A Lecture on Stained Glass

by Robert Anning Bell

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.

Another tendency in the work of contemporary designers which I regret is the absence of bordering. They are so inclined to treat figures and quarries right up to the mullion or wall without any border. It is severe and simple, but you lose the advantage in colour very often. This is a point for those of you who are attempting to treat modern subjects in stained glass, because modern subjects are very difficult. We have not the advantage our luckier ancestors had of seeing people all round us wearing rich and strong colours, colours akin to those of glass, and also fine textures; black broadcloth is not like the black velvet worn by gentlemen in the old days. You must find your colours somewhere else if you want to use modern figures, and you must manage somehow by means of borders or the decorative crosspieces which divide the window. So I would suggest that you should pay as much attention to the use of borders as you possibly can. You can have a very good, rather silvery picture without much colouring, such as modern subjects would probably demand, and yet get your colour by having a rather rich and wide border. Modern figures look best in quite small areas usually.

Another tendency, not very important, but very helpful to colour, is that in the last thirty years the light glass has been used much whiter and clearer. When I began to do stained glass the correct thing was a kind of dull green, rather a sage green, a “greenery, yallery” kind of thing. I think it was because the dullish green stuff was thought to give a less new or modern effect. As you probably know, very little glass is white, it nearly all has some tint, but contrasting strong colour knocks it out, and makes you think it is clear. There are a few sorts of glass of a really clear, limpid quality, but you cannot use them too much; they are far too dazzling.

Another tendency is, I think, to use more primary colours; strong colours are used more and not so many secondary shades: that is because the strong colours, the real colours, red and blue and green, the sober and the sombre, the deep and rich colours, are the most effective contrast with this very silvery white. When you get into half tones of browns and greys, you get rather a dull effect. The work done by good men thirty or forty years ago is often of that character. If you go to Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford, there are several windows by Burne-Jones and Morris, quite good ones, but they look rather washed out, except the earliest one which, on the contrary, is very vivid. It is partly because the glass itself is not as deep and strong as it might be, and partly because there is not enough lead, the pieces are rather too big, and partly, perhaps, because there is some very good old glass to be seen near by.

Another tendency which is a good one is the increased reliance upon painting in line, the increasing avoidance of that flat, mat affair, which has been the workshop tradition up till recently. Like many modern workshop traditions it is simply one of incompetence and mental idleness, it means they did not know how to do it better, and you could also employ cheaper labour, because you do not want the same type of educated man to do it.

There is now a school of young artists who are doing very good work, and I hope we shall soon have more—both men and women. Like pottery painting, it must not be timid, you have got to do it with a decided, firm, steady stroke, it does not do to be feeble, any more than it does on pottery; it is the vigorous, quick line you want: vigour is even more important than academic accuracy. But of course a good man can do it correctly.

There is also considerably more restraint in the amount of pattern on costume, borders, etc., and therefore more reliance on the quality of the glass itself. Those elaborate and ingenious patterns so general in, at any rate, the greater number of late nineteenth-century windows are found to be tedious and worrying; their object was, as a rule, to enrich a rather poor quality of glass. Nevertheless well-designed pattern work is very useful when judiciously used.

Now a few words to students who propose to take up the study of stained glass. First of all get thoroughly used to the material and practise painting it, leaving the design of less important detail until the glass is being handled. The constant danger to the designer is the cartoon. I find that new students are far too apt to make elaborate cartoons before they are sufficiently familiar with the glass itself, and to cover them with details of ornament of a character which will not really help the result.

Stained glass is severe and at the same time rich. As with every technique the subject must be inseparable from the treatment. The artist’s subject that is. This is not the same as that which the spectator regards as the “subject,” and it is not the “art for art’s sake” subject. It is not beauty divorced from meaning, except in the simpler forms of lead lighting or patterns in colour. These are often useful, often wanted, but they do not demand the highest imaginative qualities which our art can express. I have little sympathy with the desire to reduce our arts to the abstract. It is too austere and too puritanical an ideal. They are the better, I think, where the work is conceived in a moment of fervent exaltation. It may be religious, it may come from poetry, from music, from the external beauty of Nature; it may come as the wind comes, one knows not whence, but it sets a flame, as it were, to the imaginative mind, and in that flame the artistic subject is born.