Window glass

“ 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. ”

“ A Prismatic Display.—Take two large panes of common window glass, and set them in a frame about six inches apart. Have them perfectly clean, and then fill the space between them with cracked ice of clean and clear quality. Place the frame in the window, and behind the exact center of it hang an electric light or place a lamp with a reflector. From the sidewalk the cracked ice will show the most beautiful prismatic effects, in all the colors of the rainbow. In cold weather the ice will last throughout a day easily, and perhaps for a longer time. ”

“ In the house there is less need than in the church for severity, and more for liveliness, less occasion for breadth, and more for delicacy. The scale of the dwelling-room itself justifies, perhaps demands, a smaller treatment. Here, if anywhere, is opportunity for that preciousness of execution which, in work of more monumental character, it seems a pity to expend upon so frail a substance as glass—frailer than ever when it was the thin white glass employed for window panes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have found that the 8 by 10 size of single thick French window glass, second or third quality, is sufficiently good for Horticultural buildings, and we do not use any other, unless especially called for by the proprietor. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ If window glass is of the old, wavy, off-color sort, full of the bubbles, sand pits, and creases that characterized its production in early days, make sure that such panes are not discarded. Workmen view them with complete scorn and will cast them aside if not put under stern injunctions. ”

“ Window glass is of two principal types. One has a pale-olive cast. A few fragments of this type have finished edges, indicating that they are from the perimeters of sheets of crown glass and that Mercer purchased whole crown sheets and had them cut up. It may be assumed that this greenish glass is the oldest, perhaps surviving from Mercer’s early period. ”

“ Any one altogether unacquainted with the characteristics of style is apt to be very much at fault as to the date of a window. The later windows are in so much more dilapidated a condition than the earlier that they are quite commonly mistaken for the older.
[Pg 86] It has to be borne in mind that most of the devices adopted by the glass painters—the use, namely, of large sheets of fragile glass, and the avoidance of strengthening leads, no less than the resort to soft enamel, whether for colour or for shading—all go to make it more perishable. ”

“ There has been also a deplorable tendency among some prominent American glass makers toward startling theatrical effects. Of unchurchly windows, windows hopelessly and utterly unchurchly, the great majority doubtless are of the American school; nor are they the windows which have cost the least money. Novel and indescribable colors, as far removed as possible from all sober, reverent, devotional feeling, have been employed; effects have been sought which actually destroy all the value of the window as what it was designed by its architect, a window in a sacred edifice. ”

“ Of richly jewelled Gothic glass all innocent of paint, no single window remains to us; but there are fairly numerous examples extant of pattern windows glazed in white glass, whether in obedience to the Cistercian rule which forbade colour, or with a view to letting light into the churches—and it is to churches, prevalent as domestic glass may once have been, we must now go for our Gothic windows. ”

“ He is reckless, that is, of the obscurity of the glass he covers with it. At moments, when the sun shines fiercely upon it, you dimly see what he was aiming at; nine-tenths of the time all is blackness. Slabs of white glass are coated literally by the yard with dense brown pigment through which the light rarely shines.
It had become the practice now to glaze a window mainly in rectangular panes of considerable size. Where pot-metal colour was used at all, it had of necessity to be surrounded with a leaden line ”

“ It is not enough for complete success in this form of window that the quarry lines shall be the basis of the design; the painting also must be strong enough to hold its own against leads and bars. That is hardly the case with the exceptionally delicate ornament in the Dutch glass opposite. But here, notwithstanding that the scroll is slighter than the Italian work and more delicately painted, the central patch of enamel colour in the shield and mantling does, to some extent, focus the attention there, and so withdraw the eye from the lead lines. The window is not merely cleverly designed ”

“ Few have wood floors and all seem dirty. No glass is used in the windows, and very little window glass is seen in the city. The window openings are grated on the outside and have a sort of portiere or wooden shutters on the inside. ”

“ The glass mosaic as above described is held in its place in the window by horizontal iron bars, and the position of these is a matter of some importance, and is by no means overlooked by the artist in considering the effect of his finished work. A well-designed coloured glass window is, in fact, like nothing else in the world but itself. It is not only a mosaic; it is not merely a picture. It is the honest outcome of the use of glass for making a beautiful window which shall transmit light and not look like anything but what it is. ”

“ Occasionally a window, so deep that under ordinary conditions of light it is obscure, may need the [Pg 383] strongest possible illumination; but even in the case of very deep-toned windows—such, for example, as those in the transepts of the Duomo at Florence—the glass, as a whole, is best seen by a sober light. You get the maximum of colour effect with the minimum of hurt to any individual window, if there be any hurt at all. A really garish window may be beautiful as the light wanes. The great North Rose at Notre Dame (Paris) is impressive at dusk. ”

“ In a white window the leads, from their greater thickness, are more conspicuous than the traced lines of the painting, and in consequence it is upon the leads that the artist depends for the main features of his design. The earliest grisaille windows may be divided into two classes: those in which the pattern is formed of narrow "straps" of white glass interlacing or seeming to interlace ”

“ 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. ”

“ The more careful of the workmen protect themselves from the danger, however, by wearing large spectacles of ordinary window glass. These spectacles, when they have been in use a little time, give practical evidence of their utility, for on examining them they are found to be speckled all over with the particles of steel, which, when red-hot, become embedded in the glass. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had not dreamed the rattling of glass, nor the jarring sensation, nor yet the smoke and heat and lurid light. The walls shook with a dull vibration, and the window-panes were like castanets. Through the glass transom over the door I could see a shimmering, ruddy glow that rose and fell, and was brightened by bursting sparks and little darting tongues of yellow flame. Apart from this one lurid spot all was thickly curtained into darkness by a heavy pall of smoke. ”

“ No man in his senses, no artist at all events, ever denied that the designer of a stained glass window must take into consideration the architecture of the building of which his work is to form part. The only possible question is as to what consideration may be due to it. ”

“ The great west window is filled with fragments brought from the nave clerestory, and is mostly figures and canopies. Taken as a whole, the glass in this church provides a delightful experience. It is very typical of the lighter tones that came in with the Perpendicular style, but its greatest service is in teaching the lesson that, no matter how much a window’s design may have suffered, it will carry its message of beauty, if only the original colour scheme be sound. ”

“ High up in the north wall of the easterly transepts is a rose window which retains its thirteenth century glazing in the large central circle, but alas! white glass replaces all but the borders of the outer circles, thus drowning the old glass in a glare of light [Pg 47] and utterly extinguishing the splendid glow which would otherwise delight our eyes. Although the handsome five-light Decorated window on the south side of St. Anselm’s Chapel (lying off the south choir aisle) has lost its original glass, the records of the cost contain features of interest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the contrary, notwithstanding the very great variety in the tints of greenish-white, which resulted from the chemically imperfect manufacture of the glass, they were employed very much at haphazard, and so far from ever defining the design, go to obviate anything harsh or mechanical there may be in it. There is else, of course, a tendency in geometric pattern to look too merely geometric. One wants always to feel it is a window that is there, and not just so many feet of diaper. ”

“ The design is there absolutely regardless of any consideration of glass or architecture. Each window is treated as a vast oil picture, without so much as a frame. Here is no vista of distant architecture, nor any such relief of lighter colour as you find at Gouda. Force of colour is sought by masses of deep shadow, into which the figures merge. This shadow being obtained by paint, and the glazing being in the now usual squares, there are literally yards of painted quarries, which, except when the sun is at its fiercest, are all but black. ”