Windows for the world

Nineteenth-century stained glass and the international exhibitions, 1851–1900

Jasmine Allen

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526114723
• eBook ISBN: 9781526114747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Windows for the world explores the display and reception of nineteenth-century British stained glass in a secular exhibition context. International in scope, the book focuses on the global development of stained glass in this period as showcased at, and influenced by, these exhibitions. It recognises those who made and exhibited stained glass and demonstrates the long-lasting impact of the classification and modes of display at these events. A number of exhibits are illustrated in colour and are analysed in relation to stylistic developments, techniques and material innovations, as well as the broader iconographies of nation and empire in the nineteenth century.

1

Exhibiting stained glass: classification, organisation and status

The art of glass-painting can rarely receive justice in a general exhibition. Its dimmed light is injurious to most other objects. It is as exclusive in an exhibition as a beech-tree in a forest, under which nothing else will grow.

– Thomas Gambier Parry, 1867¹

Stained glass is an art form fundamentally concerned with the interplay of light and colour, and enhanced by the formal elements of line (both decorative and structural) and ornament. Transmitted light gives the translucent glass its precious colour, and illuminates a stained glass window, rendering it visible. The texture and tone of the coloured glass, as well as the application of vitreous pigment (glass paint), serve to modulate and temper the light passing through, as well as illuminating an image. Stained glass is also an art form strongly associated with picture and pattern; structural lead lines give a window its form and shape, while decorative painted detail enhances the design to give a pictorial or ornamental effect. A stained glass window often has to strike a careful balance between pictorial or decorative effect and the importance of the overall effect of the window in its architectural environment, taking into account lighting, scale, colour and decoration, as well as the function and climate of the building for which it is destined.

Typically, stained glass windows are seen and contemplated in an architectural setting. Within this architectural framework and context, stained glass performs a practical, symbolic, and aesthetic function, keeping the elements out; regulating, refining, and refracting light into a building; and illuminating pictures and patterns. But when stained glass panels, or entire windows, are relocated to new spaces and contexts, they adopt a variant set of functions, symbolism, and aesthetics, prompting a range of methodological questions. What are the implications of the temporary or permanent displacement of stained glass panels, designed to fit a specific window opening, to new architectural settings, geographical contexts, and social environments? As this chapter will reveal, a number of practical as well as theoretical problems arise with the temporary display of stained glass in an exhibition setting, along with opportunities for new experiences and interpretations of the medium.

Stained glass panels require structural support to hold them in place, and need a sufficient amount of light from behind in order to be seen.² ‘They are indeed unwieldy objects to exhibit’, remarked American art critic Charles de Kay (1848–1935) after the 1893 Chicago Exposition.³ Furthermore, most architectural stained glass windows are large monumental artworks intended to be placed at a great height and viewed from a distance, rather than up-close. As one writer, E. G. Howard, observed in 1887, much ‘[p]‌ainted glass appears to great disadvantage in museums. Large figures and subjects intended to be seen from a considerable distance are brought close to the eye, so that the effect they were calculated to produce is entirely lost.’⁴ Likewise, smaller painted-glass roundels and panels, intended to be seen up-close in more intimate domestic settings, might get ‘lost’ amongst other exhibits in dense museum displays.

Although many modern museums have found innovative and attractive ways of displaying architectural stained glass, the sheer size and scale of some panels make it difficult, if not impossible, to display an entire window (and rarely a whole scheme of windows), unless housed in a purpose-built architectural structure.⁵ This is one of the reasons why artist and collector Thomas Gambier Parry (1816–88), quoted above, believed that stained glass could not be fully appreciated in an exhibition context. Virginia Raguin has considered the implications of displaced stained glass windows and urged museum curators to evaluate historical stained glass windows within their architectural contexts:

The nature of the detached object, of necessity, is in conflict with the object in use. No object can be simultaneously in use and on exhibit in a museum, and therefore we find the exclusion of functional, living art, an inevitable result.⁶

Raguin’s chief concern is that when individual stained glass panels are isolated from their original, or intended, setting and placed on display in an exhibition or museum, they lose their physical and metaphysical connections with the architectural contexts for which they were designed and made. Raguin acknowledges that such stained glass windows in museum settings are no longer ‘living’; but adopt a ‘museal mortality’. As Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) wrote in his essay on the ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ (1952–54):

The German word museal [museumlike] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present.⁷

Both Raguin and Adorno subscribe to a Benjaminian school of thought that ‘[w]‌orks of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work.’⁸ In this case, once a stained glass window is separated from its integral architectural framework, site-specific function, and symbolism, its ‘cult value’ becomes irretrievable and, instead, it assumes an ‘exhibition value’.⁹

However, the placing of stained glass windows in new spaces can also establish new parameters of visual interest. As Svetlana Alpers has observed, when cultural objects are ‘severed from the ritual site, the invitation to look attentively remains and in certain respects may even be enhanced’.¹⁰ It is significant that Alpers demonstrates her paradigm through the example of Romanesque capitals and Renaissance altarpieces, since, like stained glass windows, these cultural objects have a fixed place within an architectural setting and a functional, symbolic, and ritualistic relationship with their surroundings. As we shall see, most of the stained glass panels or windows displayed at the international exhibitions were designed and made for specific buildings (predominantly churches), but had not yet been installed, and were therefore displayed outside of their intended contexts in these displays. Other exhibited panels were made specially for exhibition or competition purposes, and some were commissioned to decorate both temporary and permanent international exhibition buildings.

The international exhibitions were not the first events to place ecclesiastical stained glass windows on public display in a temporary exhibition setting. The Musée des Monuments français, which opened in the suppressed convent of Petits-Augustins in Paris from 1795 until 1816 under the direction of French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir (1761–1839), displayed a collection of French monuments including tombs, architectural sculptures, stained glass, and other artistic fragments confiscated from French churches following the secularisation of France.¹¹ Little attention was paid to the subject matter or original context of the stained glass panels on display in the Musée des Monuments français, but their presence in all of the museum galleries helped recreate, through themed and period room settings, the atmosphere and mysticism of the Middle Ages in France.¹²

Increased antiquarian interest in stained glass led to a number of eclectic displays of historical stained glass within the houses of antiquarians and collectors, some of which were opened to the public.¹³ In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century displays of stained glass formed part of a popular and spectacular urban exhibition culture, alongside diverse mechanical novelties and freak shows.¹⁴ The international exhibitions drew upon, and democratised further, the viewing of stained glass in such settings. As we shall see in Chapter 2, several displays at the international exhibitions similarly treated stained glass as an architectural and aesthetic accessory to give a particular religious, aesthetic, or spectacular effect, but disregarded its specific intended architectural context.

At these exhibitions, stained glass windows were no longer defined in relation to their architectural setting, but formed an intermediary display as part of a new, sometimes altogether different, collection of exhibits. Literary critic Susan Stewart has argued that, ‘the collection replaces history with classification’; and ‘is dependent upon principles of organization and categorization’.¹⁵ Although Stewart’s writing focuses on private collections, her argument that the formation of the collection depends upon the decontextualisation of objects and the creation of new narratives also applies to ‘collections’ of objects within temporary exhibition displays. In the contexts of the international exhibitions, stained glass exhibits were no longer considered in relation to their architectural or liturgical context, symbolic function, or role in a multimedia iconographic or decorative scheme, but in relation to the new objects and spaces in which they were placed, arranged, and categorised.

The placing of stained glass within a heterogeneous and eclectic collection of international exhibits provided opportunities to experiment with displaying stained glass, and to explore the relationship between stained glass and a range of other objects and artistic media. These events became forums for the discussion of the role of stained glass in nineteenth-century society, where the many agents involved in making and interpreting stained glass – including artistic and architectural practitioners, critics, and the public – questioned the medium’s status. For, in the second half of the nineteenth century, stained glass was simultaneously and incongruously perceived as an applied art, art-manufactu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Exhibiting stained glass: classification, organisation and status
• 2 A multitude of displays
• 3 Stylistic eclecticism in nineteenth-century stained glass
• 4 Competition and exchange: exhibitors and their networks
• 5 Stained glass as propaganda
• Conclusion: reappraising nineteenth-century stained glass
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates