Studio: international art (51.1911)

Painted Glass designed by Sir E, Burne-Jones

not difficult to understand, if one recalls the kind
of window that was being produced by contem-
porary stained-glass workers. Every single group
and detail in it is charming if only it could be
regarded as a thing by itself, apart from the rest.
The whole, however, is too kaleidoscopic and too
lacking in breadth and decorative effect to be suc-
cessful. The last work of the kind in which
Burne-Jones was engaged for Messrs. Powell was
a large window (i860) of the Creation, for
Waltham Abbey. Very shortly afterwards, before
the close of 1861, the firm of Messrs. Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner & Co. came into being. Burne-
Jones joined them as one of the original co-
operating members, and from that time onward to
his death he continued to design for the firm
whensoever required.

drove Ruskin “ wild with
joy” when he saw it.

Thus encouraged, the
artist made designs repre-
senting the Call of St. Peter
and of St. Paul; and the
three designs for Bradfield
College, viz., Adam and Eve
outside the Gate of Para-
dise ; The Story of the
Tower of Babel; and A
State Procession in Honour
of Solomon and the Queen
of Sheba. Each of these is
a single trefoiled light. The
next undertaking, more am-
bitious if, through no fault
of the designer (who was
utterly misled at the outset
by having false measure-
ments supplied to him), less
satisfactory, was a series of
subjects (1859) illustrative
of the legend of St. Frides-
wide. The glass now occu-
pies the east window of the
Latin Chapel at the north-
east of the ancient church
°f St. Frideswide (Christ
Church) in Oxford. The
colour is gorgeous and, con-
sidering the period, must have

SIR EDWARD BURNE-JONES’S
DESIGNS FOR PAINTED GLASS.
BY AYMER VALLANCE.

The names of Burne-Jones as designer, and
of the firm of Morris & Co. as executants, of
painted glass have become so indissolubly con-
nected together that the fact is not always realised
that the artist began to design for glass in early
days, before ever Morris’s firm existed. It was Mr.
Arthur Powell, of the firm of Messrs. Powell, of
Whitefriars, who first applied to Burne-Jones, on
the recommendation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for
a design for glass. That was in 1857, and the
design produced in response—the earliest one that
Burne-Jones ever furnished for glass-painting—
represented the Good Shepherd. It was a mystical
composition in the rigid pre-
Raphaelite manner, which,
as Rossetti himself testified,

amounted in its audacity to
a veritable challenge, as it is
LI. No. 212.—November,

WINDOW IN ROT-TINGDEAN CHURCH, SUSSEX

DESIGNED

I9IO.

BY SIR E. BURNE-JONES

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