This is the most significant publication on the art and craft of stained glass since Martin Harrison’s revelatory work of thirty-eight years ago (Harrison Reference Harrison1980). It attempts to write about the Arts and Crafts Movement ‘in a new way’ – with the aim of restoring ‘stained glass to its rightful position within the canon of Arts and Crafts work, demonstrating that the art and its practitioners were at the heart of the movement’s philosophical discussions and public activity throughout its history … their achievements should be considered a significant contribution to the visual culture of the modern era’.
The author embarked on this challenging mission forty years ago while curator at the William Morris Gallery in London. At that time, hardly any historical research had been directed at British stained glass between the 1880s and the 1940s, and he recognised that there were, still living, artists and craftsmen who had worked with the artist/craftsmen and women of the Movement who could provide vital insights and information. It is axiomatic that no-one researching historic stained glass had been in a position to do this for any other period – all based their studies on the glass itself in its architectural context using conventional methods of documentary research and stylistic attribution – focusing on the product rather than the producers.
Cormack has effectively reversed this process, defining his methodology masterfully in the introduction to this book, and, in reviews published in the Journal of Stained Glass, chastises other exponents of the Arts and Crafts Movement for ‘inadequate appreciation of the personalities and relationships that are so central to the Arts and Crafts (based) movement’s collaborative nature’, their lack of focus on ‘specific crafts and the personal approach of individual craft workers’ in particular being ‘painfully reminded … of the V&A Museum’s disastrous 2005 International Arts and Crafts exhibition which reduced the Movement’s complexity to a lifeless array of loosely related styles’.
Apart from those who have a specific interest in ascertaining if the author has achieved the high standards of scrutiny he has thus imposed on himself, this book will be of great interest to historians of twentieth-century art, aesthetics, design, technology, social and educational history, feminism, Christian and Celtic iconography, patronage and the transmission of ideas. Medievalists will discover that it was the study and appreciation of medieval glass – even in fragmented collages – that inspired the artists and craftsmen of the Movement to reject the arid academicism of the so-called ‘Gothic Revival’ of high Victorian mass-production glass. By recovering the medieval technique of integrating a hierarchical lead-net into their designs, the Movement reinstated two-sided legibility after the inarticulate incoherence of Pre-Raphaelite leading matrices.
Cormack commenced his exploration of the glass-artist/craftsman relationships by organising a series of ground-breaking exhibitions at the William Morris Gallery – each the very first to be focused on the work of major Arts and Crafts stained-glass artists. Commencing in 1979 with the ‘Daddy’ of them all, Christopher Whall (1849–1924), he assiduously traced all Whall’s surviving associates, pupils, patrons, colleagues and family members and captured a whole spectrum of evanescent memories, insights, anecdotes, technical and biographical details. He harvested loans or acquisitions of photographs, drawings, vidimuses, cartoons, unpublished correspondence, sketches and studies to augment material sourced for these exhibitions from public collections and gleaned from contemporary documents. As workshops closed or coalesced, he rescued and archived significant contents and embarked on an epic, self-financed search to track down and photograph extant Arts and Crafts stained glass in situ.
Each exhibition was accompanied by an inexpensively produced, annotated and illustrated catalogue containing an authoritatively concise account of the subjects’ life, training, influences, philosophy, achievements, methods, materials and associates, as well as a glossary of terms and a chronology of key dates and commissions. Despite the constraints of cost – not to mention the physical impossibility of conveying the effect of the stained glass in its architectural context – the combined impact of his photographs, lectures, exhibitions and catalogues that followed was sensational. They catalysed consciousness-raising of the contribution that Whall, his pupils, associates and followers had made – and continue to make – to the art and craft of glass, and laid the foundations for building this book.
The polemical and passionately persuasive introduction provides a comprehensive summary of the author’s methodology, his personal perceptions of the historiography, precepts, philosophy, proponents and personalities of the stained-glass artists and craftsmen defining the Movement. The ensuing nine chapters can be read as discrete entities or as a compelling narrative charting the history and development of Arts and Crafts stained glass: the regeneration of the ‘lost art’ in the late nineteenth century; a biography of Christopher Whall and his influence on English stained-glass artists, glass makers, schools and workshops; the genesis of the ‘New Woman’, Irish and Scottish stained-glass artists; their collective concerns with style, theme and context; an analysis of major glazing schemes; Whall’s influence on transatlantic stained glass; the ‘second generation’ 1900–14, the inter-war period and beyond.
The entire volume is animated and illuminated by the 250 superbly reproduced photographs (all but a few taken by the author) selected specifically to ‘follow the critical focus of my writing which, throughout emphasises the particularities of technique and materials that underlie the varied idioms of Arts and Crafts glass-painting and glazing’.
There are twenty-nine packed pages of triple columns of notes, amplifying the text and scrupulously citing all sources of information: an extensive nine-page bibliography and a formidable list acknowledging the collaborative assistance of everyone who is – or was – anyone in the stained-glass world on both sides of the Atlantic.
An accomplished artist and designer himself, Cormack uniquely acknowledges experiencing first hand ‘the important dimension of sheer fun of being a stained glass artist and craftsman’. No other stained-glass historian has combined rigorous research, entrepreneurial curatorship, technical expertise and aesthetic judgement with such eloquent, enthusiastic, exegesis, passionate advocacy and provocative polemic. It is a remarkable achievement.
