glazed expressions

long necks and ears

Someone was having a laugh, as they say, when they put these giraffes high up in a beautiful window in St Edmundsbury Cathedral. You really need a giraffe-length neck to be able to see them. Failing that, a telephoto lens enables you to admire this delightful and charming pair.

Thankfully, there is more to enjoy lower down, including two tiny long-eared mice and some beautiful ground cover. 

craftsmen at work

It's the knitted cables, the moustache and the flask, 

the flat cap and the pencil behind the ear which do it, which make me love this window and want to laugh with delight. It's a fine example of modern stained glass at a time when the demand for windows is declining and everyone is terrified of offending someone.

It's by Chris Fiddes (b1934) with Nicholas Bechgaard (b1948) and was made in 1997 for the church in Potterspury, Northants. The pair have made several windows for churches in the area - there's also a Millennium window in Potterspury with a delightful beaming mother, bouncing baby, and excited sheepdogs in the snow. Their work uses clever angles and feature utterly ordinary people and scenes, reminding me of paintings by Bruegel. Most of all, though, it's the details that fascinate and cheer me; they are funny, clever, and thoughtful, and the couple who commissioned the window to celebrate the 'skill and dedication of all craftsmen' on the occasion of their 40th wedding anniversary did us all a service.

 

 

 

camp kempe

There is no end to CE Kempe's camp imagination. 

 

expressionism

Sometimes I like a stained glass window for the wrong reasons. It's all about the expressions in this one. 

(The work of Sir Ninian Comper (1864-1960)  in St Mary's, Wellingborough.)

spoilt for choice

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Just wonderful what you can do with clear glass, black paint, yellow stain, and a lot of skill. 

I found these details in one of the windows in St Mary's, Banbury, a quite phenomenal 1790s church which once sat 3,000 people and still has most of the old pews in the nave and curving galleries to prove it. Now fifty people come on a Sunday, and they don't sit in the pews but on the new raised area at the front of the church. I love old pews, the taller, the darker, the more enclosed the better, although I don't suppose they are terribly comfortable even though they do keep out the draughts. Anyway, the stained glass windows are beautiful, a complete set made in the 1860s by Heaton, Butler & Bayne, full of unexpected detail (stoats, walruses, seaweed, snowflakes). I could have spent all day moving from pew to pew, window to window, looking for the best one like Goldilocks. Except there'd be more than three choices.

chance find

I found these fritillaries in a church in Surrey while I was visiting to see a completely different window. Chance finds like this are what make stained glass so rich and rewarding. It is so poorly documented (and attributed) that you can often go to a place for a specific window and discover there's a lot more than you'd expected. Like this wonderful Arts and Crafts window with bright, chequered fritillaries. It is attributed to Karl Parsons (1884-1934), but I am not so sure and think it might be by Louis Davis (1860-1941) who was particularly good at little flowers like snowdrops, lily-of-the-valley and daisies set against brilliant emerald glass. His work looks like coloured-in woodcuts and makes me think of children's illustrated books. 

[I did some research and it It is by Louis Davis]

 

ted jones

Long before he was the artist known as Sir Edward Burne-Jones, he was plain 'Ted' Jones from Birmingham. He was born and lived at 11 Bennett's Hill, a stone's throw from St Philip's Church which, like Ted Jones, went up in the world when it later became Birmingham Cathedral.

Unlike some people, I generally don't swoon over Burne-Jones' work. His hollow-eyed, pewter-coloured men and droopy, anaemic women, and sickly greens and yellows aren't for me.

But sometimes he surprises me and upsets my prejudices. I hadn't known he had a sense of humour until I saw his St Frideswide window in Christ Church, Oxford. I feel the vine-entwined windows in the decommissioned church of St Peter in Vere Street, London, should be better known and cared for. And he designed a lovely cymbals-player with a faraway gaze in St Mary's in Meole Brace, Shrewsbury. 

Then there are these windows in Birmingham. His crowning achievement in stained glass, I'd say. They are breathtakingly beautiful, with a medieval intensity of colour. But no-where else have I come across such rich blues and pinks and reds, with sky blue halos, flaming red wings, deep coral cloaks, azure robes and aquamarine water.

The tall, elegant, rather plain Georgian church is the perfect backdrop to these tall, elegant and gorgeous windows. 

This time I really did swoon.

[There is more excellent stained glass nearby at St Martin in the Bull Ring and the next post will be about another outstanding window in Birmingham.]

brain-ache

There are times when I marvel at the sheer strangeness of stained glass. There is so much in there, so much going on, so much to decode, to wonder at, to understand. I love the fact that to untutored eyes it can often appear quite barmy; stained glass artists were way ahead of the game when it came to surrealism. It can be so madly over-the-top, so richly detailed, so weird that I wonder if I'll ever make sense of it. A lot of the time I don't, I just enjoy it. That way I avoid unnecessary brain-ache.

Some of the stranger windows seen in Lichfield Cathedral earlier today include the brilliantly-attired apostles by Betton & Evans (1819, example above),

a fabulously bizarre and decorative devil by Harry Stammers (1951)

a rather fey hand-clasping angel with enormous eyes, peacock-feather wings, grapes, vine leaves and a lot of accessories by CE Kempe (1890s), 

and an inordinately crowded Baroque scene with a fountainful of boys (date/provenance unknown, probably Flemish, C17/18).

 

It's full of stuff, including lots of enormous feet and unexpectedly casual poses. I just need to unpack it all, as they say. 

 

i-spy a butterfly

Thomas Denny (b.1956) is one the best-known contemporary stained glass artists and has created windows in several important places, including Hereford Cathedral. He has an instantly recognisable style; dense, dark, luminous, textured, layered, minutely detailed, heavily painted and scratched, stippled, and scumbled. The results are mystical and strange, with half-glimpsed, half-hidden animals, trees, people, landscapes and buildings. Some of his windows are placed at eye level so it is possible to examine them carefully, and once you start, it's difficult to stop trying to making out all the tiny, almost ghostly, elements. In the Hereford windows I found apples trees (of course) and stags, country lanes and ploughed fields, spires and towers, and all sorts of iridescent insects, spotted moths and butterfly wings.

Although they are not immediately obvious, it soon becomes clear that there are insects camouflaged all over the windows which are dedicated to the Metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne. He wrote that 'the Creation of Insects affords us a Clear Picture of Almighty Power' and Denny has captured perfectly his lyrical descriptions of flies and their 'Burnisht, and Resplendent Bodies...like Orient Gold, or Polisht Steel'.

These are very particular windows which are so densely packed and painted that it's hard to believe they are made of glass - until the sun comes out and the chapel is filled with glowing colour and all the insects are made visible. Well worth a long game of I-Spy a Butterfly.

 

winner

If there were to be a stained glass knobbly knees competition, I feel sure these would win. I know I'm supposed to be looking at Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but all I see are the most amazing depictions of flesh, muscle and bone. This is a huge departure from the skinny, wooden early medieval figures whose ribs, breasts and torsos are indicated by firm, thick, simple lines as in basic woodcuts.

These knees are in University College Chapel in Oxford, in a set of eight windows painted by Abraham van Linge in the 1640s. Although they amuse me, they are also part of the wider story of art and developments in the way the naked human body was represented in painting and in stained glass. 

Full disclosure: the rest of Adam. (I love the way hair and foliage are strategically placed to preserve Adam and Eve's modesty.)

Prize-winning knees, indeed.