NO LOST ART: THE STAINED GLASS OF WILLIAM MORRIS
The Revd Peter Jackson has contributed a summary of the lecture given by Peter Cormack, MA FSA. Mr Cormack has been Deputy Keeper, William Morris Gallery, London since 1978.
Christ Church has one of the finest sets of Morris & Co. stained glass in London. Only All Saints, Putney Common can compete and its collection spans a shorter period. Christ Church has glass from the first year of the Morris Company’s existence, 1861-2, until the 1910’s. This came about through the enlightened view of Christ Church’s incumbents who supported the inclusion of Morris glass after the main East and West windows by Clayton & Bell had been installed.
The creator of the Christ Church glass, William Morris (1834-1896), was born in Walthamstow and lived for part of his youth in a large house which is now the William Morris Gallery, where Peter Cormack works.
From a privileged background, Morris went to Oxford University, intending to become a clergyman. However, while at Oxford, his ambitions turned towards art and he initially trained as an architect in the practice of the well-known architect G.E. Street (himself a pupil of Sir George Gilbert Scott). This gave Morris the only formal training of his career.
Street, like Gilbert Scott and Pugin, belonged to the Gothic Revival Movement. One of their guiding principles was that an architect should design what went into a building as well as the building itself. This meant Morris’s training in Street’s office included the design of furniture, embroidery, and stained glass.
Morris saw his stained glass work as the continuation of an ancient tradition. In a contribution to Chambers encyclopaedia in the 1890’s, Morris wrote, ‘Glass painting is no lost art’. He believed that the processes employed in the 19th century were essentially those of the 12th century and that departing form these mediaeval processes ‘[would] only lead us astray’.
The ancient glass making process that Morris employed involved taking of pieces of coloured glass (like the glass of a wine bottle or beer bottle), joining them together with lead, and painting on the glass to define line work and shading. Once this painting was complete, the glass was fired to make the images permanent. Paint was not used to colour the glass. All the windows in Christ Church were made by this process and a hypothetical time-travelling mediaeval craftsman transported to Morris’ workshop, or that of Clayton & Bell, would have recognised everything that was being done there (apart from the gas kilns!). In a sense, Morris had simply revived a mediaeval craft.
At Oxford, Morris met Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), who became his great friend and business partner, and primarily designed the figures in Morris’ glass.
Another early friendship, with Philip Webb (1831-1915), the architect, was also formative. Webb designed the additional ornament that surrounded the Morris and Burne-Jones’ designs and he was responsible for the inclusion of animals and birds in the designs.
In the course of his lecture, Mr Cormack showed how Christ Church’s glass, which effectively provides a survey of the evolution of Morris’ style, fits into the overall context of Morris’ work.(In their first ten years, over three quarters of Morris’ company’s work was in stained glass).
For example, Philip Webb had studied the 14th century windows of Merton College, Oxford, to provide inspiration for the earliest designs of the company that Morris founded with his friends in 1861, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.
The canopy work that frames the St. Matthew window in the Lady Chapel (the first as you enter the chapel from the North Door and modelled on Morris himself) was designed by Webb and closely resembles the Merton glass.
Mr Cormack speculated that Webb’s point of contact with Sir George Gilbert Scott’s office when the commission for the Lady Chapel glass was being arranged would not have been Sir George himself but quite possibly his son, George Gilbert Scott Jr., who became a distinguished architect and was the father of one of the 20th century’s most distinguished architects, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Waterloo Bridge, Liverpool Cathedral, the Cambridge University Library tower, Battersea Power Station, and the (now largely defunct) red post office phone boxes.
Mr Cormack stressed that, in spite of their traditional craftsmanship, the windows in Christ Church by Morris would have struck our forebears as very modern. The fine, big East and Windows in Christ Church were simply neo-Gothic. Morris’ glass, however, included figure subjects in what was then a very modern pre-Raphaelite style, modelled on real people (e.g. Morris is the model for the St. Matthew window in Christ Church) doing real things. To make his point, he gave the amusing example of a window including St. Joseph at Selsey church in Gloucestershire where St. Joseph is depicted as blowing on a bowl of hot porridge.
Mr Cormack also described how Morris was different in his working habits from his fellow artists. They worked in their studios but he worked in his workshop, first at Red Lion Square and then at Queen’s Square (where most of the glass in mid-1880’s was made). Morris - a man of many contradictions – enjoyed a private income but saw himself as a foreman of the craftsmen working in his workshop and his family lived on the upper floors above the showrooms and workshop.
The Morris family life was idiosyncratic. On one occasion, his daughter May gave her doll an elaborate funeral service, which distracted the craftsmen from their work. On another, people came in search of Morris, called out his name, and received the response form Morris, who was making dyes for fabrics at the time, ‘I am dyeing.’
A fine example of Burne-Jones’ contribution to the design of Christ Church’s glass is the window at the West End of the South Aisle of Christ Church, of SS. James and Jude. This has figures drawn by Burne-Jones with angels by Dante Gabriel Rosetti (modelled on his wife). Rosetti was the Oxford friend of Morris’ who had influenced him to choose an artistic career. Curiously, the angels, holding shields specific to the saints, have been transposed in installation. These windows aptly illustrate the simplicity and monumental conception typical of Morris & Co. glass. They lack the extraneous ornament of other Victorian glass.
Mr Cormack related the design of our windows to other contemporary examples, notably those that we should all go to visit at Christ Church, Oxford, Jesus College, Cambridge, and St. Philip’s Cathedral in Birmingham.
Another fascinating illustration that Mr Cormack gave us was in the window illustrating acts of charity in the North side of the chancel. Burne-Jones, in his account book of 1875, records that he had had a photograph of a watercolour enlarged to produce the life-size drawing necessary to execute this particular window (the usual way of showing a patron how a window would look was to paint a preliminary watercolour). Burne-Jones also relied on the new technique of photography to study the Italian masterpieces which considerably influenced his art.
Mr Cormack also noted Morris’ unique use of foliage patterns, paralleling those of his fabric designs, which were used in Christ Church’s Virtue windows, which have foliage patterned fabric hanging behind the figures. Morris also used colours in his glass not found elsewhere (Morris was responsible for the colours and Burne-Jones for much of the figure drawing). Walk around soon and see the pinks and ochres, etc.
Mr Cormack reminded us of Morris’ great technical skill. The windows that he made were usually larger than they had space to arrange in their entirety in the workshop. This means that they had to be made in sections (which you can see if you inspect our windows) and the continuity of the sections relied entirely on Morris’ memory for colour and pattern.
A late influence on the designs of Burne-Jones and Morris was Byzantine art, best exemplified by the mosaics that they designed for the American Church in Rome. Both men would entertain themselves on a Sunday afternoon – after a lunch shared by both their families – with choosing appropriate tesserae of Venetian glass for the mosaics! You can observe the influence of this Byzantine mosaic style in their late windows both in the use of smaller pieces of glass (like mosaic tesserae) and in the elongated figures that Burne-Jones came to favour.