stained Glass, 3rd ed., revised by Carola Hicks [Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 1996; 1st ed. 1968], p. 88) Even in the late nineteenth century, there was often no indication of the artist or designer. In the meticulously documented volumes of the “Buildings of Scotland” series (published by Penguin until the year 2000, after that by Yale University Press), the attribution of many windows to Adam is described as possible or likely or is accompanied by a question mark in parentheses. When a window does bear a signature, it is often “Studio of Stephen Adam, Glasgow” or “Adam & Small,” so that the individual responsible for the design remains anonymous. On the other hand, some windows described as having been made after Stephen Adam’s death are attributed in the “Buildings of Scotland” series simply to “Stephen Adam” rather than to the Adam studio. Similarly, on the government-supported Historic Scotland website, a window dated 1920 in Sherwood Greenlaw Church, Paisley is attributed to Stephen Adam, though Adam died on August 23, 1910. (“Glasgow Road Sherwood Church,” Historic Environment Scotland) A window depicting “The Good Shepherd” in New Kilpatrick Church in the Glasgow suburb of Bearsden offers an example of the complexity of attribution. The window was described in an earlier version of the Church’s excellent website as having been “executed and adapted by Stephen Adam and Alf Webster”; the “artist,” however is named as “W.H. Margetson” and his work is said to have been “copied from an English cathedral window.”
21 Information derived from the typescript (p. 4) of an unpublished paper entitled “Kunst der Gegenwart, Kunst der Zukunft” (circa 1934) communicated to me in 1999, with the permission of Dieter Pevsner, by Susie Harries, the author of the 2011 biography of the noted art historian. Pevsner never abandoned the core views expressed in this paper. A decade later, in the Introduction to An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1943; 2nd revised ed., 1951), he wrote: “An age without painting is conceivable, though no believer in the life-enhancing function of art would want it. An age without easel-painting can be conceived without any difficulty, and, thinking of the predominance of easel-pictures in the 19th century, might be regarded as a consummation devoutly to be wished” (p. 20); and in the Introduction to the 5th edition (1957):
The very fact that in the 19th century easel-painting flourished at the expense of wall-painting and ultimately of architecture, proves into what a diseased state the arts (and Western civilization) had fallen. The very fact that the Fine Arts today seem to be recovering their architectural character makes one look into the future with some hope. [p. 24]
22 Salmon cited by Elgin Vaassen, Die kgl. Glasmalereianstalt in München 1827-1874 (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013), p. 273; see also on Salmon’s position, George Rawson, “The Cathedral Glazing Campaign 1855-1864,” in Richard Fawcett, ed., Glasgow’s Great Glass Experiment: The Munich Glass of Glasgow Cathedral (Edinburgh: Historic Scotland 2003), pp. 21-33, on pp. 25-26. In similar vein, F.G. Stephens in an article on “Mr. E. Burne-Jones, R.S.A. as a Decorative Artist,” The Portfolio 20 (1889): 214-19: “The functions of art in glass-staining are: - (1) to subserve architecture of which it is an essential member; (2) to combine in expression and dignity with the walls and mouldings, which are, to some extent, its framework.” (p. 217)
23 In France, Théophile Gautier was a strong advocate of mural painting. In the United States, a virtually exact contemporary of Adam, the philosopher and expert on Oriental art Ernest Fenolossa (1853-1908), best known now for his influence on Ezra Pound, declared that mural painting was “a civic art -- not hidden away in the cabinets of the rich, but where all may see it and participate in the pride of ownership,” while the painter and stained glass designer Will Hicok Low (1853-1933) denounced “the unrelated easel picture destined to private possession, an apandage [sic] of the rich” (cited in Bailey van Hook, The Virgin and the Dynamo: Public Murals in American Architecture 1893-1917 [Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2003], p. 100).
24 Gropius, “Proclamation from the Weimar Bauhaus 1919,” in Bauhaus 1919-28 (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1938 [1st ed. 1928]), p. 18. The stained-glass artist, it is worth noting, seems not always to have appreciated his subservience to the architect or to have accepted the architect’s judgment as superior to his own; see Connick, Adventures in Light and Color, pp. 191-92.
25 This situation has changed recently in some prominent cases. See note 15 above.
26 Oliphant, A Plea for Painted Glass, pp. 65-66. In his Inquiry (1847), Winston warned that “painted glass loses so much of its interest and value in every respect, when torn from its original position, that this measure should never be resorted to unless for the purpose of better preservation.” (p. 304) This does not mean, however, that the original architectural wholes do in fact usually remain intact. On the contrary, it has been pointed out that for various reasons (wars, decay, changes of taste, renovation and reconstruction) few churches retain their original stained glass windows. Most have a variety of windows in different styles and from different periods. (See Lawrence Lee, The Appreciation of Stained Glass, pp. 17-18) One well-known example of displacement is that of Joshua Price’s “The Supper at Emmaus” (1719-1721), based on an Italian design by Sebastiano Ricci and originally commissioned by Lord Chandos for the chapel of his estate, Cannons, in Middlesex, but later, on the break-up of the estate, installed by Price’s son, along with a magnificent Italian baroque ceiling, in Saint Michael and All Angels Church in Great Witley, Worcestershire. (Sarah Brown, Stained Glass: An Illustrated History [London: Studio Editions, 1992], p. 121). See likewise, Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Stained Glass: Radiant Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), p. 87: “Elements of architectural decoration, such as stained glass windows, become objects in museums or private collections after they have lost their original context—for example, with the destruction of a building—or after having been deliberately removed from an extant site. Over the centuries, and long before they became museum pieces or collector’s items on the art market, these works were sometimes removed from their original locations and placed in new ones. This re-placing happened in churches, for example, where windows were repositioned due to successive renovations.” On panels created in 15th-century Switzerland to serve as gifts on special occasions, see George Seddon, “The History of Stained Glass,” in Lawrence Lee, George Seddon, Francis Stephens, Stained Glass (London: Michael Beazley, 1976), pp. 64-175, on p. 124): “Protestant objections to religious imagery in stained glass and the development of the enamelling technique combined to make popular a new genre of glass-painting: small panels for secular use. A craze for giving such panels as gifts began in Switzerland late in the fifteenth century. The occasions that were used for giving a panel were many – from a great civic occasion to a family wedding. [. . .] Panel painting spread from Switzerland to southern Germany” and the Netherlands. The subject matter, heraldic at first (the arms of the donor, for instance, or of a guild), later included the figures of the donors themselves, then of their wives and children. According to Raguin, Stained Glass: Radiant Art, “Roundels, pieces of uncolored glass, painted in a manner similar to prints and drawings, became popular in the Renaissance. This form of stained glass was developed to serve a new wealthy mercantile class and its scale suited the small windows in the urban townhouses they decorated.” (p. 59) See also Timothy B. Husband and Ilja M. Veldman, The Luminous Image: Painted Glass Roundels in the Lowlands 1480-1560 (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 1993) and, for many fine illustrations of these small, free-standing panels, Ewald Jeuter and Birgit Cleef-Roth, Licht und Farbe: Eine Glasgemälde-Sammlung des 15. bis 19. Jahrhunderts aus dem Besitz der Herzöge von Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, exh. cat. (Schloss Callenberg bei Coburg, 2003). According to Robert Sowers, “the intimate and portable heraldic panel, which became fashionable to hang in domestic windows particularly in Switzerland, the Low Countires, and Germany” were “the most interesting development in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. [. . .] Seldom more than two feet high [. . .] they complete the divorce between stained glass and architecture.” (http://www.britannica.com/art/stained-glass)
27 The British Journal of Stained Glass, which appears annually, does offer a small illustrated section in each issue entitled “Highlights from the auction rooms.” On the market for stained glass and on collectors, see Raguin, Stained Glass: Radiant Art, pp. 92-94, where William Randolph Hearst and, to a lesser extent, Henry Ford are cited as serious collectors of stained glass. On the difficult conditions for the display of stained glass in a museum, see this discussion on the website of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
28 Robert Sowers, The Language of Stained Glass (Forest Grove, OR: Timber Press, 1981[?]), p. 193. See, in the same vein, Sowers, “Autonomy as a Spurious Absolute,” in Clarke, Architectural Stained Glass: “Because [the stained glass artist’s] work is normally commissioned, must relate to a given space, and may even be called upon to evoke, however implicitly, some particular range of human experience -- because it is an ‘applied’ art -- it is declared to be hopelessly compromised from the outset. In effect, the autonomy of art, its utter freedom from any possible link with any place, thing, or function outside itself is raised to the level of a quasi-moral absolute.” (Clarke, p. 55) And so it comes about that, even though “museums, after all, are run by curators, who, on the evidence of the past, have not only refused the donation of masterpieces but spent inordinate sums of money on pure junk,” the artist must “reluctantly” accept that museums are “the least sullied refuge for art in a grossly imperfect world. [. . . ] All real art then belongs, somewhat grudgingly, in this least tarnished place and nowhere else. What kind of world does this injunction bring to mind, this world in which the one place for art as art [. . .] is the museum of fine art?” (p. 57)
29 The significance of the figure can be appreciated in light of the cost (£6,000) of building a new St. Margaret’s Church in Dalry in 1871-73 to replace an earlier building that had had to be demolished. (Rona Moody, "A Short History of St Margaret's Church Dalry")
30 Martin Harrison, Victorian Stained Glass (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1980), pp. 71-72; Roger Rosewell, Stained Glass (Botley, Oxon.: Shire Publications, 2012), pp. 65 ff.; Jim Cheshire, Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival, passim. Efforts to streamline production may not have been an altogether new development. According to the modern stained glass artist Robert Sowers in his article on “Stained Glass” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “There is ample evidence to show that by the 14th century it was the practice of glaziers to have a stock of finished cartoons, executed on parchment or paper, which could be adapted for different glazing schemes.”
31 Fras. W. Oliphant, A Plea for Painted Glass, pp. 54-55; John Herries, Discovering Stained Glass, p. 81. Cf. the chapter title “Restoration and Mass-Production” in George Seddon, “The History of Stained Glass,” in Lawrence Lee, George Seddon, Francis Stephens,eds., Stained Glass (London: Michael Beazley, 1976), pp. 64-175, on p. 148. Around the same time as Oliphant, the great French restorer of Gothic architecture referred to stained glass production as “that art or, if you will, that industry.” (Eugène Viollet-le -Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, article “Vitrail” [Paris: Morel, 1875; first ed. 1854-1868], p. 453)
32 Stained Glass: Its History and Modern Development (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1877), p. 25. See also Adam’s article “Some Notes on the History of Stained Glass,” The British Architect (29 December, 1893), 481-83: “We will now touch on, as gently as feeling will allow, the quondam ‘Gothic Revival’ of 40 or 50 years ago. Gothic architects, Gothic glass stainers [. . .] all at once awakened to the beauties of early work. Gothic churches wanted medieval windows and figures, and many glass stainers, knowing the ‘requisite little’ to produce them brought forth in large quantities grotesque twisted saints, with wry faces, at per foot prices, issued catalogues and flooded the country with stock ‘Acts of Mercy,’ ‘Evangelists and Miracles.’” (p. 482) Here, as in other places, Adam was repeating the views expressed decades earlier by Charles Winston in his Inquiry of 1847.
33 On the “great tide of memorial glass,” that set in around the time of the publication of an address to the Oxford Architectural Society by J. H. Markland in 1842, see A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, p. 10. In an appendix to the second edition (1904) of his pamphlet Truth in Decorative Art (1896) Adam himself lists as “a few” that “may be mentioned” just under 100 “among the most important church memorial windows designed and executed in recent years by Stephen Adam.”
34 A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, pp. 20-21. Though today’s workshops may be smaller than those of Adam’s time and may claim to have artistic aspirations, their directors are still -- as practitioners of the “decorative arts” have always been, no matter how academically trained and high-minded -- unavoidably more directly influenced by commercial considerations and the preferences of their clients than modern painters. E.g. the following offer: “We can model your leaded stained glass to match the current decor in your home, or design you an original pattern from scratch. We work closely with each of our clients, through each step in the custom-creation of their own special masterpiece” (stainedglasswindows.com)
35 See, however, articles on “The Return of the Religious in Contemporary Art” (Huffington Post, 1/6/2011) and “The 20th Century’s Varied Influence on Religious Art” (Washington Post, 2/17/2007). See also the following from “Question of Faith: Is There a Return of the Religious in Contemporary Art?” Art Mag.
36 Winston, Inquiry, p. 282. Winston goes on to remind his readers “that a display of high art depends not on the nature of the materials employed, but on the mode of employing them.”
37 The criticism by Quatremère de Quincy and others of the policy of removing works of art from their original locations -- in lands conquered by Napoleon’s armies or, in the case of the Elgin marbles, from the Parthenon in Athens -- failed to arrest the development of the Museum as repository of works of art from all parts of the world. It should be noted, however, that to Quatremère the collection or museum in itself was not the problem. On the contrary, established collections and museums were among the “original locations” that should be respected, inasmuch as the works in them “once assembled, illuminate and explain one another.” (Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens, transl. Chris Miller and David Gilks [Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012], p. 100). The Lettres sur le projet d’enlever les monumens d’Italie appeared in 1796, the Lettres écrites de Londres à Rome, et adressées à M. Canova, sur les marbres d’Elgin in 1818.
38 Thus Winston: “The ancient tints have in many cases been reproduced, but not the textures of the more ancient material. Consequently there is a difference of effect between the modern and the ancient glass. The former is more homogeneous, and therefore clearer, and more perfectly transparent than the latter, especially than that belonging to the twelfth and the two following centuries: and I feel persuaded that it is to this circumstance that we must refer the poor and thin appearance, which almost every modern glass painting [. . .] presents in comparison with an original specimen.” (Inquiry, p. 270) For helpful accounts of the technical aspects of stained glass production, how they evolved in the nineteenth century after the revival of “antique” glass, and how that revival affected the esthetics of stained glass, see Elgin Vaassen, “Stained Glass Windows for the United Kingdom by the Königliche Glasmalereianstalt in Munich, and their painting technique,” in Glasgow’s Great Glass Experiment: The Munich Glass of Glasgow Cathedral, pp. 35-45, on pp. 41-42, and especially Rush, pp. 47-65, on pp. 57-59.
39 See Charles Connick’s account of the indignant response of a wood-carver when he was asked by a church committee to reproduce the face of a Raphael Madonna on a reredos statue: “I am a wood carver! What have I to do with those soft, sensuous Eyetalian girls?" His visitors, Connick continues, “were shocked by such heresy. They thought Raphael’s pictures should be the ideal of everyone interested in Christian art. But the sheer force of their craftman’s character held them while he told of the virtues and potentialities of wood. He struggled to say that wood is important in a field of design where realism does not belong at all. His feelings for surface and texture impressed the committee. Almost everyone caught his delight in the peculiar genius of wood.” (Adventures in Light and Color, pp. 104-105)
40 Fras. W. Oliphant, A Plea for Painted Glass, pp. 24, 41, 32.
41 Connick, Adventures in Light and Color, p. 150. Viollet-le-Duc also discusses the effect of proximity or distance on the view the spectator has of a stained glass panel. He illustrates his point by showing how, at a distance of 20 metres, a head “d’une exécution si brutale prend un tout autre caractère. Ce sont les traits d’un jeune home à la barbe naissante.” (Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XI au XVI siècle, article “Vitrail,” pp. 421-22).
42 On widespread post-WWII demolition of British churches resulting in the loss of fine stained glass windows, see Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, pp. 83-84. On the destruction of Townhead Parish Church, see Juliet Kinchin, Hilary Macartney, David Robertson, Cottier’s in Context: Daniel Cottier, William Leiper and Dowanhill Church, Glasgow, 3 (Case Study), (Edinburgh: Historic Scotland, 2011), p. 13. An e-mail to the author from Professor Ray McKenzie, recently retired from the faculty of the Glasgow School of Art, suggests that some individuals did try, unsuccessfully, to prevent the destruction. McKenzie recalled a conversation he had had “many, many years ago,” when he himself was still an undergraduate, with the Scottish film director Murray Grigor in the company of the Glasgow University Art History professor McLaren Young. Grigor told “about an encounter he had with a demolition squad knocking down a church in Glasgow with some Morris & Co. glass in the windows. When he asked the foreman if he would accept a bung (£50 if I remember rightly) to let them remove the glass before the wrecking balls got to work, he (the foreman) picked up a half brick and with a sneer threw it through the window. 'That's what you get for fifty quid' was his enlightened comment.” (E-mail of 27 September 2015) Charles Sewter points to other instances of casual disregard for stained glass windows, such as extracting figures from their backgrounds and surrounds of patterned work and resetting them in plain glass. (The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle, p. 85) It is hard to imagine a sculpture or painting being subjected to such cavalier treatment.
43 On the fate of Sowers’ window, see, for instance, “JFK airport dismantles famed stained glass window,” USA Today (2 February 2008) and Noah Fleisher, “Broken glass – Robert Sower’s window at JFK Airport’s American Airlines terminal,” Antique Trader (4 April 2008). . On the “perfect collaboration” of Cottier and Thomson, see Michael Donnelly, Glasgow Stained Glass: A Preliminary Study (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, 1981), p. 9 and Sally Joyce Rush, “Alexandeer Thomson, Daniel Cottier and the Interior of Queen’s Park Church” in Gavin Stamp and Sam McKinstry, eds., “Greek” Thomson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), pp.77-85. In contrast, there is no discussion of stained glass decoration in Ronald McFadzean’s groundbreaking and thoroughly documented The Life and Work of Alexander Thomson (London: Routledge, 1979), or in Gavin Stamp’s beautifully illustrated Alexander “Greek” Thomson (London: Lawrence King Publishing in association with Glasgow 1999 Festival Company Ltd., 1999).
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