Windows: A Book About Stained & Painted Glass

by Lewis F. Day

The advocates of painting complain that due consideration of the qualities of glass would limit the artist to the baldest kind of pictorial effect. Something certainly must be sacrificed to fit treatment of the material, or glass suffers, whatever picture may gain. That is what has happened. But if so much sacrifice is necessary to figure, why always adopt that form of design? Why not sometimes at least abandon subject, and seek what can best be done in glass, even though that be barbaric? It is not quite certain but that glass really lends itself only to a rather barbaric kind of design, or what we are barbarous enough to call barbaric. This is certain: the interest of figure work has put an end to ornamental glass. It has become almost an article of faith with us that, to the making of a window worth looking at, figure design is indispensable. That should not be so. And, seeing that picture does not afford full scope for the qualities which glass-lovers most dearly love in glass, it seems rather cruel that picture should so largely preponderate in its design as to suppress the possibilities in the way of ornament. Why should it be so?

There are two very important reasons for the introduction of figure into glass, the one literary, the other artistic. In the first place, we love a story, that is no more than human; we want to know what it is all about, that is no more than rational; and figure subjects afford the most obvious means of satisfying those cravings of ours. But artists want these cravings satisfied by means of art. Some of them, perhaps, think more of the means employed than of the end achieved, and would have “art for art’s sake.” Theirs is a doctrine of very limited application. Sanity insists upon subordination of the means to end; and art is not an end in itself, nor is craftsmanship. It is not, therefore, for one moment suggested that story, sentiment, meaning, in windows, should be ruthlessly sacrificed to craftsmanship, even though expression implied the use of figure, which it does not. What is claimed, is merely this: that when you employ a material or a process some consideration is due to it.

Before undertaking to express an idea, it is always as well for the artist to consider how far its expression is consistent with art. If it can be expressed only at the cost of all that is best in art, it were better to adopt some other means of expression. If a particular craft is your one means of expression, and that particular thing cannot well be said in it, then say what can be said; it will be to much more purpose than saying even a better thing and saying it ill. The better the thought, the greater the crime of saying it inadequately.

After all, the sentiment, or what not, which people ask for in glass, and which compels figure work, is not, in the majority of instances, by any means so important, even in their eyes, but that they would sacrifice it readily enough if they knew the price in art at which they would have to pay for it. Let patrons of stained glass, if they care for art, ponder this statement; it is not spoken in haste, but in conviction.

There is one reason of sentiment which would argue against great part of the use that is made of figure work, at all events in church glass, the doubt, namely, as to how far it is possible, in these days, to reconcile the devout with the decorative treatment of sacred subjects. We are all admiration when we gaze up at the splendid figure of Moses in the great transept window at Chartres. But it is the artist in us that is entranced, the lover of glass, and especially of colour; the artless worshipper might feel that the dignity of the Lawgiver would perhaps have been better expressed with less attention to decorative effect. We are not shocked at the archaic effigy, because we realize that reverence underlies its simplicity. In modern work it is otherwise. Artistic intention, admirable or not from the æsthetic point of view, is responsible for the introduction into our churches of delineations of all that Christians hold sacred so ridiculous, it is a wonder devout worshippers allow them to be there. The excuse for glass is its decorative effect. Its value is in its colour. A Saint in stained glass (to mention no higher Person) stands in a window for just so much colour: is not that rather a degradation of the saint?

In the second place, apart altogether from what has been called the literary interest (which no one will dispute) there is in figure work a charm, altogether artistic, in the very unexpectedness of the colour-patches you get in it, not accidental quite, but in many instances at least, inspired by accident. The besetting sin of ornament is obviousness; it has a way of distributing itself too symmetrically and evenly, of laying its secret bare to the most casual glance. We see at once there is nothing to find out in it, and our interest drops to zero.

In figure design, on the contrary, there are breaks even in the very best balanced scheme; there is always something unexpected, unforeseen, something to kindle interest; in fact, the difficulty is, there, to distribute the composition evenly enough. The question arises whether this sameness, and consequent tameness, of ornament, the way the points of intended interest recur with irritating frequency and regularity, resolving themselves into mere spots—whether this defect is inherent in ornament, and inseparable from it.

Proof that it is not is afforded by heraldry, distinctly a branch of ornamental design, in which, for precisely the same reasons as in figure work, we get just that inevitable deviation from system, and more especially from symmetry, which seems necessary to the salvation of ornament. Where by happy chance an ornamental window has been patched with glass not belonging to it, or where portions of it have been misplaced, we get similar relief from monotony. Here the unexpectedness of contrast, colour, and so on, is accidental; in heraldry it is, in the nature of things, unforeseen of the artist, and unavoidable. May not similar results be obtained of set purpose and design? Surely they may. Were it otherwise, it would be worth falling back now and then upon haphazard, and letting colour come as it might.

Happily there is no occasion for that feeble sort of fatalism. Given a colourist and a man with that sense of distribution (whether of line, mass, or colour) which makes the artist, what is to hinder him from deliberately planning so much of surprise as may be necessary to tickle the appetite for the ornamental? The ogre in the path is what we call economy. Because ornament can without doubt be more cheaply executed than figure work, it is taken for granted that it must be reserved by rights for cheap work. What else is there to recommend it? And, that being so, ornament being but padding, by all means, it is argued, let it be not only cheap but of the cheapest!

Design, moreover, if it be worth having at all, is costly, and there is clearly thrift in repeating the same pattern, and even one unit of it, over and over again. The practice of saving design in this way has become at last so much a matter of course, that no one thinks of designing an ornamental window, as a whole, without repetition of pattern—except the artist; and with him it is a fond desire which he hopes perhaps some day to fulfil—at his own expense.