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 dense enough, produced pot-metal more heavily charged with colour. This was wilfully streaked, mottled and quasi-accidentally varied; some of it was opalescent; much of it was more like agate or onyx than jewels. Other forms of American enterprise were: the making of glass in lumps, to be chipped into flakes; the ruckling it; the shaping it in a molten state, or the pulling it out of shape. It takes an artist of some reserve to make judicious use of glass like this. La Farge and L. C. Tiffany have turned it to beautiful account; but even they have put it to purposes more pictorial than it can properly fulfil. The design it calls for is a severely abstract form of ornament verging upon the barbaric.

Examples of Important Historical Stained Glass.

There are remains of the earliest known glass: in France—at Le Mans, Chartres, Châlons-sur-Marne, Angers and Poitiers cathedrals, the abbey church of St Denis and at St Remi, Reims: in England—at York minster (fragments): in Germany—at Augsburg and Strassburg cathedrals: in Austria—in the cloisters of Heiligen Kreuz.

The following is a classified list of some of the most characteristic and important windows, omitting for the most part isolated examples, and giving by preference the names of churches where there is a fair amount of glass remaining; the country in which at each period the art throve best is put first.

Of late years each country has been learning so much from the others that the newest effort is very much in one direction. It seems to be agreed that the art of the window-maker begins with glazing, that the all-needful thing is beautiful glass, that painting may be reduced to a minimum, and on occasion (thanks to new developments in the making of glass) dispensed with altogether. A tendency has developed itself in the direction not merely of mosaic, but of carrying the glazier’s art farther than has been done before and rendering landscapes and even figure subjects in unpainted glass. When, however, it comes to the representation of the human face, the limitations of simple lead-glazing are at once apparent. A possible way out of the difficulty was shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 by M. Tournel, who, by fusing together coloured tesserae on to larger pieces of colourless glass, anticipated the discovery of the already mentioned fragment of Byzantine mosaic now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. He may have seen or heard Of something of the sort. There would be no advantage in building up whole windows in this way; but for the rendering of the flesh and sundry minute details in a window for the most part heavily leaded, this fusing together of tesserae, and even of little pieces of glass cut carefully to shape, seems to supply the want of something more in keeping with severe mosaic glazing than painted flesh proves to be.

Glass painters are allowed to-day a freer hand than formerly. They are no longer exclusively engaged upon ecclesiastical work; domestic glass is an important industry; and a workman once comparatively exempt from pedantic control is not so easily restrained from self-expression. Moreover, the recognition of the artistic position of craftsmen in general makes it possible for a man to devote himself to glass without sinking to the rank of a mechanic; and artists begin to realize the scope glass offers them. What they lack as yet is experience in their craft, and perhaps due workmanlike respect for traditional ways of workmanship. When the old methods come to be superseded it will be only by new ones evolved out of them. At present the conditions of glass painting remain very much what they were. The supreme beauty of glass is still in the purity, the brilliancy, the translucency of its colour. To make the most of this the designer must be master of his trade. The test of window design