Lewis F. Day

“ The merest jumble of old glass, more especially if it be all of one period or quality, is far better than what is called restoration. Who does not call to mind window after window in which the glass is so mixed as to be quite meaningless, and is yet, for all that, beautiful? The Western Rose at Reims is an unintelligible jumble mainly of blue and green. It may not be design, but it is magnificent. Again, the Western lights at Auxerre, in great part patchwork, are simply glorious when the afternoon sun shines through. ”

“ This is the place to study the decline and fall of glass painting—a melancholy sort of satisfaction. Here more thoroughly than ever must be realised how hopeless it is to evade in glass the glazier’s part of the business; how powerless enamel is to produce effect; how weak, poor, lacking in limpidity and lustre, its colour is—and this even in the hands of an artist born, one may say, after his time. Gonthier was an incomparable glass painter. He could produce with a wash of pigment effects which lesser men could only get by laborious stippling and scratching ”

“ This man possibly did in glass much what he would have done on canvas; but he could never have got such pure, intense, and at the same time luminous, effects of colour in anything but glass, and he knew it, never lost sight of it, and tried to get the most out of what it could best give him—that is to say, purity of colour, and translucency and brilliancy of glass. Whatever amount of pigment he employed (probably more than it seems, the light is so strong in Italy) it seldom appears to do more than just give the needful modelling. ”

“ A vile habit of the restorer is to smudge over his glass with dirty paint, perhaps burnt in, perhaps merely in varnish colour; this he terms “antiquating.”
The worse the new work added to the old, the more thoroughly it spoils it; the better the forgery, the more serious the doubt it throws upon what may be genuine. The modern ideal of restoration is thoroughly vicious. All that can be done is mending; and it should be an axiom with the repairer, that, where glass (however broken) can possibly be made safe by lead joints, no new piece of glass should ever be inserted in its place. ”

“ Are we, therefore, to have no rich windows any more? Thirteenth century pictures were diminutive in scale. Are we to have no larger pictures ever? Sixteenth century subjects spread themselves over the whole window. Are we never to frame our glass pictures? And as to that frame, are we to choose once and for all the ornamental details of this period or that, or the formula of design adopted at a given time?
Whether in the matter of technique or treatment, of colour or design, no one style of old glass is enough for us. What does an historic style mean? ”

“ Experience teaches a man to make allowances, but he can only judge what he has seen; and it is only with the light shining through a window that he can see its colour or judge of its effect.
The wonderful difference which the strength of the light makes in the appearance of a window, is nowhere quite so obvious as in the case of windows, not of glass, but of translucent alabaster—as, for example, at Orvieto, in the lower lights on either side of the nave, or, framed in black marble mullions, at the West end of the cathedral. ”

“ According as we contemplate glass painting from the earlier or the later standpoint, from the point of view of glass or of painting, we are sure to prefer one period to the other, to glory perhaps in the advance of painting, or to regret the lesser part that coloured glass eventually plays in the making of a window. To claim for one or the other manner that it is the true and only way, were to betray the prejudice of the partizan. Each justifies itself by the masterly work done in it, each is admirable in its way. ”

“ It is worse than hearing a symphony only in snatches; it is rather as if a more powerful orchestra were all the while drowning the sound. It takes an expert to appreciate glass when light is reflected upon it from all sides. The effect of some of the finest glass in Germany, as at Munich and Nuremberg, is seriously marred by a wicked German practice of filling only the lower half of the window with coloured glass and glazing the upper part in white rounds. That enables folk to read their Bibles, no doubt; but the volume of crude white light above goes far to kill the colour of the glass. ”

“ There is no occasion to dwell upon the oddities of glass painting; they are those of mediæval art all through. If we take a certain incongruity for granted, the guilelessness of it only charms us. That same guilelessness enables the artist to make absolutely ornamental use of themes which to-day we might think it profane to make subservient to decorative effect. We never question his sincerity, though in the scene of the Creation, as at Erfurth, he made a pattern of the birds, pair and pair, each on its own tree. ”

“ In Flanders, as has been said, and in France, are to be found exquisite pictures in glass, admirably decorative in design, glowing with jewel-like brilliancy of colour, not seriously obscured by paint, the figures modelled with a delicacy reminding one rather of sculpture in very low relief than of more realistic painting and carving, the colour delicate and yet not thin, the effect strong without brutality. ”

“ It would not be easy to find finer instances of Late Gothic German work than the five great windows on the North side of Cologne Cathedral. There, too, one has only to turn right-about-face to compare early sixteenth century with nineteenth century German practice, and on precisely the same scale, too. Any one who could hesitate for an instant to choose between them, has everything yet to learn in regard both to glass and to colour. The garish modern transparencies show, by their obvious shortcomings, the consummate accomplishment of the later Gothic glass painters. ”

“ If the new is good it puzzles and perplexes one; if bad, one can see nothing else. What is crude kills what is subdued. It is as if one listened for a tender word at parting, and it was drowned in the screech of the steam-engine.
Early glass was so mechanically imperfect, and age has so roughened and pitted it, that its colour has, almost of necessity, a quality which new work has not; and one is disposed, perhaps too hastily, to ascribe all garish glass in old windows to the restorer. Many a time, however, the new work convicts itself. At Strassburg it is quite easily detected. ”

“ We find it in here and there a window only, white light shining unmitigated from windows all round. Perhaps in the window itself there is a breakage, and a stream of light pours through it, spoiling, if not its beauty, all enjoyment of it. It is not generally understood how completely the effect of glass depends upon the absence of light other than that which comes through it. Every ray of light which penetrates into a building excepting through the stained glass does injury to the coloured window; more often than not, therefore, we see it under most adverse circumstances. ”

“ You may see at first little more than flat surfaces of pleasantly mottled white and purple-grey, translucent, but comparatively dull and dead. Then, as the sun creeps round the corner, a strange life comes into them. The white and palest greys begin to glow, and turn by slow degrees to pearly-pink, which kindles into gold, and deepens in the duskier parts to copper-red. The stronger markings of the stone now show out in unsuspected strength, and the lighter veins take on by contrast a greenish tint, so that the warm colour is subtly shot with its cool counterpart. ”

“ The balance of white and colour is just perfect, and the way the patches of deep colour are embedded, as it were, in grisaille, is skilful in the extreme. To compare them with the futile effort of the eighteenth century, opposite, is to apprehend what can be done in glass, and what cannot. The whole secret of the success of the mere craftsman where the great painter failed, is that he knew what to seek in glass,—colour, brilliancy, decorative breadth. ”

“ You have there the design of no less a man than Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted by one of the best china painters of his day. None but a china painter, by the way, could be found to do it. It is not unfair, therefore, to compare this masterpiece of its poor period with the rude work of the fourteenth century, done by no one knows whom. And what do we find? Conspicuous before us is the great West window, which might as well have been painted on linen, so little of the translucency of glass is there left in it. ”

“ He did not even conceive his design as a picture and then translate it into glass. His work runs so smoothly it cannot be translation. The ingenuity with which he leads up little bits of colour in the midst of white, is no mere feat of engineering; it is spontaneous. It is clear that he had the thought of glazing in his mind all along—that he designed for it, in fact. The difference between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth century designer is, that one thinks first of glazing, is primarily a glazier, the other thinks first of painting, is primarily a painter. ”

“ It was the business of a window to shut in those that worshipped from the outer world, and wrap them in mysterious and beautiful gloom. With other days, however, came other ideals. As time went on, and men emerged from the dark ages, the problem of the glazier was how more and more to lighten his glass; until at last white glass predominated, and the question was how to introduce colour into it. Meanwhile the thirteenth century glaziers resorted, where they wanted light, to the use of windows in grisaille, in absolute contrast to the rich picture-glass in the same church. ”

“ The certain thing is that, if we want the quality of glass in all its purity and translucency, we have to sacrifice to it something of the light and shade, the relief, the atmospheric effect, the subtlety of realistic colour, which we are accustomed nowadays to look for in a picture. Happy the men who could contentedly pursue their work undisturbed by the thought that there were effects to be obtained in art beyond what it was possible for them to get. ”

“ If old windows have suffered at the hands of time, they have also gained, apart from sentiment, a tone and quality which the glass had not when it was new.
Their arch-enemy is the restorer, at whose hands they have suffered cruel and irreparable wrong. He is the thief who has robbed so much old glass of its glory, and a most impenitent one: there are times when any one who cares for glass could find it in his heart to wish he were crucified. So greedy is he of work, if not of gain, that restoration cannot safely be left even to the most learned of men ”

“ What, then, about historic style? Are we to disregard it in our work? That question may be answered by another: What about old work? Old work, it is argued, should be our guide. Well, old work preaches no adherence to past styles. It went its own way, in delightful unconsciousness that the notion could ever occur to any one deliberately to go back to a manner long since out of vogue; and when the idea of a Renaissance did occur to the artist, he very soon made it something quite different from the thing he set out to revive—if ever that was his deliberate intention. ”

“ Every artist, of course, knows that a colour is beautiful according to the variety in it; and a “Ruby” background (as it is usually called) , which is made up of little bits of glass of various shades of red, not only crimson, scarlet, and orange, but purple and wine-colour of all shades from deepest claret to tawny port, is as far beyond what is possible in a sheet of even red glass as the colour of a lady’s hand is beyond the possible competition of pearl powder or a pink kid glove. ”