David whyman stained glass

Wider leads indicate the key elements of the design. Transparent gold or amber details, e. The window is held in place by copper ties attached to bars fixed into the surrounding stonework. When you visit the Cathedral, on entering look generally at the ambience of the space and how all the windows illuminate the interior. Your first impression of a stained glass window is usually from a distance. It can be from a few metres to many metres away. As you walk around, aim to focus on one window at a time.

At this distance you will get an impression of the overall design and colour choices of the artist and the building context. Then look at the window close up. Many in this Cathedral are very accessible, although the use of binoculars may help. The colour in the glass was introduced when the sheet was in its molten state during manufacture.

The designer selected the colour palette for the window. The glass painter added the fine detail, e. As in Southwark, they stand with clerics to represent the union of Church and State, including William of Wykeham once more.

Sumner had initiated the rebuilding of the crumbling nave on fashionable Gothic lines in A rising generation of ecclesiologists, who stood for a more exacting and scholarly vision of the Gothic, had attacked his efforts as a botch job. Having wrested control of the living from its parishioners and appointed Thompson, its last chaplain, as its first rector, he sought funds for the restoration of its fabric.

In Arthur Blomfield — began rebuilding the nave and south transept, with the Prince of Wales laying the foundation stone. Although Kempe had trained with Clayton and Bell, he had drifted from early medieval styles towards the more painterly qualities of German fifteenth-century glass, just as architects such as Blomfield and his early collaborator George Frederick Bodley were turning from early French to the study of English and German Gothic.

He was popular as a maker of memorial windows to great men and local heroes. The Prince and Princess of Wales had inspected this design and it was therefore natural that they commissioned Kempe to produce a memorial window to their son the Duke of Clarence after his death from influenza in Although Kempe appealed across the religious spectrum, he was fiercely Tractarian.

He may have been educated at Rugby School and later designed a memorial window to Edward White Benson in its chapel, but he did not take to its muscular Christianity. He left Pembroke College Oxford a mannered, firmly unmarried High Churchman of delicate sensibilities who wished to be a priest before his stammer ruled that out.

At his exquisite country house at Lindfield in Sussex, Kempe clashed with wardens of the parish church over his plans to replace box pews with benches and screen off the chancel.

Mozley and Mandell Creighton against the flippant Macaulay to establish him as a tolerant reformer of the English Church. The first was a cosmic rather than a parochial history of salvation. Facing the Jubilee window in the south transept was another grand Kempe effort: a Tree of Jesse commissioned by Sir Frederick Wigan as a memorial to a dead relative. This scheme culminated in a great east window by Kempe, which depicted the Crucifixion, and a west window by Henry Holiday, depicting the Creation.

The second narrative was national and local rather than ecclesiastical. The most celebrated were a set on the south side of the nave devoted to giants of Elizabethan drama: Edward Alleyn, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Shakespeare.

These windows created a composite picture of the English as a literary but also Bible-reading nation. These windows prized philanthropic effort over worldly power or literary brilliance.

In the Alleyn window, which the Duke of Connaught had unveiled with the Albert memorial, Kempe remembered not the gifted actor but the educational pioneer, a fit parallel to William of Wykeham. The left-hand panel featured a figure of Charity and quoted Psalms Talbot was a liberal High Churchman. Brought up in a family enthused by Tractarianism, Talbot escaped its excesses by virtue of his formative reading of John Stuart Mill and other liberal thinkers as an undergraduate. Thompson, p.

Victoria did not dazzle the people; she represented them and their religiosity. Ecclesiastical commitments both inspired and shaped monarchism in Victorian Britain. Further consideration of other windows might similarly show us that people who felt reverence for Queen Victoria and the monarchy always refracted it through their ecclesiastical, political, and social commitments. Therein arguably lay the magic of the Victorian monarchy.

Ledger-Lomas, M. Abstract This article presents stained glass as an important source of material evidence for attitudes to monarchy in Victorian Britain.

Published on 05 Aug