Windows: A Book About Stained & Painted Glass

by Lewis F. Day

The French glass painters were less reckless. At Troyes, indeed, there is plenty of seventeenth century glass in which a workman can still find considerable interest. That of Linard Gontier, in particular, has deservedly a great reputation. He was a painter who could get with a wash of colour, and seemingly with ease, effects which most glass painters could only get at by stippling, hatching, and picking out; and he managed his enamel very cleverly, floating it on with great dexterity. But it is rarely that he gets what artists would call colour out of it. Even in the hands of a man of his prodigious skill the method proclaims its inherent weakness. The work is thinner, duller, altogether poorer, than the earlier glass of much less consummate workmen, who worked upon sounder and severer principles. The strength and the weakness of the painter are exemplified in the group of Donors [above]. The painting is admirable, not only in the heads, but in the texture of the men’s cloaks; those cloaks, however, are painted in black paint. When the light is quite favourable they look like velvet; they never look like glass.

There is here the excuse, for what it may be worth, of texture and perhaps other pictorial qualities. Even that is often wanting in seventeenth century work, as when, at S. Jacques, Antwerp, the background to a design in white and stain is glazed in panes of white glass solidly coated with brown paint. This is obscuration out of pure wilfulness.

It was not only when the artist sought to get strong effects in enamel painting that the method fell short of success. The delicacy that might be got by means of it was neutralised by the necessity of some sort of glazing, and matters were not mended by glazing the windows in panes. It is impossible to take much satisfaction in the most delicately painted glass picture when it is so scored over with coarse black lines of lead or iron that it is as if you were looking at it through a grill. That is very much the effect seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ famous window in the ante-chapel at New College, Oxford (two lights of which are shown [opposite]), where the Virtues are seen imprisoned, you may say, within iron bars. They look very much better there than in the glass, which, for all the graceful draughtsmanship of the artist and the delicate workmanship of the painter, is ineffective to the last degree. It has no more brilliancy or sparkle than a huge engraving seen against the light; square feet of white glass are muddied over with paint.

It was not Sir Joshua’s fault, of course, that the traditions of the glazier’s craft were in his day well-nigh extinct; but Sir Horace Walpole was quite right when he described these vaunted Virtues as “washy.” To say that they are infinitely more pleasing in the artist’s designs is the strongest condemnation of the glass.

48. VIRTUES, BY SIR J. REYNOLDS, NEW COLL., OXFORD.

There was one use made of enamel which promised to be of real help to the glazier—that of painting the necessary shadows on pot-metal in shades of the same colour as the glass. Since enamel of some kind had to be used, why not employ a colour more akin to the glass itself than mere brown? It would seem as if by so doing one might get depth of colour with less danger of heaviness than by the use of brown; but the glass painted in that way (by the Van Lingen, for example, a family of Flemings established in England, whose work may be seen at Wadham and Balliol Colleges, Oxford) was by no means free from heaviness. Enamel then, it will be seen, was never really of any great use in glass painting, and it led to the degradation of the art to something very much like the painting of transparencies, as they are called, on linen blinds.

Let us note categorically the objections to it. A glazier objects to it, that it is an evasion of the difficulty of working in glass, and not a frank solution of it. That may be sentimental more or less. A colourist objects to it, because it is impossible to get in it the depth and richness of strong pot-metal, or the brilliancy of the more delicate shades of self-coloured material. That, it may be urged, remains to be proved, but the enamel painter practically undertook to prove the contrary, and failed. Admirers of consistency object to it, that it succeeds so ill in reconciling the delicacy of painting aimed at with the brutality of the glazing employed. That, again, is a question of artistic appreciation, not so easily proved to those who do not feel the discord. Lovers of good work, of work that will stand, object to it that it is not lasting. This is a point that can be easily proved.

The process of enamel painting has been explained above ([page 77]). The one thing necessary to the safe performance of the operation is that the various glass pigments shall be of such consistency as to melt at a lower temperature than the glass on which they are painted. That, of course, must keep its shape in the kiln, or all would be spoilt. The melting of the pigment is, as a matter of fact, made easier by the admixture of some substance less unyielding than glass itself—such as borax—to make it flow. This “flux,” as it is called, makes the glass with which it is mixed appreciably softer than the glass to which it is apparently quite safely fixed by the fire. It is thus more susceptible to the action of the atmosphere; it does not contract and expand equally with that; and in the course of time, perhaps no very long time, it scales off. Excepting in Swiss work (to which reference is made in [Chapter IX].) this is so commonly so, that you may usually detect the use of enamel by the specks of white among the colour, where the pigment has worked itself free, altogether to the destruction of pictorial illusion. And it is not only with transparent enamel that this happens, but also with the brown used by the later painters for shading.