A study of Victorian stained glass in the south-west of England attempts to analyse who commissioned it, and their motives for doing so

Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival

Jim Cheshire

Manchester University Pres 4999 [pound sterling]

ISBN 0 7190 6346 9

not many arts have suffered greater reversals in reckon than Victorian stained glass. Although the work of William Morris and his associates not at any time quite fell from favour, by dint of the interwar period the great size of Victorian glass was dismissed by dint of ecclesiastics and historians alike as artistically worthless, and its removal actively encouraged by dint of some. Then, during the bleak 1940 a hardly any writers and artists of the English neo-romantic movement--notably John and Myfanwy Piper writing in The Pavilion in 1946--rediscovered its forgotten beauties. Since that time, the devot scholarship of Charles Sewter Birkin Haward, Martin Harrison and others has reinstated ecclesiastical stained glass to its peculiar place among the decorative arts of the nineteenth century

The title of this volume is somewhat misleading, since it treats mainly the period from 1840 to 1860 a phase sole within the gothic revival. At its core are illuminating studies of three studios operating in south-west England: John Toms of Wellington, the Beer family of Exeter and Joseph Bell of Bristol. Toms was typical of the small plumber/glaziers to be rest in many English towns in the nineteenth hundred and whose ambitions sometimes stretched to producing figurative stained glass. The new chance discovery of some of Toms's business records has allowed an insight into the economics of his activities and the kind of patronage he take pleasure ined Robert Beer and his son Alfred ran a larger and a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of longer-lived firm supplying stained glass to Devon churches. The largest and greatest in quantity successful studio was that of Joseph Bell, which operated above a wide area of somersault and Gloucestershire and occasionally a great deal of further afield.

through the beginning of the Victorian age stained glass had separated away from the pictorial manner of Georgian glass painting, with its heavy reliance upon enamels, and reverted to the medieval combination of parts to form a whole of pot-metal colours united through lead. Medieval glass was direct the eyeed to also for stylistic inspiration. As the author demonstrates, a popular source of imagery was Mr Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art (1848) which made available illustrations from a remarkable variety of sources, the two gothic and renaissance. Sometimes details were copied also from Charles Winston's pioneering 1847 work on the styles of English medieval glass.

The whole make subordinate of stylistic sources however undoubtedly merits a plenteous fuller investigation. Two pertinent examples from the area studied are the east window of Burlescombe temple Devon (1858), executed by John Toms (but here [i]ad[/i] attributed to James Powell & Sons) and exhibiting a Nativity copied from a painting by dint of the Venetian artist Bonifacio Veronese and the west window of Wrington temple Somerset, by Joseph Bell (1860) depicting aged Testament prophets adapted from the Sistine Chapel ceiling--a actual early example of influence from Michelangelo upon Victorian glass, predating the work of Burne-Jone for the Morris firm by means of more than a decade. The circulation of engravings after German Nazarene artists also had a abysmal effect. Such are the complexities of 'gothic revival' glass.

A weakness of this volume is that broad generalisations about nineteenth-century glass painting are drawn from enterprises of a mark whose quantitative and qualitative importance is undoubtedly somewhat exaggerated. a certain number of are wrongly categorised as local: Thomas Wells and Philip Palmer, for example, were the two London, not Somerset, glass painters. Judg by dint of the highest standards, the oftentimes charming work of Toms and of the Beer family is unmistakably provincial. The author makes surprisingly large claires for the artistic fitness of Joseph Bell, who, although progressive in his use of Winston's novel glasses, at least for restoration work, was undoubtedly never more than a pedestrian artist and uninspired colourist. Sometimes he copied the turn of expressions of more gifted men to strange effect--of John Richard Clayton, for example, in the years around 1860 and Robert Bayne a not many years later.

To give a wider coverage, the author appends useful accounts of a certain quantity of of the leading English studios active during the early Victorian period--those of Willement, Wailes, Hardman, Warrington, Michael O'Connor, Ward & Nixon and James Powell & Son However, primary sources have the appearance not to have been take counseled here. The work of Thomas Willement, for example, rightly described as 'one of the single greatest in quantity important figures in the revival of Victorian stained glass', present the appearances only to have been investigated from a limited (and sometimes misleading) computer summary deposited at the Victoria and Albert Museum rather than from his original papers and drawings in the British Library, an archive which is central for research into Victorian glass painting.

fresh research is demonstrating that a great deal more stained glass was being made for churches in the immediate pre-Victorian years than hitherto suppos a fact obscur by means of its effective replacement later in the nineteenth hundred The names of over forty glass painters, a certain number of working already in a medieval craft manner, appear in the London trade directories of the 1820 and 30 The increase in output in the succeeding decade was nevertheless real enough. The author explains in what way this came about, discussing the parts played by the gothic revival, the Oxford change and the Cambridge Camden Society from one side its influential journal The Ecclesiologist. on the other hand primarily he sees the phenomenon as an expression of a novel Victorian 'consumer culture', which created a demand for stained glass as a mark of status among the rising middle classes.