Robert Anning Bell

“ Stained glass is essentially a method of strengthening, carrying further and enriching the mood in which the worshipper finds himself when he enters those noble buildings, so full of the sense of aspiration and exaltation, and of the mystery which lies behind the outward show of things. That is just by way of showing you the sort of attitude which, I believe, we should adopt towards stained glass. You must realise that your work is more than making pleasant and agreeable colour and striking a casual note of beauty. ”

“ Nevertheless there are suggestions to be got from modern life, and I am glad to see that our students are aware of it—children, women—men are more difficult. Texture as well as colour is a difficulty, it cannot quite be ignored.
But the great, the profound difficulty is the absence of symbolic figures, of characters which have been “canonised” in our times by popular acclaim, and symbolism must be widely and readily recognised to be of value. Think of all the great moral qualities—and these are naturally the motives of much stained glass. Is it leadership in war? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The spiritual function of stained glass is, like that of mosaic, by a noble beauty of treatment, to present elevated ethical and religious ideas in a worthy way. It may do this by means of symbolism, or by typifying virtues and moral qualities by individual figures of great characters from mythology or from religious history. For symbolism and these type-figures it is peculiarly suited. Further, its function is to enhance and to deepen the mood of religious exaltation which the architecture of the building has already suggested to the worshipper. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The beautiful possibility cannot come to the birth, it is without form, it has no bodily shape, and is but one of those pitiful unrealised and unrealisable glimpses through the veil which form the tragedy of the incomplete artist. ”

“ You want to be a good plumber to do it very well, as I think our students have found out. I think all who practise the art should go through the workshop and learn to cut the glass and to lead it up; it is not a very serious part of their training; it is not necessary that they should become expert plumbers, but they should learn how and why it is done. I should very much like to have an expert plumber and an expert glazier to do that part of the work for the more advanced students, so that they could get on more quickly with advanced work. ”

“ 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 follows then, that those who wish to excel in stained glass designing should have a wide culture and real imagination, a sound knowledge of the necessary technique, and a thorough delight in the craft. I feel sure, too, that they would be all the better for study and design in other methods of artistic expression in order to avoid that staleness and repetition which too often comes to those who practice one form of art alone. ”

“ Then the blow-pipe is put in, and with a quantity of the sticky mixture attached to it is then blown out into a large bulb, just as ordinary window glass is, and cut off and flattened out on big tables to cool. The beauty of the quality of stained glass is very largely owing to the irregularity of the thickness of it, and you often get subtle variations in the colour, streaks, blotches of colour and so on; the thickness of the glass makes quite an appreciable difference in the depth of the colour, as you can easily imagine. ”

“ 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 [Pg 10] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now for the practice of the craft. I am afraid this will be very commonplace talk to those students who are working at stained glass, but possibly some others will be interested. I particularly hope the more advanced painter students may be interested, for it is to them one rather looks to take to stained glass in the last years of their education when they have become fairly competent in drawing and design, that is the time when stained glass should become to them a very attractive and fruitful means [Pg 6] of expression. The modern practice is extremely like the old practice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only when you are so familiar and so easy with your means of expression that their limitations, their so-called restraints, are to you a help and a happy freedom and as natural to you as the organs of your body, can you hope to realise the gift which is offered to you and transform it into your own artistic expression. ”

“ I like to think that the man who cuts the glass and the rest have some kind of [Pg 8] 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. ”

“ Excursions along these paths might give very interesting results to those whose temperaments lead them to such adventures. They have been by no means explored—and some of our students are gifted that way.
We modern people stand at a disadvantage compared to our ancestors in that the surroundings of our lives are not so immediately suggestive of treatment in glass as those which they enjoyed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The craft has the great attraction to my mind of being one of those crafts which have changed very little all through the ages, and the workshop method of executing stained glass now is very much what it was in the earliest days. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”