Stained Glass Work: A text-book for students and workers in glass

You might indeed find that, in any single light, it is quite easy to arrange them at proper and serviceable distances, without cutting across the heads or hands of the figures; but it is ten chances to one that you can get them to do so, and still be level with each other, throughout a number of lights side by side.

The best plan, I think, is to set them out on the side of the cartoon-paper before you begin, but not so as to notice them; then first roughly strike out the position your most important groups or figures are to occupy, and, before you go on with the serious work of drawing, see if the bars cut awkwardly, and, if they do, whether a slight shifting of them will clear all the important parts; it often will, and then all is well; but I do not shrink from slightly altering even the position of a head or hand, rather than give a laboured look to what ought to be simple and straightforward by "coaxing" the bars up and down all over the window to fit in with the numerous heads and hands.

If, by the way, I see fit in any case to adopt the other plan, and make my composition first, placing the bars afterwards to suit it, I never allow myself to shift them from the level that is convenient and reasonable for anything except a head; I prefer even that they should cut across a hand, for instance, rather than that they should be placed at inconvenient intervals to avoid it.

The principle of observing your limitations is, I do not hesitate to say, the most important, and far the most important, of all principles guiding the worker in the right practising of any craft.

The next in importance to it is the right exercise of all legitimate freedom within those limitations. I place them in this order, because it is better to stop short, by nine-tenths, of right liberty, than to take one-tenth of wrong license. But by rights the two things should go together, and, with the requisite skill and training to use them, constitute indeed the whole of the practice of a craft.

Modern division of labour is much against both of these things, the observance of which charms us so in the ancient Gothic Art of the Middle Ages.

For, since those days, the craft has never been taught as a whole. Reader! this book cannot teach it you—no book, can; but it can make you—and it was written with the sole object of making you—wish to be taught it, and determine to be taught it, if you intend to practise stained-glass work at all.

Modern stained-glass work is done by numerous hands, each trained in a special skill—to design, or to paint, or to cut, or to glaze, or to fire, or to cement—but none are taught to do all; very few are taught to do more than one or two. How, then, can any either use rightful liberty or observe rightful limitations? They do not know their craft, upon which these things depend. And observe how completely also these two things depend upon each other. You may be rightly free, because you have rightly learnt obedience; you know your limitations, and, therefore, you may be trusted to think, and feel, and act for yourself.

This is what makes old glass, and indeed all old art, so full of life, so full of interest, so full of enjoyment—in places, and right places, so full even of "fun." Do you think the charming grotesques that fill up every nook and corner sometimes in the minor detail of mediæval glass or carving could ever be done by the method of a "superior person" making a drawing of them, and an inferior person laboriously translating them in facsimile into the material? They are what they are because they were the spontaneous and allowed license and play of a craftsman who knew his craft, and could be trusted to use it wisely, at any rate in all minor matters.

THE LIMITATIONS OF STAINED-GLASS

The limitations of stained-glass can only be learnt at the bench, and by years of patient practice and docile service; but it may be well to mention some of them.

You must not disguise your lead line. You must accept it willingly, as a limitation of your craft, and make it contribute to the beauty of the whole.

"But I have a light to do of the 'Good Shepherd,' and I want a landscape and sky, and how ugly lead lines look in a pale-blue sky! I get them like shapes of cloud, and still it cuts the sky up till it looks like 'random-rubble' masonry." Therefore large spaces of pale sky are "taboo," they will not do for glass, and you must modify your whole outlook, your whole composition, to suit what will do. If you must have sky, it must be like a Titian sky—deep blue, with well-defined masses of cloud—and you must throw to the winds resolutely all idea of attempting to imitate the softness of an English sky; and even then it must not be in a large mass: you can always break it up with branched-work of trees, or with buildings.

There should be no full realism of any kind.

No violent action must assert itself in a window.

I do not say that there must not, in any circumstances, be any violent action—the subject may demand it; but, if so, it must be so disguised by the craftsmanship of the work, or treated so decoratively, or so mixed up with the background or surroundings, that you do not see a figure in violent action starting prominently out from the window as you stand in the church. But, after all, this is a thing of artistic sense and discretion, and no rules can be formulated. The Parthenon frieze is of figures in rapid movement. Yet what repose! And in stained-glass you must aim at repose. Remember,—it is an accessory to architecture; and who is there that does not want repose in architecture? Name me a great building which does not possess it? How the architects must turn in their graves, or, if living, shake in their shoes, when they see the stained-glass man turned into their buildings, to display himself and spread himself abroad and blow his trumpet!

Efface yourself, my friend; sink yourself; illustrate the building; consider its lines and lights and shades; enrich it, complete it, make people happier to be in it.

There must be no craft-jugglery in stained-glass.

The art must set the craft simple problems; it must not set tasks that can only be accomplished by trickery or by great effort, disproportioned to the importance of the result. But, indeed, you will naturally get the habit of working according to this rule, and other reasonable rules, if you yourself work at the bench—all lies in that.

There must be nothing out of harmony with the architecture.

And, therefore, you must know something of architecture, not in order to imitate the work of the past and try to get your own mistaken for it, but to learn the love and reverence and joy of heart of the old builders, so that your spirit may harmonise with theirs.

Do not shrink from the trouble and expense of seeing the work in situ, and then, if necessary, removing it for correction and amendment.

If you have a large window, or a series of windows, to do, it is often not a very great matter to take a portion of one light at least down and try it in its place. I have done it very often, and I can assure you it is well worth while.

OF MAKING A SKETCH IN GLASS

But there is another thing that may help you in this matter, and that is to sketch out the colour of your window in small pieces of glass—in fact, to make a scale-sketch of it in glass. A scale of one inch to a foot will do generally, but all difficult or doubtful combinations of colour should be sketched larger—full size even—before you venture to cut.

Work should be kept flat by leading.

One of the main artistic uses of the leadwork in a window is that, if properly used, it keeps the work flat and in one plane, and allows far more freedom in the conduct of your picture, permitting you to use a degree of realism and fulness of treatment greater than you could do without it. Work may be done, where this limitation is properly accepted and used, which would look vulgar without it; and on the other hand, the most Byzantine rigidity may be made to look vulgar if the lead line is misused. I have seen glass of this kind where the work was all on one plane, and where the artist had so far grasped proper principles as to use thick leads, but had curved these leads in and out across the folds of the drapery as if they followed its ridges and hollows—the thing becoming, with all its good-will to accept limitations, almost more vulgar than the discredited "Munich-glass" of a few years ago, which hated and disguised the lead lines.

You must step back to look at your work as often and as far as you can.

Respect your bars and lead lines, and let them be strong and many.

Every bit of glass in a window should look "cared for."

If there is a lot of blank space that you "don't know how to fill," be sure your design has been too narrowly and frugally conceived. I do not mean to say that there may not be spaces, and even large spaces, of plain quarry-glazing, upon which your subject with its surrounding ornament may be planted down, as a rich thing upon a plain thing. I am thinking rather of a case where you meet with some sudden lapse or gap in the subject itself or in its ornamental surroundings. This is apt specially to occur where it is one which leads rather to pictorial treatment, and where, unless you have "canopy" or "tabernacle" work, as it is called, surrounding and framing everything, you find yourself at a loss how to fill the space above or below.

Very little can be said by way of general rule about this; each case must be decided on its merits, and we cannot speak without knowing them. But two things may be said: First, that it is well to be perfectly bold (as long as you are perfectly sincere), and not be afraid, merely because they are unusual, of things that you really would like to do if the window were for yourself. There are no hard and fast rules as to what may or may not be done, and if you are a craftsman and designer also—as the whole purpose of this book is to tell you you must be—many methods will suggest themselves of making your glass look interesting. The golden rule is to handle every bit of it yourself, and then you will be interested in the ingenuity of its arrangement; the cutting of it into little and big bits; the lacework of the leads; thickening and thinning these also to get bold contrasts of strong and slender, of plain and intricate; catching your pearly glass like fish, in a net of larger or smaller mesh; for, bear in mind always that this question relates almost entirely to the whiter glasses. Colour has its own reason for being there, and carries its own interest; but the most valuable piece of advice that I can think of in regard to stained-glass treatment (apart from the question of subject and meaning) is to make your white spaces interesting.

The old painters felt this when they diapered their quarry-glazing and did such grisaille work as the "Five Sisters" window at York. Every bit of this last must have been put together and painted by a real craftsman delighting in his work. The drawing is free and beautiful; the whole work is like jewellery, the colour scheme delightfully varied and irregular. The work was loved: each bit of glass was treated on its merits as it passed through hand. Working in this way all things are lawful; you may even put a thin film of "matt" over any piece to lower it in tone and give it richness, or to bring out with emphasis some quality of its texture. Some bits will have lovely streaks and swirling lines and bands in them—"reamy," as glass-cutters call it—or groups of bubbles and spots, making the glass like agate or pebble; and a gentle hand will rub a little matt or film over these, and then finger it partly away to bring out its quality, just as a jeweller foils a stone. This is quite a different thing from smearing a window all over with dirt to make it a sham-antique; and where it is desirable to lower the tone of any white for the sake of the window, and where no special beauties of texture exist, it is better, I think, to matt it and then take out simple patterns from the matt: not outlined at all, but spotted and streaked in the matt itself, chequered and petalled and thumb-marked, just as nature spots and stripes and dapples, scatters daisies on the grass and snowflakes in the air, and powders over with chessboard chequers and lacings and "oes and eyes of light," the wings of butterflies and birds.

So man has always loved to work when he has been let to choose, and when nature has had her way. Such is the delightful art of the basket and grass-cloth weaver of the Southern seas; of the ancient Cyprian potter, the Scandinavian and the Celt. It never dies; and in some quiet, merciful time of academical neglect it crops up again. Such is the, often delightful, "builders-glazing" of the "carpenters-Gothic" period, or earlier, when the south transept window at Canterbury, and the east and west windows at Cirencester, and many such like, were rearranged with old materials and new by rule of thumb and just as the glazier "thought he would." Heaven send us nothing worse done through too much learning! I daresay he shouldn't have done it; but as it came to him to do, as, probably, he was ordered to do it, we may be glad he did it just so. In the Canterbury window, for instance, no doubt much of the old glass never belonged to that particular window; it may have been, sinfully, brought there from windows where it did belong. At Cirencester there are numbers of bits of canopy and so forth, delightful fifteenth-century work, exquisitely beautiful, put in as best they could be; no doubt from some mutilated window where the figures had been destroyed—for, if my memory serves me, most of them have no figures beneath—and surrounded by little chequered work, and stripes and banding of the glaziers' own fancy. A modern restorer would have delighted to supply sham-antique saints for them, imitating fifteenth-century work (and deceiving nobody), and to complete the mutilated canopies by careful matching, making the window entirely correct and uninteresting and lifeless and accomplished and forbidding. The very blue-bottles would be afraid to buzz against it; whereas here, in the old church, with the flavour of sincerity and simplicity around them, at one with the old carving and the spirit of the old time, they glitter with fresh feeling, and hang there, new and old together, breaking sunlight; irresponsible, absurd, and delightful.

CHAPTER XV

A Few Little Dodges—A Clumsy Tool—A Substitute—A Glass Rack—An Inconvenient Easel—A Convenient Easel—A Waxing-up Tool—An Easel with Movable Plates—Making the most of a Room—Handling Cartoons—Cleanliness—Dust—The Selvage Edge—Drying a "Badger"—A Comment.

Here, now, follow some little practical hints upon work in general; mere receipts; description of time-saving methods and apparatus which I have separated from the former part of the book; partly because they are mostly exceptions to the ordinary practice, and partly because they are of general application, the common-sense of procedure, and will, I hope, after you have learnt from the former parts of the book the individual processes and operations, help you to marshal these, in order and proportion, so as to use them to the greatest advantage and with the best results. And truly our stained-glass methods are most wasteful and bungling. The ancient Egyptians, they say, made glass, and I am sure some of our present tools and apparatus date from the time of the Pyramids.

A CLUMSY KILN-FEEDER

What shall we say, for instance, of this instrument (fig. 64), used for loading some forms of kiln?

Fig. 64.

The workman takes the ring-handle in his right hand, rests the shaft in the crook of his left elbow, puts the fork under an iron plate loaded with glass and weighing about forty pounds, and then, with tug and strain, lifts it, ready to slip off and smash at any moment, and, grunting, transfers it to the kiln. A little mechanical appliance would save nine-tenths of the labour, a stage on wheels raised or lowered at will (a thing which surely should not be hard to invent) would bring it from the bench to the kiln, and then, if needs be, and no better method could be found, the fork might be used to put it in.

Meanwhile, as a temporary step in the right direction, I illustrate a little apparatus invented by Mr. Heaton, which, with the tray made of some lighter substance than iron, of which he has the secret, decreases the labour by certainly one-third, and I think a half (fig. 65).

Fig. 65.

It is indeed only a sort of half-way house to the right thing, but, tested one against the other with equal batches of plates, its use is certainly less laborious than that of the fork. And that is a great gain; for the consequence of these rough ways is that the kiln-man, whom we want to be a quiet, observant man, with plenty of leisure and with all his strength and attention free to watch the progress of a process or experiment, like a chemist in his laboratory, has often two-thirds of it distracted by the stress of needless work which is only fit for a navvy, and the only tendency of which can be towards turning him into one.

Fig. 66.

A GLASS-RACK FOR WASTE PIECES

Then the cutter, who throws away half the stuff under his bench! How easy it would be, if things were thought of from the beginning and the place built for the work, to have such width of bench and space of window that, along the latter, easily and comfortably within reach, should run stages, tier above tier, of strong sheet or thin plate glass, sloping at such an angle that the cuttings might lie along them against the light, with a fillet to stop them from falling off. Then it would be a pleasure, as all handy things are, for the workman to put his bits of glass there, and when he wanted a piece of similar colour, to raise his head and choose one, instead of wastefully cutting a fresh piece out of the unbroken sheet, or wasting his time rummaging amongst the bits on the bench. A stage on the same principle for choosing glass is illustrated in fig. 67.

But it is in easels that improvement seems most wanted and would be most easy, and here I really must tell you a story.

AN INCONVENIENT EASEL

Having once some very large lights to paint, against time, the friends in whose shop I was to work (wishing to give me every advantage and to save time), had had special easels made to take in the main part of each light at once. But an "Easel," in stained-glass work, meaning always the single slab of plate-glass in a wooden frame, these were of that type. I forget their exact size and could hazard no guess at their weight, but it took four men to get one from the ground on to the bench. Why, I wanted it done a dozen times an hour! and should have wished to be able to do it at any moment. Instead of that it was, "Now then, Bill; ease her over!" "Steady!" "Now lift!" "All together, boys!" and so forth. I wonder there wasn't a strike! But did no one, then, ever see in a club or hotel a plate-glass window about as big as a billiard-table, and a slim waiter come up to it, and, with a polite "Would you like the window open, sir?" quietly lift it with one hand?