In early Twentieth-century North America, stained glass was primarily related to the artist-designers John La Farge and Louis Consolation Tiffany, who each used the novel strategy of opalescent glass. Its opaque texture and painterly design bore little relationship to medieval stained glass. On this new research of the work of Charles J. Connick, Peter Cormack, an professional in post-medieval stained glass and creator of Arts & Crafts Stained Glass (Yale 2015), whereas denouncing “the simpering vulgarity of opalescent home windows”, describes Connick’s distinctive use of the medieval method.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1875 to a poor household, Connick confirmed expertise as an artist regardless of virtually no formal coaching and first labored as a newspaper illustrator for Pittsburgh Press. However an encounter in Pittsburgh with J. Horace Rudy, a associate within the stained-glass agency Rudy Brothers and Reich, led to a put up as an apprentice designer. The books of N.H.J. Westlake (A Historical past of Design in Painted Glass, 4 volumes, 1881-94) and Lewis F. Day (Home windows: A E book About Stained and Painted Glass, 1909) awoke him to the character of medieval glass.
After transferring to Boston he met the distinguished architect Ralph Adams Cram, who notably admired the English Arts and Crafts stained-glass maker Christopher Whall. Cram’s enthusiastic help was essential to Connick’s profession. An interview in 1909 led to a fee for a window for All Saints, Brookline, Massachusetts, and within the subsequent yr Connick made the primary of a number of visits to Europe, touring England and assembly Whall, after which travelling to France, the place he was greatly surprised by the flowery home windows within the Thirteenth-century cathedral of Notre-Dame at Chartres. Lastly in 1913 he opened his personal studio and workshop in Harcourt Road, Again Bay, Boston, and started to assemble his workforce of artists and glaziers. He was a wonderful employer and was rewarded by devoted loyalty.
Cormack describes the event of Connick’s type, which was by no means slavishly historicist. It was ideally acceptable to the largely Gothic revival church buildings being erected on the time. His commissions included such essential buildings because the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York Metropolis, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, and Princeton College Chapel, New Jersey. The Heinz Memorial Chapel on the College of Pittsburgh, a lofty and stylish neo-Gothic shrine designed by Charles Z. Klauder, the place the transept home windows are 70ft tall, is amongst his masterpieces. At Princeton the iconography covers the authors Dante Alighieri, John Bunyan, John Milton and Thomas Malory, Dante being probably the most exceptional—the results of detailed research by Connick. For the Heinz Chapel, Connick selected the theme of Christian virtues for the chancel and the 4 parts for the transepts. The figures embody the author Emily Dickinson; William Penn, founding father of Pennsylvania; Gyantwachia, the Seneca chief; President Abraham Lincoln; and the pioneer nurseryman Johnny Appleseed.
In 1937 Connick revealed a big and opulent e-book, Adventures in Mild and Color: An Introduction to the Stained Glass Craft. The point out of “mild” within the title was vital, as he hooked up the best significance to its impact on glass. Regardless of his lack of formal schooling, he was deeply excited about literature, particularly poetry, and, as hinted above, the themes of his home windows had been instructed by his in depth studying. They embody a notable variety of ladies, in addition to a sympathetic illustration of Native Individuals. He was a quiet however charming and humorous man, with a deft reward for a neatly turned phrase, for instance: “I prefer to say that stained glass home windows want peaceable sleep when the solar goes down, as do the remainder of us, and so I like the thought of letting them take their locations within the mild of day, and gently ignoring them at dusk.” After his dying in 1945 his workforce carried on the work in the identical spirit till 1986.
Cormack justly claims that “Connick’s imaginative, poetic exploration of historical stained glass, and his recognition of the basically anti-realist, non-pictorial nature of the medium because it had originated within the early Center Ages, had been more and more manifested in his work as a potent means of latest visible expression.”
The e-book is the results of profound analysis and knowledgeable appreciation, primarily based on an intensive understanding of the inventive and technical basis of Connick’s work. It’s beautifully illustrated. All lovers of stained glass can be grateful to Cormack for his exemplary research and passionate advocacy of Connick’s work.
• Peter Cormack, Charles J. Connick: America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist, Yale College Press, 376pp, 297 color & b/w illustrations, £60/$75 (hb), revealed 14 Could/25 June
• Peter Howell’s newest e-book is The Triumphal Arch (Unicorn Publishing 2021)
