Studio: international art (85.1923)

STAINED GLASS BY REGINALD BELL

five hundred odd years which have passed
since* And to-day windows are being
painted in England so vastly different from
the work executed by the same painters
less than twelve years ago, that they might
well be attributed not only to other men
but to another country and another era
altogether. 00000
A change of occupation is good for all of
us. As years pass, spent in the same employ,
one inevitably grows stale, gets into a
groove, yields to routine. The younger
glass painters of England, divorced from
their handicraft during four years of
soldiering, had time to think, to reconsider
old methods and scheme new. The Vic-
torian glass-painters overpainted their
material and their windows were dense and
heavy; but now the younger men are
painting more and more lightly and deli-
cately every year. Colour is as deep as in
the fourteenth century, and because there
is more white glass to contrast with it, it
seems richer than before ; but the brown
shadows beloved by the Victorians are gone,
let us hope for ever. The painting now is as
delicate and windows nearly as translucent
as they were at the end of the fifteenth
century. 00000

Of the work of two or three younger
men well in the van of the new movement
perhaps none repays examination so well as
that of Reginald Bell, and few men do work
so difficult at first sight to appraise or
criticise. From the variety of his designs
and his range of subjects and treatment
one is at first tempted to class him as
an experimentalist. Sometimes he is grave,
sometimes gay. He will design little nursery
window medallions and do them to per-
fection : a series of toys, miniatures of
wooden knights on spotted hobby horses,
gay little spots of colour happily conceived,
perfectly drawn, and for all their lightness
of subject firm and strong in treatment and
design. One so soon jumps to the conclu-
sion that here is a painter vowed for life
to paint jolly things for children that it
comes almost as a shock to find that all this
dainty stuff is mere playtime relaxation and
that Reginald Bell is happier when oppor-
tunity offers of treating large window spaces
in the grand manner. Not till one has seen
his most important works does one realise
that even underneath the tiny play medal-
194

PART OF A SERIES OF
“VICTORY’' WINDOWS
IN SALISBURY CATHE-
DRAL. BY REGINALD BELL