A Lecture on Stained Glass

by Robert Anning Bell

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.