ORDINARY MEETING OF FELLOWS LECTURE

After Tiffany: How the British Arts & Crafts Movement Transformed American Stained Glass in the Early 20th Century by Peter Cormack MBE FSA

The history of American stained glass in the twentieth century remains a neglected field of study, its canon misleadingly distorted by a disproportionate emphasis upon the nineteenth-century work of Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge. This lecture, based on several decades of research, focuses on significant transatlantic influences, particularly the inspiration of the British Arts & Crafts Movement, which led to the creation of ‘Modern Gothic’ stained glass in the USA.

Although Tiffany’s and La Farge’s development of ‘opalescent glass’ windows in the 1870s was one of the most significant aesthetic and technical innovations in the history of stained glass, both designers’ aims were essentially pictorial and realistic, diverging radically from the medium’s origins as primarily an architectural art form. By the 1890s, a polemical campaign against opalescent windows, led by the church architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), reasserted the traditional values – exemplified by medieval precedent – of design, technique and materials in stained glass. Few American artists responded to his appeals at first, so Cram commissioned windows from Christopher Whall (1849-1924), the foremost English designer-maker of the time and a prominent member of the Arts & Crafts Movement. The distinctive qualities of Whall’s work in American churches, and his influential craft treatise Stained Glass Work (1905), soon proved to be a catalyst.

By the time of the Great War, a talented new school of stained glass workers, which included immigrant British artists trained in Whall’s ‘Arts & Crafts’ idiom, had begun to emerge in the USA. Given important patronage by Cram and his partner Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and by other leading architects, these men and women successfully challenged the ascendancy of opalescent glass, introducing the use of pot-metal ‘antique’ glass as well as the English-made ‘slab’ glasses favoured by Whall and his followers. Their designs were architectonic, with graphically-conceived leading that emphasised the essential two-dimensionality of the medium and its transcendent qualities of light-infused colour. The work of Charles J. Connick (1875-1945), in particular, demonstrated for 20th-century Americans that the medieval tradition could inspire powerfully expressive modern windows.

Among those whose work will be discussed in the lecture are Charles J Connick (who was to become America’s foremost stained glass artist of the period), Christopher Whall, Harry Eldredge Goodhue, Henry Wynd Young, Mary Hamilton Frye, Margaret Redmond, John Gordon Guthrie, Ernest Lakeman, John E Tarbox, William M Francis and William J Blenko. Their stained glass windows can be found in some of the USA’s most impressive buildings, such as Princeton University Chapel, New York’s St John the Divine Cathedral and San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral.

Peter Cormack MBE FSA has been researching, writing and lecturing about post-medieval stained glass since the 1970s. He was formerly Keeper of the William Morris Gallery, London, where he curated many exhibitions of work by Morris and members of the Arts & Crafts Movement, including pioneering displays of nineteenth- and twentieth-century stained glass. He has been a Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum and for some years has been the Society of Antiquaries’ Honorary Curatorial Adviser for Kelmscott Manor, William Morris’ Oxfordshire home. His book Arts & Crafts Stained Glass (published by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press in 2015) was the first study of the subject and his monograph on the American stained glass artist Charles J. Connick was published in 2024, also by Yale.

---

This event will be both in person at Burlington House and online. Please select the appropriate ticket below.

Attendance at Burlington House:
Open to anyone to attend.
The event will begin at 5pm, with tea/coffee from 4.30pm.
Pre-registration is essential for non-Fellows but we encourage Fellows to register as well.
Fellows must ensure they sign the guest book.
Sherry is served in the Foyer following the lecture.

Attendance online:
The event will be live-streamed on Zoom (if you register) and recorded on our YouTube channel.
The event will begin at 5pm.
You will receive an email reminder with the link to join the day of the lecture.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].

Get tickets online