French window

“ But, on reflection, we discover that not only is there not one window too many, but that the very simplicity of the treatment of them as regards the curtaining as described in the last chapter, makes them far less expensive to deal with than the ordinary sash or French window, which one finds awaiting one in the dreadful houses of the older suburbs, or in those which have not yet advanced beyond the tastes of the day before yesterday. ”

“ The dreary rows of square-headed windows at even distances in long brick walls govern the rooms inside, and imperatively domineer over the convenience of the arrangement. A French writer, speaking of the palace of Versailles, at the time it was built, and regretting that a style had been adopted which demanded this precisely even fenestration, said that it caused a footman’s pantry to be lit by a huge window which had perforce to correspond with a row in a drawing-room on the same front, and perhaps had to be cut in two by a partition, to let the other half do duty for another minor apartment. ”

“ French windows are larger, heavier, and framed with wood that looks as if it had been cut to its shape with a hatchet; they have curious and cumbrous fastenings, and can only be forced asunder or together by some ingenuity and effort, and even then not properly. ”

“ We stood facing an exquisite mullioned window whose carved stone outlines were entirely new, yet delicately and finely cut, certainly at a cost of many thousand francs. The French do not seem to consider expense in a work of that sort. Concrete imitations will not do. ”

“ Beside this breviary is a narrow, arched window, closed by two iron bars in the form of a cross, and looking on the square; the only opening which admits a small quantity of light and air to a little cell without a door, constructed on the ground-floor, in the thickness of the walls of the old house, and filled with a peace all the more profound, with a silence all the more gloomy, because a public place, the most populous and most noisy in Paris swarms and shrieks around it. ”

“ The splendor and the squalor are alike hidden by this misty curtain, which settles down by my window, and on my spirits, causing an unpleasant gloom. How the passers-by jostle each other with their umbrellas, and of what a dull color are the brick houses opposite! ”

“ The stained glass windows are one of its distinguishing marks of beauty. "It is a woful thing, a sad necessity, that any Christian soul should pass from earth without once seeing an antique painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing through it. ”

“ What goes by the name of a window is half of it stuffed with rags or covered by boards to keep out wind and rain; the rest is so begrimed and obscured that scarcely can light enter or anything be seen outside. Should you have ascended to the attic, where at least some approach to fresh air might be expected to enter from open or broken window, you look out upon the roofs and ledges of lower tenements, and discover that the sickly air which finds its way into the room has to pass over the putrefying carcases of dead cats or birds, or viler abominations still. ”

“ My fancy in connexion with you will picture always a rose-bowered window set in a grey stone wall—just a frame for you, with your moonlit hair and eyes like beautiful stars. Always I shall see you like that—inaccessible, while I stand below and gaze upward. ”

“ The arch, its normal feature, supplies to it an endless store of beauty. The vault supplies another inexhaustible fund, and assumes forms unrivalled in any other style. The window, comparatively neglected by the ancient architects, and even hated by the Greeks, was, in the hands of the Gothic builders, a perfect treasury of architectural loveliness; and the introduction of window-glass, an invention nearly unknown to the ancients, became the source of an entirely new and most enchanting art, and one which exercised the most surprising influence upon architecture. ”

“ No degree of familiarity with old glass quite prepares one for the kind of thing which has made the humdrum market town of Gouda famous. Imagine a big, bare, empty church with some thirty or more huge windows, mostly of six lights, seldom less than five-and-twenty feet in height, all filled with great glass pictures, some of them filling the whole window, and designed to suggest that you see the scene through the window arch. ”

“ Fault, no doubt, has been found with the windows that they do not throw down the light sufficiently from above, but the windows themselves are traceried and filled with beautiful stained glass. Upon entering by the great portal at the west, the eye is caught in the far distance by the glimmering colours of the grand east window, whose dimensions are colossal, as may be gathered from the fact that its traceried compartments comprise no fewer than 350 pictures in glass, copies, in many instances, of known paintings. ”

“ The fashion of the day builds plate-glass windows round them, but it is truly a gross superfluity.” The room in which Lady Cressage and the luncheon-table awaited them was of a more hospitable aspect. A broad expanse of lawn, and of distant trees and sky-line fading away in the sunny autumn haze, made a luminous picture of the high embrasured window stretching almost from corner to corner across one side. By contrast with the other apartments, the light here was brilliant. ”

“ There green trees and pale blue water against a deep blue sky and deeper blue hills, anticipate a favourite sixteenth century colour scheme; but the glass is a mere wreck of what was once probably a fine window.
Figure groups on a considerable scale are chiefly to be found in the great “bull’s-eye” windows, which are a striking feature in Italian Gothic churches, occupying a position where in France would have been a rose—over the West door, for example. ”

“ He must know them and humour them. Bars have to be accepted as needful supports, leads to be acknowledged as convenient joints; glass must be allowed its translucency, and painting kept to what it can best do. A window should own itself a window.
And what is the aim and use of a stained glass window? To “exclude the light,” said the poet, sarcastically. Yes, to subdue its garishness, soften its glare, tinge it with colour, animate it with form perhaps.
The man who means to do good work in windows will devote as serious study to old glass as a painter to the old masters. ”

“ It is evident that the Germans, unlike the English, never paid for light and air in the shape of a window tax. The old part of the city is literally a town of windows; many are beautified with plants and flowers, fancy screens and porcelain views, which give it an enlivening appearance, in contrast with the gable-ended, projecting, overhanging houses. ”

“ We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. ”

“ Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I know a window from which one can see across a first, a second, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest 'prints' which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black ”

“ The window-tax—a result of war—laid an embargo on light, by restricting size and number, so the house, like most in the neighbourhood, having been built subsequently to “Billy Pitt’s” obnoxious impost, there were only two windows, and those were narrow. They were draped with heavy curtains, and festooned valances of dove-coloured moreen, trimmed with blue orris-lace, and worsted-bullion fringe, with spiral silken droplets here and there to shimmer in the rays of sun or chandelier. ”

“ In villages where there are no street lamps, the white man's window is a lamp all night of the night before the mail. From steamers that are tied to trees among the rushes, in rivers that you do not know, the officer on watch may look all night through such a window at such a man writing, writing a long, long letter—the beating heart of man, articulate in all that heartless darkness. ”

“ The mystery was not concealed amongst the carved oak window draperies, and cottage pattern wood-work, which hid the stone tracery of the old east window; it was not behind the spindle balustrade communion rails, nor the iron-barred workhouse-window-like rood-screen, nor in the brass-nailed, red-curtained, soft-cushioned, high-sided pews, where City folk loved to snooze on Sundays. ”

“ The beautiful foliaged bosses along the ridge rib are best seen from the triforium or the clerestory.
The great east window is considered to be the finest example of its style in the kingdom. It is of eight lights, "formed by doubling the four-light," and has a great circle in the head, filled with a six-foil surrounded by half-a-dozen quatrefoils. "Bar-tracery being fully developed," we read in a note to Rickman's "Gothic Architecture," "the general appearance of the window is rather Decorated than Early English, but the mouldings still belong to the earlier style." "This window ... ”

“ Jutting out of the black, moss-vegetating roof, is an old-maidish looking window, with a dowdy white curtain spitefully tucked up at the side. The mischievous young negroes have pecked half the bricks out of the foundation, and with them made curious grottoes on the pavement. Disordered and unpainted clapboards spread over the dingy front, which is set off with two upper and two lower windows, all blockaded with infirm, green shutters. ”

“ The windows are enormous. Not satisfied with the giant sliding doors that open on the street, revealing windows—unencumbered with sash or glass, there are sliding doors under the window sills, that roll back right and left and offer the chance to introduce a current of air directly on the lower limbs. ”

“ The modern window, with its huge panes of glass and simple framework, makes an insistent demand for curtains. Without curtains windows of this kind give a blank, staring appearance to the room and also a sense of insecurity in having so many holes in the walls. The beautiful windows of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, England and France, give no such feeling of incompleteness, for their well-carved frames, and over-windows, and their small panes of glass, were important parts of the decorative scheme. ”

“ Such windows are obviously windows. The huge sheets of plate glass that people are so proud of are all very well for shops, but they are seldom right in small houses.
I remember seeing one plate glass window that was well worth while. It was in the mountain studio of an artist and it was fully eight by ten feet—one unbroken sheet of glass which framed a marvelous vista of mountain and valley. It goes without saying that such a window requires no curtain other than one that is to be drawn at night. ”

“ Here, then, is called into requisition the art of the glass-stainer; without any vital diminution of light, the scheme of colour is no longer disturbed, a perfect chromatic harmony is established, and the window serves a double purpose, by admitting the necessary illumination from without, and enhancing the beauty of the building within. ”

“ It must, of course, be understood that there is some thirteenth century glass which will not be visited by us, but any one who has followed these itineraries will have seen all of the best. When we reflect how fragile is a glass window, it is really marvellous that we shall find so much of this easily destroyed beauty after the stress of centuries. Only a few churches can show anything like a complete series of windows, and fewer still a series all glazed during the same period. ”

“ Like a mural mosaic, an Eastern carpet, or the enamelled goldsmith's work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a truly decorative window has no affinities with a picture, a scene or landscape gazed at from an open window, where the interest concentrates itself upon a particular point, and where the illumination is not equally diffused throughout. ”

“ Above, and set back rather from the face of the doorway, is a rose window, the very rich traceries of which are arranged in intersecting equilateral triangles; over it is a crocketed pediment, with tracery in the spandrels and on either side, and flanked by pinnacles. Every portion of the wall is panelled or carved. ”

“ That to the east displays shields below the figures, a decoration which is absent in the western one. The central window on this side dates from the sixteenth century, and is the best of that period here. It contains three subjects in each side lancet, and two in the central one. Such intelligent use has been made of the leads that one concludes that the men who made the designs, and they who constructed the window, were either identical or else worked side by side. ”

“ The main divisions of the centre part of such a window would each contain its little “subject” or glass picture; the border and the interstices between the pictures would be occupied with foliated ornament; only, the earlier the work, the more pronounced would be the Romanesque character, alike of the ornament and the figure work. The broad borders from Angers, above, and the narrower one from Le Mans (page 327) differ materially from the accepted thirteenth century type (page 117) . ”