Studio: international art (85.1923)

STAINED GLASS BY REGINALD BELL

lions is an unusual quality of strength—a
strength which stands the designer in good
stead when working on the heroic scale.

Strength, in brief, is his characteristic :
depth of colour, firmness and balance in
composition, and a startling boldness of
line. Every window he touches shows easy
certainty—a confidence in his own mastery
of a most obdurate material. Any painter
of average talent, inheritor of the traditions
of a celebrated family of glass-painters and
educated in a studio which has been a
school for two generations of craftsmen,
should be able to produce good work, but
Reginald Bell is not a painter of average
talent. He is an artist, a designer of re-
markable ability, and a handicraftsman to
his finger tips. He has knowledge, power,
and that happy inborn quality of ease in
handling his material which makes light of
limitations and turns them to advantages.
Where a lesser man would be shackled by
the lead lines in which all glass-painters

must work, Reginald Bell’s windows wear
them as easily as light chain armour. They
outline his work, strengthen his design and
shackle him nowhere. His Victory window
in Salisbury Cathedral—one of the finest
windows painted in England during the
past four hundred years—would still be a
dignified thing, would still tell its story,
if every painted line and shadow upon it
could be removed. The leadlines would still
preserve its composition—in the Cruci-
fixion panel, rigid and still, with one
drooping figure where Our Lady slowly
sinks at the foot of the Cross, and in the
Triumph light with soaring lines like
flames outlining the wings of the adoring
Cherubim beneath the rainbow on which
the Christ is throned. 00a
His little St. George on foot, shown in
the colour reproduction, though a miniature
after this last, displays the same qualities.
The design is firm and strong, the radiating
lines of the figure with its slender legs and