Studio: international art (18.1900)

Stained-Glass Designs

is bringing into prominence other ways of turning
to account capacities that have hitherto been pre-
vented from developing in the right direction, and
is calling into existence a school of craftsmen
whose work is full of promise and interest. It
foreshadows in painting the same change that has
already made itself evident in sculpture, that
application of the highest type of technical per-
formance to the purposes of decorative design by
which results of great aesthetic importance are
obtainable.

In every way this recognition of the claims of
decoration is to be welcomed. It restores to its
right place a form of art which in bygone cen-
turies was thought worthy to engage the attention
of the greatest masters and to afford the noblest
opportunities to men of splendid ability. It opens
up for the modern worker possibilities of profitable
occupation, and in these days, when the painting of
easel pictures has ceased to be a reliable profession,
gives him hopes for the future. The depression
that has of late years hung heavily over the studios
is to be ascribed to a decrease in the demand for
purely pictorial productions, and to the fact that
the annual supply of pictures is far greater than is
desirable in the present condition of public taste.
But this depression will vanish when artists gene-
rally realise that there is ample room for them in
the ranks of the decorators, and that if they fit
themselves for the work of design they will find an
increasing number of openings for professional
activity.

Among the men who have had the discretion to
appreciate properly this changing order of things
in the art world, and to put themselves in the
front of a very well marked movement, Mr. Gerald
Moira holds an indisputable place. He has rapidly
established himself as one of the cleverest and
most ingenious of the younger workers in decora-
tive art, and has fully proved his capacity to invent
and carry out new applications of artistic materials.
His methods are sound, and the principles by
which his effort is directed have the merit of being
fresh and unconventional. If he may be said to
have a speciality, it is in the production of the
modelled and coloured plaster work that he has
done in collaboration with Mr. F. Lynn Jenkins.
This has been frequently illustrated in the pages
of The Studio, notably in the numbers for June
and August 1898, and is familiar enough to every
one who follows the progress of present-day aesthe-
tics.

But, wisely, Mr. Moira does not limit himself to
only one type of performance. Lately he has been
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busy with a series of designs for stained glass, and
these claim notice because they show an intention
somewhat different from that by which the majority
of other workers in the same field have been
governed. It is not so much that he has deliberately
cut himself adrift from the accepted traditions that
have habitually controlled stained-glass designing,
or that he has disregarded the customs of his
predecessors, but rather that he has found new
and pleasant ways of using limitations that are
inevitable. In all these cartoons there is something
to admire in the manner in which he has chosen a
judicious middle course, neither mistakenly striving
for pictorial effect nor relapsing into the other
extreme of archaic convention without spirit or
vitality.

The merit of his method is seen best in the
series of windows for the church designed by
Mr. F. Selby at Stantonbury, in Bedfordshire. In
these the use he has made of the lead lines, and
his adaptation of them to give an agreeable and
appropriate pattern, can be thoroughly commended.
The leads form an important part of his design,
and yet fulfil quite adequately their structural
purpose. They add richness to the whole effect,
but they are spaced with sufficient largeness and
freedom to cause no impediment to the light, and
with a well-judged irregularity that avoids the not
uncommon suggestion of too emphatic outlining
of the chief features of the design. These windows
are about six feet high, a size large enough to
permit a certain elaboration of pattern without any
suggestion of fussiness.

There is further evidence of the study which
Mr. Moira gives to the relation between the
size of the window and the amount of detail
permissible in the other cartoons. These, the
Apostle for a new college, of which Mr. H. T.
Hare is the architect, and the figure of the
Queen for Mr. Unsworth's Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon, are less than half
the height of the Stantonbury Church designs, so
the leads are proportionately less numerous and
less free in their arrangement; but they are placed
with just as much discretion and consideration for
the effect. All this goes to prove that the artist
has taken the trouble to think out for himself the
principles of this branch of design, and to approach
it with a desire to be reasonable. His work has
the artistic quality of fitness, of suitability to its
specific purpose; but it is a type of fitness that
implies a good deal more than mere mechanical
contrivance ; it is a product of very real intelligence
as well.