Part 1

A LECTURE ON STAINED GLASS

BY PROFESSOR R. ANNING BELL R.A., R.W.S.

Published at The Royal College of Art Students’ Common Room, South Kensington, S.W.7; and printed by George W. Jones at The Sign of The Dolphin in Gough Square, Fleet Street, London. Copyright. All Rights Reserved.

A LECTURE ON STAINED GLASS, DELIVERED IN THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART STUDENTS’ COMMON ROOM, BY PROFESSOR R. ANNING BELL, R.A., R.W.S., ON TUESDAY, 31ST JANUARY, 1922.

My subject of Stained Glass is a very wide, vague, large sort of subject, and of course it is quite impossible to talk about it in any thorough way in the course of an evening. You want to write books about it. I thought it would be interesting to you, perhaps, to talk about the more recent variations and changes, the evolution in the use of glass. The fact that this modification in Stained Glass is very largely the work of artists trained in this College should interest you particularly.

Stained Glass, commonly so-called--it is a misnomer, for it is really coloured and painted glass--is one of the three great Christian decorative arts: Mosaic, Stained Glass, Fresco. They are in sequence, roughly speaking, but they overlap. First, Mosaic in the earlier ten centuries. It began about the 4th century and went on to the Renaissance, when its character changed. You then get Stained Glass, overlapping it about the 12th century; and the third great Christian art is Fresco Painting, which flourished from the 14th century onward, following a long and slow development from a very early period.

These three seem to be the main arts through which the expression of the Christian religious scheme, its story, and its emotion have been conveyed--Sculpture has found expression in all religions. They have a considerable sympathy in the fact that they all demand plain surfaces, flat or curved, and are all closely associated with architecture. Each of them also has been so important, so dominating, that it has affected the architectural treatment of the buildings which it was designed to adorn.

Coloured and painted glass is the outstanding decorative treatment of the Gothic period--the age of the cathedrals. The earliest stained glass which we know is, I believe, of the 10th or 11th century, and there are but few examples existing now. The great period runs from about 1200 to 1550 or so in its full vigour. That is the big cycle of stained glass; it went on living after that, and is reviving, I am glad to say, nowadays; but those centuries showed its highest and fullest development. It was then that the conditions of life and architecture allowed its completest opportunity of expression. After that it was adapted--with a much simpler treatment, with far less colour, with more painting on clear glass--to domestic decorative work, and you will see a good deal of Continental work of a very pleasant and attractive type of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The practical function of stained glass is comparable with that of mosaic. Mosaic is an enrichment of the shadow. Buildings designed for mosaic usually have quite small windows, low down in the big domes or sparsely set in the side walls, and it is the mosaic enrichment of shadow, vaguely lit by reflected light from these windows, which gives it its highest beauty. The peculiar charm of mosaic depends largely on the gold treatment of the background, which is infinitely more attractive when seen on curved surfaces and lit from below.

Stained glass is a method of glorifying and modifying the light which enters a building; it has a wide range, from a limpid clarity to rich and even sombre depths. Its power of emotional suggestion is considerable and this, doubtless, commended it to the mediaeval mystics.

The spiritual function of stained glass is, like that of mosaic, by a noble beauty of treatment, to present elevated ethical and religious ideas in a worthy way. It may do this by means of symbolism, or by typifying virtues and moral qualities by individual figures of great characters from mythology or from religious history. For symbolism and these type-figures it is peculiarly suited. Further, its function is to enhance and to deepen the mood of religious exaltation which the architecture of the building has already suggested to the worshipper. Stained glass is essentially a method of strengthening, carrying further and enriching the mood in which the worshipper finds himself when he enters those noble buildings, so full of the sense of aspiration and exaltation, and of the mystery which lies behind the outward show of things. That is just by way of showing you the sort of attitude which, I believe, we should adopt towards stained glass. You must realise that your work is more than making pleasant and agreeable colour and striking a casual note of beauty. You have more than that to carry out, and deeper feelings to express.

Now to come down to the material, to what is called stained glass. The fact is it is merely coloured glass. It is glass melted and mixed up in the pot with various coloured oxides, green, blue or red, whatever you want. Then the blow-pipe is put in, and with a quantity of the sticky mixture attached to it is then blown out into a large bulb, just as ordinary window glass is, and cut off and flattened out on big tables to cool. The beauty of the quality of stained glass is very largely owing to the irregularity of the thickness of it, and you often get subtle variations in the colour, streaks, blotches of colour and so on; the thickness of the glass makes quite an appreciable difference in the depth of the colour, as you can easily imagine. One selects from the large sheet of glass the particular piece which contains a tone of colour one wishes to use.

Another treatment of glass is very largely used. This is called “flash” glass. It was found that if the glass were coloured right through with vigorous blues, ruby reds, and greens, it became so deep that you did not get enough light through it. So quite early they found out a method by which a film of colour could be applied to a sheet of clear glass, usually of a greenish tinge. You have the same thickness of glass as in the other method, but the colour is in a thin stratum on the surface of it. This “flash” glass has another advantage which we occasionally make use of; you can work away the thin veneer of colour, leaving only the dear glass, an obvious method for making patterns. It used to be done by means of a wheel with which you ground away the surface rather laboriously, now you stop out with Brunswick Black the parts you do not want to eliminate and apply acid--it is the same method as in etching--and when you get down to the clear glass you get rid of the acid. Then you can paint in your brown paint or yellow stain, and you get quite an attractive effect. You will often see it done in rich robes and in crowns and things like that; it is quite useful and workmanlike, but if it is used too much it becomes tricky and pretty.

Now for the practice of the craft. I am afraid this will be very commonplace talk to those students who are working at stained glass, but possibly some others will be interested. I particularly hope the more advanced painter students may be interested, for it is to them one rather looks to take to stained glass in the last years of their education when they have become fairly competent in drawing and design, that is the time when stained glass should become to them a very attractive and fruitful means of expression. The modern practice is extremely like the old practice. The craft has the great attraction to my mind of being one of those crafts which have changed very little all through the ages, and the workshop method of executing stained glass now is very much what it was in the earliest days.

The tools are very much the same, too, except that for cutting the glass nowadays we use the more convenient modern diamond. The old method was simple but rather laborious. When you wanted to cut out a piece of glass you got a rather stoutish iron wire which you made red hot, and you drew the iron wire over the lines you wanted to break, and then with another tool you just nipped it off all round. They did the most extraordinarily elaborate things in those days with these. I think they got towards the later period to be far too fond of showing off their skill. They cut most preposterous, irregular and odd shapes to show they could do them; it was a case of the skilful craftsman getting a bit beyond himself.

After the glass cutting comes the painting. This is done in the same way as it always was, and the leading too. There are several sizes of leads, 1/2 in., 3/8 in., and 1/4 in., etc. It is just a piece of narrow lead flanged in the middle to separate the adjacent pieces of glass, and when the lead is fixed all round the pieces, cement is put in to hold it together. You want to be a good plumber to do it very well, as I think our students have found out. I think all who practise the art should go through the workshop and learn to cut the glass and to lead it up; it is not a very serious part of their training; it is not necessary that they should become expert plumbers, but they should learn how and why it is done. I should very much like to have an expert plumber and an expert glazier to do that part of the work for the more advanced students, so that they could get on more quickly with advanced work. But I am afraid we shall not have that just yet, owing to the need for economy all round.

Now getting further on, I take it the earlier people designed their windows in a much more simple way than we do. They had no cartoons, I think. I believe that they set the work out on the long wooden bench on which the glass is laid to be leaded up and cut, and marked it out with charcoal. Very often they had to use up bits of glass they had got, and make the designs fit into these, as glass was very expensive. Again, the early work is generally based on geometrical forms. A tall window would be cut up into seven or eight diamonds, circles, quatrefoils, or such like; with ornamental detail in between. That gives an opportunity of using up very small pieces of glass. In those days labour was not very valuable and glass was, and so they did not like to waste any bits. Nowadays you cut a large sheet of glass, you get a few bits out of it, and often that is about all you can use of it. They had very few colours, and as you could not go very far wrong with a limited palette, I really think very much of the beauty of the earliest glass is because they could not help themselves. The earlier glass was glaziers’ work, it was the men thinking of leading it up rather than of the painter’s work, who made the design.

Then about 1300 somebody discovered that extraordinarily effective and useful material, the yellow stain. It was found that a solution of silver painted on the glass would give, according to its strength and according to the firing, all sorts of shades of yellow. This led them to escape from the coarse note in stained glass. Blues, reds and greens are very good as a rule, but the neutral colours are rather poor, the purples are not very good, and yellow is inclined to be coarse. The yellow stain was of great assistance, and they could get nearly all the yellows they wanted; it was very much more manageable because they could shade it off.

The next thing is the paint, which is just a sort of brown monochrome. It is a colour which has an affinity with glass, which, when fired, fuses into the glass and becomes part of it. There are what are called enamel colours, that is to say they are enamels painted on and fired over the glass in the same way that the brown paint is fired on, and they give, of course, variations of colour necessary in heraldry, etc. This method is rather to be distrusted, because it can only be used safely in small quantities; it is inclined to fly and disappear in large spaces.

We have now dealt with the main materials: the glass, the leads, the stain and the paint, and I think I have said all that is necessary about the materials themselves. Once you know your materials, the production of a stained glass window is essentially and properly a piece of communal work. I do not a bit sympathise with those people who say they do the whole thing themselves. Why should a man who is capable of designing a thing well be a plumber and glazier; he ought not to. It is like the people who insist on building their own houses, the sort of people who wear sandals and live on nuts. Besides it is so unsocial; it is so much better that it should be a communal art. I like to think that the man who cuts the glass and the rest have some kind of interest in doing the work; they are not merely your slaves to do a cut-and-dried job, merely arbitrarily. I like to talk it over with the men, from whom, too, you often get quite useful suggestions. My own training has been entirely that way. I learned stained glass backwards, really. I began by designing windows, and then learned how to work them--designing them all wrong, and talking to the fellows in the shop and learning about it that way. I had the ordinary training of a painter, I thought a stained glass window was the kind of thing you just did with charcoals and “genius.” I see now quite constantly in a workshop in Scotland my first stained glass efforts; they are a very valuable lesson in modesty--they are quite absurd. They turned out well enough because the fellows in the workshop knew their job; they did it, and talked to me, and I had the sense to see they knew the work better than I did, and we got the work out pretty well in the end. You people here with a useful craft shop, with all the materials to hand, have a tremendous advantage over us older people who just had to find out the best way we could. It was years and years before I really got to do it in a workmanlike way, and I am still finding out all sorts of faults.

First of all, of course, you get a commission; that is quite a difficult thing to do. The subject is next settled; that also is often a very difficult thing, particularly if you have a Committee. Then you make a design and, having got the design approved, you get the templates, and set the thing out on the cartoon. When you have to ask for templates, see that you get them made of cardboard or of paper, otherwise the local builder will send you an enormous construction of wood, which is very unmanageable, costs a lot in travel, and is very awkward for setting out. A piece of old wallpaper or brown paper will do well for templates, carefully marked as to their relative places in the window and particularly with the “inside” well marked as well as cut out to the shapes. Often all you need is the head of the window above the “springing” and figures showing what length it is below. You cannot trust the masonry if it is not modern, and not always then; old work is almost always irregular. There is a decorative window over there (pointing), those lights are extremely irregular, and we had to have a template of every bit of it; one light is about 1-1/2 in. wider at the bottom than the top. They sent the templates carefully measured up, and I set up the cartoons. It seemed all right, the window was made and sent down and put up. When I got to see it in the church, I found the windows were not horizontal at the bottom, the middle one was 1 in. lower than this one, and the other one 1 in. lower than that again. The result was these saddle bars, which are quite straight on the cartoons, made three steps in the window. It is really rather disconcerting to see the saddle bars running across slightly out of the true, it catches the eye of a person used to making stained glass. I was very angry with myself when I saw it on the opening day. You must be quite sure that the shapes of the window are accurately produced, and you must not trust your template of the top of one light to do for the others; you want one for each. Even in recent work, however good the mason is, there is quite often some slight variation.

Having got your templates, you now get them traced out on the cartoon, which has to be done very carefully. Having set out the shape of the window, you place the saddle bars across. The function of these saddle bars is to hold the window up; without them the weight of glass in a long window would bulge it out or drag it down. These bars are usually about 1 in. wide, and the window is tied to them by means of copper wires. An advantage of that is that if the window has to be taken out, you only have to take out a piece at a time, just untwist the wires and take each piece between the bars away separately. If you forget to mark in the saddle bars on the cartoon, you may find when you come later to settle their positions that they cross a face or other important part of your design.

After you have got your cartoon set out, you start making your drawing, and there are a number of cartoons here which show the varying treatments different people use. The usual method is to draw them in charcoal, and leave the colour to be taken from the small sketch. You will see some very admirable sketches here by Martin Travers, one of our old students. One can fairly trust to these to do the main colour of the window. They are so close to the design in detail, that the sketch is quite enough to make the glass from without colouring the cartoon. I find myself rather less decided than that, and I am so inclined to vary the design on the cartoons, that I have to colour them just to make sure I am not losing the proportion or the distribution of colour. If you are able to stick close to your sketch, you do not need to colour the cartoon; if you are a person who varies, it is best to colour the cartoon. There is also this to be said. One is very much inclined, in doing elaborate charcoal drawings, to put in a great deal too much detail and not to trust the glass enough; glass itself is such a charming material that often the less detail on it in paint, the better the effect.

When you have done your cartoon, it goes into the workshop, and is laid down on a large bench, a stretch of tracing linen is placed over it, and the middle line of each of the leads is traced. That line is drawn so as to be as thick as the central flange in the lead. It is to separate the two pieces of glass. You have now a map of the window. Then all these shapes are numbered, and they are either cut out or another tracing is made and is cut out and numbered again; the coloured glass, which has already been chosen, is then laid over the paper shapes of the separate pieces, and is cut out and also numbered, all your pieces of glass are numbered and correspond to the numbers on the tracing, so that their places may be readily found.

Before this you must have chosen the glass. If you are not the head of a workshop, the most practical method is to go through and choose with the foreman, who is often a very intelligent man. You choose the main colours, you choose your two or three principal reds and two or three principal blues and greens, and as they naturally carry through the window, they keep the key right. Then you have to leave it to him to choose the minor tints, the various variations in these shades of “white.” There are a great many variations; you want an expert man to choose those, you cannot do it yourself unless you own the workshop and spend your life in it, because you do not know the stock. If you do own the shop and spend your life at it, you find in a short time you have got the business to get, you have got to keep your men employed, pay your rent and wages; you spend most of your time in getting the work, and the rest of your time doing the cartoons; and you have not got time to look into the details of choosing the glass. It is not a practical thing. Nobody who is essentially a stained glass man can do the whole work himself, he has got to trust to other men; it is necessarily a piece of communal work. The men work better if they have an interest in it. Of course, though, you supervise the whole and alter any piece you don’t like.

You have the glass chosen, the main tints, and they are then cut out, and the shapes all being settled by means of the bits of paper I spoke of, then they are fixed as you see here on a large sheet of plain glass, fixed in the positions they are in on the cartoon; all the separate pieces of glass for as large a portion as it is convenient to paint at one time. Then you put it up against the light, and you paint them from your cartoon, or they are painted by a competent man. That is the beginning of the final stage. After they are painted once, they are fired, and generally painted a second time, and sometimes they are done a third time, with a sort of turpentine paint--they call it “tar.” Each time it is fired the paint fades a little: the second painting is largely needed to strengthen what is fired away in the first. One is supposed to know what is to happen in the firing, but sometimes unfortunate accidents happen.

After it is all painted the leads are put round these pieces, they are cemented together, and that is the window finished for fixing.

Now a word about the modern tendencies in stained glass, and I am very glad to say this is illustrated very largely by old students of this school. I speak of modern tendencies as compared with those of thirty or forty years ago, modern works since the Gothic revival--such as the work done by artists of standing and distinction, the works of Rossetti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, William Morris, and others--I think the principal alteration has been very much in the use of leading. That sounds, perhaps, unimportant and vague to those who have not been working in stained glass, but it is really of the first importance. The leading, theoretically, and almost always in mediaeval people, was simply done to separate one figure or one colour from another, to separate the head from the clothing, and the armour from the surcoat, and such things as that. You had the lead lines drawn as far as possible simply round the form, you would have lead lines round every separate colour, but, if you could help it, you tried not to have any lead lines across. You tried to arrange it so that you could have a plain piece of colour with lead lines round it, and no interfering bars across. Modern work has broken away from that very much, I think myself to the advantage of the art of stained glass. The use of lead lines not only to emphasise form but for structural reasons and to emphasise important parts of the design, to give quality to the colour, and also to give opportunities of variation of the colour, is one modern tendency.

It was largely suggested to modern men by the fact that old glass as you see it now is so much broken up by cross lines, because it broke accidentally and has been mended. They were so clever that they often cut round dangerous shapes which did not last, and had to be leaded across to hold the window together. These proved to be so attractive in enriching the window that the suggestion was taken up, and it has now become a vicious mannerism, in fact I have heard of a man who had a stained glass window deliberately broken up, and just leaded up the cracks. But you may do it when you feel that it helps your design, if it emphasises interesting points, or enriches the colour.

Another tendency of modern glass is the tendency to the use of silhouette against plain silvery glass. It is going back to the later middle ages, when they were fond of this treatment. The silhouette treatment has various qualities, various advantages; it emphasises and, I think, makes necessary a rather symbolic treatment of stained glass, and as I think the symbolic is the more distinguished, the more noble use of the material, this treatment has a strong appeal.