Looking glass

“ They may be quite possibly founded upon them. There is the same arrangement of subjects in cartouches, set in geometric glazing of clear glass. But in the Italian windows one kind of glass is used throughout (the little pieces of thin pot-metal colour in the cartouches, and so on, scarcely count) ; and the proportion of the painted work to clear glass is so schemed that, although you may feel that the plain work wants just a touch of enrichment to bring it all together, you
[Pg 299] are not asked deliberately to imagine yourself to be looking through, beyond the painting, into space. ”

“ In all the work the artist has not forgotten that the special glory of stained glass is in luminous colour, not laid on the surface, but burnt in and filling the whole substance of the glass. It is colour which no picture on which light falls can produce. ”

“ Don't you think it's worth while spending half-an-hour to paint false lead lines on the back of the plate? A ha'p'orth of lamp-black from the oil-shop, with a little water and treacle and a long-haired brush, like a coach-painter's, will do it for you (see Plate XIII.) .
Another thing: when the window is in its place, each light will be surrounded with stone or brick, which, although not so black as the lead lines, will tell as a strong dark against the glass. See therefore that while you are painting, your glass is surrounded by dark, or at any rate not by clear, glittering light. ”

“ As to the slab-glasses—"Early-English," "Norman," or "stamped-circles"—which are chiefly affected by this question, the texture and surface upon which their special character depends is sometimes a very useful resource in work seen against, or partly against, background of trees or buildings; while against an entirely "borrowed" light perhaps, sometimes, it can almost dispense with any painting. The grey shadows that come from the background play about in the [Pg 228] glass and modify its tones, doing the work of painting, and doing it much more beautifully. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ruder and more archaic design gives in fullest measure the glory of glass—for the loss of which no quality of painting ever got in glass quite makes amends. The pictorial effects compatible with glass design are those which go with pure, brilliant and translucent colour. The ideal of a “primitive” Italian painter was more or less to be realized in glass: that of a Dutch realist was not. It is astonishing what glass painters did in the way of light and shade. ”

“ It must not be thought that stained glass loses in beauty by the presence of these black lines of lead and iron. On the contrary it gains enormously. 8 Large pieces of unrelieved colour in windows are thin in effect and trying to the eye, which needs the continual contrast of the solid black of the lead all over the window to enable it to appreciate the colour and brilliance of the glass. The painting when rightly used is directed to the same end, for it may be said that the smaller and more divided the spaces of clear glass, the more brilliant and jewel-like is the effect. ”

“ Artificial light, too, is a very treacherous medium in which to examine glass of any kind. Any find should be examined by daylight and side by side with other pieces of whose authenticity there is no doubt. ”

“ It is by their aid we get those mosaics of pot-metal, the depth and richness of which to this day, with all our science of chemistry, we cannot approach by any process of enamelling. Moreover, though merely constructional leads, taking a direction contrary to the design, may at times disturb the eye, (they scarcely ever disturb the effect) they add to the richness of the glass in a way its unlearned admirers little dream. ”

“ It does not give the effect of actual flesh, and it does not help the effect of the window. Since you cannot get actual flesh tones it is as well to accept the convention of white flesh, which gives breadth [Pg 107] and dignity to the glass. There is a sort of frivolity about enamelled flesh-pink. It is, in a way, pretty, but out of key with the monumental character of a window. Glass lends itself best to strong, large work. The quality of pot-metal gives the colour chord. The leads give the key to the scale of design—the pitch, as it were, of the artist’s voice. ”

“ It is the special excellence of pictured glass, that the light, which falls merely on the outside of other pictures, is here interfused throughout the work; it illuminates the design, and invests it with a living radiance; and in requital the unfading colors transmute the common daylight into a miracle of richness and glory in its passage through the heavenly substance of the blessed and angelic shapes which throng the high-arched window. ”

“ The way you distribute your colour matters very much. Some in washes, some in splashes, some in spots, some in stripes. What will "not do" in one way will often be just right in the other: yes, and the very way you treat your glass when all is chosen and placed together—matt in one place, film in another, chequering, cross-hatching, clothing the raw glass with texture and bringing out its nature and its life. ”

“ HUNTING GOBLET, DOME FOOT
If you place near each other, upon a white damask cloth, a glass of Charles II date, a William and Mary glass, a George III glass, and a Victorian glass, you will notice a darkening and then a whitening in tint (though not a brightening) as your eye travels from the oldest glass to [16] the most modern. By “tint” or “tinge” I do not mean “colour,” in the sense of red or green or blue; I will deal with coloured glass later on. By “tint” or “tinge” I mean the shade of leaden, darkish hue in the metal from which the glass article was blown or moulded. ”

“ For, as we have said, the glory of true stained glass is in its rich, jewel-like color. Its reds, which the makers called “ruby,” its blues which they called “sapphire,” with its “emerald” greens, its “gold” and its “pearl,” never entered the field to compete with the achievements of the painter’s brush; to compare the delight they afford the beholder with that derived from a painting would be in a sense as impossible as a comparison between the fragrance of a flower and the cadence of a song. ”

“ The so called antique glass, in both white and colors, is made precisely like the ordinary sheet window glass, except that the surface of the glass is made full of minute blow-holes, which produce almost an aventurine effect, and add greatly to its brilliancy. ”

“ You probably know that in making modern stained glass a great deal of paint is used in order to get shading and degrees of color. It was toward the end of the thirteenth century that the old glass-makers began to introduce the use of paint into their windows. First came the grisaille glass, as it was called, where instead of strong reds and blues most of the window was in white painted with scroll work in which a few bits of brilliant stained glass were set like jewels. ”

“ A window of ancient glass needs releading. The lead has decayed and the whole is loose and shaky. The ancient glass has worn very thin, pitted almost through like a worn-out thimble with little holes where the alkalis have worked their way out. It is as fragile and tender as an old oil-painting that needs to be taken off a rotten canvas and re-lined. If you examine a piece of old glass whose lead has had time to decay, you will find [Pg 316] that the glass itself is often in an equally tender state. ”

“ Before leaving the subject of paint upon glass, it is well to remark that although we may admire the brilliancy of these early windows and may rejoice that the artist had not yet learned to obscure his colour, nevertheless, if we were examining windows in Italy, that land of everlasting sunshine, we might find a little painting upon the surface a genuine relief to the eye. There is such a thing as too much sunshine. Geography must be considered in criticising glass. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But go nearer and look into the glass itself. By some malformation or mere freak of make, all the images it throws back are livid. Flood the room with sunshine; stand before this glass with youth and hot blood tingling on your cheeks; and the glass will give back neither sun nor colour; but your own face, blue and dead, and behind it a horror of inscrutable shadow. ”

“ For no one, I suppose, ever took his first batch of painted glass out of the kiln without disappointment and without wondering what use there is in such an art. For the painting when it went in was grey, and silvery, and sharp, and crisp, and firm, and brilliant. Now all is altered; all the relations of light and shade are altered; the sharpness of every brush-mark is gone, and everything is not only "washed out" to half its depth, but blurred at that. Even if you could get it, by a second painting, to look exactly as it was at first, you think: "What a waste of life! ”

“ The cutting and putting together of the glass is called glazing, and it is this that gives the window colour; while the enamel work is spoken of as painting, and gives detail, richness, and texture.
I shall presently show that the glazing and painting are really two separate crafts, having separate origins and development, and that stained glass as we know it, or as it should be called in strict accuracy "stained-and-painted" glass, is the product of their union. ”

“ It must be clearly understood then that the colour effects which are the glory of the art are not directly produced by painting at all, 5 but by the window being built up of a multitude of small pieces of white and coloured glass—glass, that is, coloured in the making, and of which the artist must choose the exact shades he needs, cut them out to shape, and fit them together to form his design, using a separate piece for every colour or shade of colour. ”

“ And in the latter half of the sixteenth century it was less and less the custom to take heed of considerations other than pictorial; so that by degrees the translucency of glass was sacrificed habitually to strength of effect depending not so much upon colour, which is the strength of glass, as upon the relief obtained by shadow—just the one quality not to be obtained in glass painting. For the quality of shadow depends upon its transparency ”

“ Now the side you first looked at is the side to cut on, and the side to paint on, and it is the side placed inwards when the window is put up.
The reason is this. Glass is made into sheets by being blown into bubbles, just as a child blows soap-bubbles. If you blow a soap-bubble you will see streaks playing about in it, just like the wavy streaks you notice in the glass. ”

“ Cut glass is a fine setting for flowers of strong colour, but kills the paler hues, and above and beyond all is the dark moss-green glass of substantial texture that is fashioned in an endless variety of shapes. By chance, gift, and purchase we have gathered about a dozen pieces of this, ranging from a cylinder almost the size of an umbrella-stand down through fluted, hat-shaped dishes, for roses or sweet peas, to some little troughs of conventional shapes in which pansies or other short-stemmed flowers may be arranged so as to give the look of an old-fashioned parterre to the dining table. ”

“ Even if the material with which the glass-stainer works admitted of a successful imitation of natural forms, the result could not be beautiful. No one desires roses to blossom on his window-panes, nor butterflies to settle on the glass as if it were a flower. The real purpose of the glass can never be safely forgotten in its decoration: it is to keep out the cold while admitting the light; the color is to tone the light, and prevent its being garish; and if, farther, any form is placed upon the glass, it is merely to prevent monotony by presenting an agreeable variation from mere color. ”

“ In short, you could have it so placed that you would like it no better, that it would be no better, than the bit of "builder's glazing" in the top quatrefoil of the next window, which looks like, and I fancy is, of almost the very same glass, but clumsily mixed, and, fortunately, dated for our instruction, 1779.
I do not know any place where you can get more study of certain properties of glass than in the city of York. The cathedral alone is a mine of wealth. [Pg 310] The nave windows are near enough to see all necessary detail. There is something of every period. ”

“ The Quality of Glass and the Colours Used.—At first these differ little from those used in the previous period, but as the fourteenth century proceeds, the rich intense reds and blues, with their "streakiness," their endless variety of tone and texture, which makes each piece of glass a jewel with an individuality of its own, and needing no enrichment, give way to glass of a thinner, flatter quality. ”