Stained glass of the middle ages in England and France

by Hugh Arnold

New College antechapel.

There had been no such work as this last done since the best days of the thirteenth century. Here, once again, one finds the art used as a means of emotional expression not only in the deep and solemn harmonies of colour that strike one with a thrill on entering the building, but in the treatment of the subjects themselves, in which the artist breaks completely away from the conventionalism of the preceding period.

The antechapel of New College, a graceful piece of Early Perpendicular, is really, like that at Merton, a cross transept at the west end of the Chapel, forming a T of which the antechapel is the head, having windows on all its four sides—two on the east, on either side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, two on the north, one on the south, and three on the west. The glass of the great central west window was taken out to make room for Jervais' smudgy rendering in muddy browns and yellows of Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous Virtues. I am not concerned with this but with the other windows, which contain, though some of the lights are evidently out of their order, the original glazing which William of Wykeham placed here when he built the Chapel, between 1380 and 1386.

The canopies.

The design of the windows is a very simple one. The horizontal transom divides each window into two equal tiers of four, or, in the eastern windows, six, lights with tracery above. Each light is filled with a figure standing on a pedestal and under a canopy, both canopy and pedestal being white, enriched with touches of yellow stain, relieved against a background which is, or was, blue and red in alternate lights, the colour of the background inside the canopy being counterchanged with the colour outside. From this arrangement and from the presence of the pedestal I think the artist had seen both Wells and the east windows of Gloucester Cathedral, but the architecture of his canopies is of a fantastic kind peculiar to this school and unlike anything in glass of the styles which preceded and followed it, but based to some extent on the stone canopies of the late fourteenth century, such as those on the screen of the west front of Exeter Cathedral. The most noticeable feature in them is the number of queer rounded turrets with pepper-box tops, modelled in relief. Indeed for their solidity, as well as for their violent and untrue perspective, these canopies have more in common with those introduced at Fairford a hundred years later, when the continental influence was coming in, than with the typical canopy of English Perpendicular.

From the large amount of space that is occupied by the canopy work, the general effect of these windows is rather a white one (though white in all old work is a relative term, the white in this case consisting really of a delicate play of greenish, yellowish, and pure white continually contrasted), and the most beautiful to my mind are those in which, as in the windows on the north side which face one on entering, the figures themselves are almost entirely covered with a coloured mantle which makes a broad splash of distinctive colour in the middle of each light.

The eastern windows.

Although all the windows conform to the same general design, those on the east side, on each side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, seem to me to be by a different hand, and were probably done first. They contain or contained originally no colours but red and blue, and the drawing of the figures has much of the conventionalism of the earlier fourteenth century work. The upper tier consists of the twelve apostles, and the lower is believed to have contained the figure of the crucified Christ with His mother and St. John on either side, repeated four times. The figures of Christ have all been destroyed and replaced by figures from elsewhere, perhaps from the destroyed west window; but three figures of the Virgin and three of St. John remain, though it was only in 1900 that they were replaced in what I have little doubt were their original positions. It may, of course, be that these windows are by the same artist as the others, but done before he had quite found himself or emancipated himself from the conventionalities of his predecessors, for he has infused a certain amount of life into the old forms; and the "Mater Dolorosa," in spite of her conventional S-like pose, is a tender and pathetic figure.

The colouring.

There is, however, no trace of this conventionality in the other windows, quaint though the drawing may be, and in the colour of them the artist has fairly "let himself go." I know of no better piece of "colour music" in the world than is afforded by the double tier of prophets and patriarchs which occupy the two northern windows which face one on entering—deep rich purple of many shades, warm green, slaty-blue, brown, and a splendid blood-red ruby with a great deal of variety in it; the changes are rung on these in the mantles, hats, and shoes of the figures, while the reds and blues of the backgrounds form a connecting link between them all. A pretty detail is the powdering of the backgrounds to the figures in all the windows with the initials of the personage represented, in white Lombardic letters surmounted by little gold crowns. The drawing is, I admit, quaint,—Thomas was not a great draughtsman even for his time; far from it,—but it is always big, masculine, and expressive, with a strong feeling for decorative line. To copy the scrolls which twist and flutter round the prophets in the upper tier is in itself a lesson in design.