A study of Victorian stained glass in the south-west of England attempts to analyse who commissioned it, and their motives for doing so

Apollo, August, 2005 by Michael Kerney

Stained Glass and the Victorian Gothic Revival

Jim Cheshire

Manchester University Press, 49.99 [pounds sterling]

ISBN 0 7190 6346 9

Few arts have suffered greater reversals in esteem than Victorian stained glass. Although the work of William Morris and his associates never quite fell from favour, by the interwar period the great bulk of Victorian glass was dismissed by ecclesiastics and historians alike as artistically worthless, and its removal actively encouraged by some. Then, during the bleak 1940s, a few writers and artists of the English neo-romantic movement--notably John and Myfanwy Piper writing in The Pavilion in 1946--rediscovered its forgotten beauties. Since that time, the devoted scholarship of Charles Sewter, Birkin Haward, Martin Harrison and others has reinstated ecclesiastical stained glass to its proper place among the decorative arts of the nineteenth century.

The title of this book is somewhat misleading, since it treats mainly the period from 1840 to 1860, a phase only within the gothic revival. At its core are illuminating studies of three studios operating in south-west England: John Toms of Wellington, the Beer family of Exeter, and Joseph Bell of Bristol. Toms was typical of the small plumber/glaziers to be found in many English towns in the nineteenth century and whose ambitions sometimes stretched to producing figurative stained glass. The recent chance discovery of some of Toms's business records has allowed an insight into the economics of his activities and the kind of patronage he enjoyed. Robert Beer and his son Alfred ran a larger and much longer-lived firm supplying stained glass to Devon churches. The largest and most successful studio was that of Joseph Bell, which operated over a wide area of Somerset and Gloucestershire and occasionally much further afield.

By the beginning of the Victorian age stained glass had broken away from the pictorial mode of Georgian glass painting, with its heavy reliance on enamels, and reverted to the medieval system of pot-metal colours united by lead. Medieval glass was looked to also for stylistic inspiration. As the author demonstrates, a popular source of imagery was Mrs Jameson's Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), which made available illustrations from a remarkable variety of sources, both gothic and renaissance. Sometimes details were copied also from Charles Winston's pioneering 1847 book on the styles of English medieval glass.

The whole subject of stylistic sources however undoubtedly merits a much fuller investigation. Two pertinent examples from the area studied are the east window of Burlescombe church, Devon (1858), executed by John Toms (but here wrongly attributed to James Powell & Sons) and exhibiting a Nativity copied from a painting by the Venetian artist Bonifacio Veronese, and the west window of Wrington church, Somerset, by Joseph Bell (1860), depicting Old Testament prophets adapted from the Sistine Chapel ceiling--a very early example of influence from Michelangelo on Victorian glass, predating the work of Burne-Jones for the Morris firm by more than a decade. The circulation of engravings after German Nazarene artists also had a profound effect. Such are the complexities of 'gothic revival' glass.

A weakness of this book is that broad generalisations about nineteenth-century glass painting are drawn from enterprises of a type whose quantitative and qualitative importance is undoubtedly somewhat exaggerated. Some are wrongly categorised as local: Thomas Wells and Philip Palmer, for example, were both London, not Somerset, glass painters. Judged by the highest standards, the often charming work of Toms and of the Beer family is unmistakably provincial. The author makes surprisingly large claires for the artistic competence of Joseph Bell, who, although progressive in his use of Winston's new glasses, at least for restoration work, was surely never more than a pedestrian artist and uninspired colourist. Sometimes he copied the styles of more gifted men to strange effect--of John Richard Clayton, for example, in the years around 1860, and Robert Bayne a few years later.

To give a wider coverage, the author appends useful accounts of some of the leading English studios active during the early Victorian period--those of Willement, Wailes, Hardman, Warrington, Michael O'Connor, Ward & Nixon and James Powell & Sons. However, primary sources seem not to have been consulted here. The work of Thomas Willement, for example, rightly described as 'one of the single most important figures in the revival of Victorian stained glass', seems only to have been investigated from a limited (and sometimes misleading) computer summary deposited at the Victoria and Albert Museum rather than from his original papers and drawings in the British Library, an archive which is central for research into Victorian glass painting.

New research is demonstrating that a great deal more stained glass was being made for churches in the immediate pre-Victorian years than hitherto supposed, a fact obscured by its effective replacement later in the nineteenth century. The names of over forty glass painters, some working already in a medieval craft manner, appear in the London trade directories of the 1820s and 30s. The increase in output in the succeeding decade was nevertheless real enough. The author explains how this came about, discussing the roles played by the gothic revival, the Oxford Movement, and the Cambridge Camden Society through its influential journal The Ecclesiologist. But primarily he sees the phenomenon as an expression of a new Victorian 'consumer culture', which created a demand for stained glass as a mark of status among the rising middle classes.