Latest news with #stainedglass
Telegraph
4 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
Sacred Mysteries: From smashed glass to a bright revival
In 1547 an edict of Edward VI ordered superstitious monuments in churches to be destroyed. There should 'remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows or elsewhere'. In Elizabeth's reign no stained-glass windows were put in churches, and in 1571 the longest in the official Book of Homilies 'against peril of idolatry and superfluous decking of churches'. It said: 'Images placed publikely in Temples cannot possibly bee without danger of worshipping and idolatrie, wherefore they are not publiquely to bee had or suffered'. Yet within a generation religious stained glass crept back into chapels and churches, beginning with the Earl of Salisbury's chapel at Hatfield in 1609. This revival that 'should not have happened' kicks off a learned and beautifully illustrated volume from the Ecclesiological Society, that force for good that still uses the seal designed by AWN Pugin in 1844. The theme, explored in the society's conference in 2023, is Stained Glass Revivals, taking in postwar achievements from Harlow to Glasgow, from Ely Place to East Acton. But first came that Jacobean revival, here examined by Mark Kirby, Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. Salisbury put biblical scenes in his windows at Hatfield far from the gaze of the unlearned. The windows used the bold, bright colours that had emerged from the Continent (the glass-making tradition having been lost in England). What survives of that first revival is found in private chapels and at Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Some glass was installed in London and later destroyed. One case of a chapel is at Trinity Hospital, Greenwich (now backed by the bulk of Greenwich power station). This hospital or almshouse was one of several built by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, long suspected of papistry and stating in his will that he died 'a member of the Catholicke and Apostolike Churche, saying with Saint Jerome In qua fide puer natus fui in eadem senex morior '. The Greenwich window, the first since the Reformation to depict the Crucifixion, was made in 1614, the year of his death, and, in the judgment of Dr Kirby, 'has a sense of making a death-bed declaration of faith'. At Oxford the two earliest examples of new glass were at Wadham, made by Bernard van Linge, and at Lincoln College, made by Bernard's brother Abraham van Linge. 'As artistic endeavours, these are not of he greatest quality,' Dr Kirby admits. More successful were windows made by Abraham van Linge at Queen's, Christ Church, Balliol and University College between 1633 and 1642. This was the period of the pursuit by Archbishop Laud and his allies of the 'beauty of holiness', as the Psalm has it. An associate of Laud was Viscount Scudamore (1601-71) who undertook the remarkable restoration of the church at Abbey Dore, Herefordshire. Windows here show signs of inexperienced craftsmen edging their way to express their pictorial ambitions. In a chapter about Scudamore, Robert Walker points out that faces are simply drawn in black line on white glass, and the extensive use of pot-metal (through-coloured glass) goes against the trend in the wider world of stained glass. His conclusion is that Scudamore himself might have been the artist. Certainly a vidimus, or glass design, is among the Scudamore papers, clearly sketching the finished windows.
BBC News
15-07-2025
- General
- BBC News
Project to analyse York Minster's Rose Window
A major restoration project is under way at York Minster, which will analyse the famous Rose Window. Due to the devastating fire in 1984, the 500-year-old stained glass window cracked in 40,000 places under the extreme 450C (842F) window, designed in the 16th Century to celebrate the marriage of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York in 1486, was restored by glaziers following the will now re-examine the work, to understand how to better care for the window in the future. The three lancet windows in the cathedral's South Transept are also set to be safeguarded by adding protective windows, which are beneath the Rose Window, depict Saints Peter, Paul, Wilfred and William of to their positioning, they were not subject to the same fire damage but exposure to the elements has rendered them vulnerable to corrosion and paint loss. Prof Sarah Brown, director of the York Glaziers Trust, said the windows had undergone a variety of restorations and additions over the years, as well as being completely removed during World War Two."It was Peter Gibson OBE, former superintendent of the York Glaziers Trust, who insisted that the Rose Window could be saved after the 1984 fire," she said. "At the time, some people saw its perilous condition as an opportunity for a completely new stained glass commission. "Thankfully, his advice was heeded and the glaziers worked tirelessly to restore the artwork."Scaffolding has been put up inside and outside the South Transept to allow teams to access the will look at the repair work from the 1980s and analyse how the restoration methods used have stood the test of time. Alex McCallion, director of works and precinct at the cathedral, added: "Four decades ago, a multidisciplinary team of skilled craftspeople worked to sensitively restore the cathedral after that devastating fire."He said they had used the best tools and techniques available at the time."We now have a fantastic opportunity to re-examine their work to allow us to better understand the Rose Window and how we might care for it into the future."The York Minster Fund was set up in 1967 to pay for projects such as this. In 2024, the Julia Rausing Trust awarded the fund a £500,000 grant, which will support the Rose Window analysis. Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
The Independent
14-07-2025
- General
- The Independent
Craftspeople review Rose Window repairs carried out after 1984 York Minster fire
Conservation experts are reviewing repairs to York Minster's famous Rose Window, which were carried out after a devastating fire in 1984, as part of a new restoration project. The stained glass masterpiece stayed in place despite the fire raging around it, but its 73 panels, containing 7,000 pieces of stained glass, were subjected to 450C heat and cracked in 40,000 places. The painstaking renovation carried out on the window, a symbol of the union between the Yorkist and Lancastrian houses that had looked out over the city for 500 years, will now be reviewed by a team of heritage craftspeople. It took four years to rebuild and restore York Minster after the 1984 fire. The new scaffolding, which has been erected inside and outside the South Transept, will allow members of the minster team to access the Rose Window and review the repair works undertaken in this period. The analysis will reveal how the restoration methods and materials have stood the test of time and whether the window needs further repairs. The new project will see the minster's stonemasons working alongside experts from the York Glaziers Trust to conserve three huge lancet windows in the cathedral's South Transept which depict Saints Peter, Paul, Wilfred, and William of York. Due to their positioning, the lancets were not subjected to the same extreme thermal stress as the Rose Window. However, centuries of exposure to the elements have rendered the medieval glass vulnerable to corrosion and paint loss. Revolutionary protective glazing will be added to the windows to help safeguard the precious works of art well into the next century and beyond. Professor Sarah Brown, director of the York Glaziers Trust, said: 'These windows have a history stretching back many hundreds of years. 'They can be attributed to the workshop of Robert Petty in the late 15th century and have undergone a variety of restorations and additions, as well as being completely removed during the Second World War. 'It was Peter Gibson OBE, former superintendent of the York Glaziers Trust, who insisted that the Rose Window could be saved after the 1984 fire. 'At the time, some people saw its perilous condition as an opportunity for a completely new stained glass commission. 'Thankfully, his advice was heeded and the glaziers worked tirelessly to restore the artwork.'
New York Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Brian Clarke, Stained-Glass Innovator, Is Dead at 71
Brian Clarke, one of the world's leading practitioners of the centuries-old art of stained glass, who pushed the form's boundaries from religious to secular settings, died at his home in London on July 1, one day before his 72nd birthday. The cause was cancer, according to HENI, an art services business that represents Mr. Clarke. 'When I started working in the medium of stained glass, it was a dying art,' he told the British newspaper The Independent in 2010. 'I knew from a very early age that the future of the medium would only be assured if it had an application in public buildings and was not limited to ecclesiastical architecture.' While Mr. Clarke did create stained-glass windows in religious locations, his work was also found in places like Pfizer's headquarters in Manhattan; Victoria Leeds, a shopping district in England; and the Lake Sagami Country Club in Yamanashi, Japan. He worked on projects with the architects Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki and Zaha Hadid. This year he completed 'Concordia,' a colossal wall of 127 vibrantly colored stained-glass panels installed at Bahrain International Airport that depicts, among other things, jasmine flowers, dragonflies and hawks; incorporates Islamic geometric patterns; and makes reference to medieval European tapestries and illuminated manuscripts from the Book of Hours. At 112 feet wide and nearly 56 feet tall — and weighing more than 30 tons — it is one of the largest stained-glass installations in the world. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sir Brian Clarke, stained-glass artist whose punk ‘crazy days' livened up 1970s London
Sir Brian Clarke, who has died the day before his 72nd birthday, was once described in The Daily Telegraph as the 'rock star of stained glass', a tribute to his role as a leading light of the modern reinvention of the centuries-old art as well as a reference to what he called his 'crazy days' of the late 1970s, when he was ubiquitous on the London party scene and a darling of the gossips. At that time he was a member of the Uncommitted, a 'punk' band which advertised gigs but never actually played a note of music, although, according to Clarke's website, they 'did discuss the possibility from time to time in 1977'. And just as he could never be described as a musician, Clarke, who was also active in painting, sculpture, mosaics, tapestry and even stage design (he did the sets for Sir Paul McCartney on two world tours), resisted being pigeon-holed as a stained-glass artist. Yet by pushing the boundaries of the medium, both in terms of technology and its artistic potential, and collaborating with prominent architects on hundreds of projects around the world, he became a global star. Clarke's shimmering windows, featuring figurative and abstract designs – or combinations of both – can be found in churches across Europe. But he was determined to go beyond the traditional. 'When I started working in stained glass, it was a dying art,' he told The Independent in 2010. 'I knew from a very early age that the future of the medium would only be assured if it had an application in public buildings and was not limited to ecclesiastical architecture.' Clarke became famous for spectacular projects, including the Pyramid of Peace in Kazakhstan, the Pfizer building in New York, the Holocaust Memorial Synagogue in Darmstadt (unveiled on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1988), the royal mosque at King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh, incorporating 360 windows, and Concordia, a colossal work 34 metres wide and 17 metres high, that was unveiled at Bahrain International Airport by Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa in April this year. Clarke was always on the hunt for new ways to develop his medium. For the Pfizer building he pioneered a way to reproduce watercolour designs depicting medical and scientific imagery in molten glass. And he developed a technique involving the bonding of glazed colours to architectural 'float glass', often in multiple layers, to allow colour to be applied to large areas of glass without the traditional dividing lead-work. Wherever he worked, Clarke was sensitive to site and historical context. When working on the refurbished Queen Victoria Street Arcade in Leeds he nodded to local traditions in tiling and glass. For the cladding of the Hotel du département des Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille, he selected deep Mediterranean ultramarine tones. At the 13th-century Linköping Cathedral in Sweden he incorporated photographs reinterpreting Christian iconography, but adapted them to fit the cathedral's diamond-patterned 1850s windows. 'What could be more modern than a medium that has a celluloid quality,'' Clarke asked, 'a cinematic drama that changes constantly?' Brian Clarke was born on July 2 1953 in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Clarke, a miner, and Lilian, née Whitehead, a cotton-mill worker. His maternal grandmother, who lived with the family, made a living as a medium, helping local people communicate with the dead. 'We had to get used to her chatting away to spirits and passing messages on to the neighbours,' Clarke recalled. As a child Brian himself was reportedly considered a 'sensitive'. But he felt a very different calling when, aged 12, he was taken on a school trip to York Minster: 'I remember seeing not the glass itself, but the illuminated pool of colour on that remarkable warm stone so characteristic of northern Gothic architecture. And that, combined with the music of a rehearsing choir, had such a powerful impact on me that I thought it was kind of a vocation. I thought I must have a calling to be a priest, to be a monk – and later on, I just found out it was art.' The same year he won a scholarship to Oldham School of Arts and Crafts, from which he moved to Burnley School of Art and North Devon College of Art and Design. A Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship in 1974 allowed him to visit important stained-glass sites in France, Germany and Italy. Clarke made his first stained glass, a heraldic eagle design, at 16, and won his first commission aged 17 for stained glass windows in a Grade II-listed property. Before long he found himself in demand for church work, in which he was influenced by the artist John Piper and inspired by his wife Liz's father, a Lancashire vicar. This was his real beginning: he recalled transporting the glass for one church on his bike. By his early 20s he had been the subject of a BBC arts documentary, was living in an old vicarage in Derbyshire and had developed a reputation as both a painter and stained-glass designer – though he preferred the term artist as 'I'm interested in rendering the commonplace sublime.' In the late 1970s he moved to London, feeling that he could never fully realise his ambitions for stained glass in the provinces. On his arrival he threw himself into the punk movement, becoming friends with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and producing a series of slashed punk paintings called Dangerous Visions (1977), fixed with large safety pins. John McEwen, writing in The Spectator, described Clarke as ''the most Sixties character to have emerged in the London art scene since the Sixties'. David Bailey became a friend, as did Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and the McCartneys, Paul and Linda. Clarke became a familiar figure at Langan's and in loucher establishments in Soho, his drinking companions including Francis Bacon, Bacon's companion John Edwards, and Robert Fraser, the Old Etonian aesthete and gallerist known to his friends as 'Groovy Bob', to whom Clarke was introduced by McLaren. 'Everywhere I went it was 'pop', I'm in the gossip columns again,' he recalled. His friendship with Bacon survived an occasion when Clarke asked the artist whether he had ever thought of doing something in stained glass, to which Bacon replied, 'No, dear. And I've never thought of doing something in macramé either.' Clarke agreed to be an executor of Bacon's estate (he later became sole executor acting on behalf of John Edwards), a role which meant that 'a lot of people in the art world are very, very keen to be my friend,' but also embroiled him, after Bacon's death, in a long and bruising legal battle with Bacon's old gallery, the Marlborough, which was only settled in 2002. Meanwhile, Fraser became Clarke's art dealer and in 1983, when Fraser opened a new gallery in Cork Street, Clarke was the first artist he showed. According to a 1988 report in The Times, in the early 1980s, in an effort to get Clarke to concentrate on his work, Fraser had dispatched him to Rome, then New York, though his efforts as a reformer were half-hearted at best. Clarke, who eventually went teetotal though he continued to enjoy the occasional spliff, recalled that the first time he attended Alcoholics Anonymous, Fraser 'was waiting outside in a taxi to meet me – with a bottle of wine and plastic cups'. Yet throughout his 'crazy years' Clarke retained an earnest commitment to his art. In 1978, with John Piper and Marc Chagall, he co-curated Glass/Light, a seminal exhibition exploring the history and possibilities of stained glass. The following year he published Architectural Stained Glass, a polemic which called for the integration of art and architecture. He also established a close friendship with the architect Norman Foster, with whom he would work extensively in later years. 'There is a thousand-year precedent for what I do,'' he told The New York Times in 1990. 'What's new is that I've nailed my colours to the post by working openly in an architectural context.' Clarke collaborated with Linda McCartney on her stained-glass photography projects, and after her death he created The Glass Wall, a mammoth eight-panel work dedicated to her memory. His set design for Paul McCartney's 1992 world tour, Let It Be, consisted of a projected collage of historical stained-glass pictures, including Matisse's windows from St Paul de Vence. He also designed the stained-glass stage sets for The Ruins of Time, a ballet by Wayne Eagling in tribute to Rudolf Nureyev. British projects included a stained-glass window for the papal chapel at the Apostolic Nunciature in Wimbledon, which was blessed by Pope Benedict XVI on his state visit to the UK in 2010, and a series of large-scale stained-glass windows for the Brian Clarke Church of England Academy, a co-educational secondary school in Oldham which is named after him. Much of Clarke's glass was made in a studio in Wiesbaden, West Germany, and it was there in the mid-1980s that a delegation from Darmstadt came to ask him to do the stained glass for the city's new Holocaust Memorial Synagogue, designed by Alfred Jacoby. They wanted a non-Jewish non-German to interpret both the past and the future, and after considering about a dozen artists, had lighted on Clarke. At first he demurred, but as he recalled, 'When they explained to me what it meant to them, and that this was a symbol for Jewry the world over, paid for by Germans, built on the site of Gestapo headquarters and opening on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, I was so moved… that when they left I wanted that commission at any price.' He regarded his Darmstadt windows, with a red-themed side symbolising destruction, and opposite a blue-themed side signalling hope, as the most important commission of his career. Clarke, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, was knighted in 2024. In 1972 he married Liz Finch, with whom he had a son. The marriage was dissolved in 1996 but they remarried in 2013. Sir Brian Clarke, born July 2 1953, died July 1 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
