Stained Glass Work Part 9

One of the main _artistic_ uses of the leadwork in a window is that, if properly used, it keeps the work flat and in one plane, and allows far more freedom in the conduct of your picture, permitting you to use a degree of realism and fulness of treatment greater than you could do without it. Work may be done, where this limitation is properly accepted and used, which would look vulgar without it; and on the other hand, the most Byzantine rigidity may be made to look vulgar if the lead line is misused. I have seen gla.s.s of this kind where the work was all on one plane, and where the artist had so far grasped proper principles as to use thick leads, but had _curved these leads in and out across the folds of the drapery as if they followed its ridges and hollows_--the thing becoming, with all its good-will to accept limitations, almost more vulgar than the discredited "Munich-gla.s.s" of a few years ago, which hated and disguised the lead lines.

_You must step back to look at your work as often and as far as you can._

_Respect your bars and lead lines, and let them be strong and many._

_Every bit of gla.s.s in a window should look "cared for."_

If there is a lot of blank s.p.a.ce that you "don't know how to fill," be sure your design has been too narrowly and frugally conceived. I do not mean to say that there may not be s.p.a.ces, and even large s.p.a.ces, of plain quarry-glazing, upon which your subject with its surrounding ornament may be planted down, as a rich thing upon a plain thing. I am thinking rather of a case where you meet with some sudden lapse or gap in the subject itself or in its ornamental surroundings. This is apt specially to occur where it is one which leads rather to pictorial treatment, and where, unless you have "canopy" or "tabernacle" work, as it is called, surrounding and framing everything, you find yourself at a loss how to fill the s.p.a.ce above or below.

Very little can be said by way of general rule about this; each case must be decided on its merits, and we cannot speak without knowing them.

But two things may be said: First, that it is well to be perfectly bold (as long as you are perfectly sincere), and not be afraid, merely because they are unusual, of things that you really would like to do if the window were for yourself. There are no hard and fast rules as to what may or may not be done, and if you are a craftsman and designer also--as the whole purpose of this book is to tell you you must be--many methods will suggest themselves of making your gla.s.s look interesting.

The golden rule is to handle every bit of it yourself, and then you will _be_ interested in the ingenuity of its arrangement; the cutting of it into little and big bits; the lacework of the leads; thickening and thinning these also to get bold contrasts of strong and slender, of plain and intricate; catching your pearly gla.s.s like fish, in a net of larger or smaller mesh; for, bear in mind always that this question relates almost entirely to the _whiter_ gla.s.ses. Colour has its own reason for being there, and carries its own interest; but the most valuable piece of advice that I can think of in regard to stained-gla.s.s _treatment_ (apart from the question of subject and meaning) is to _make your white s.p.a.ces interesting_.

The old painters felt this when they diapered their quarry-glazing and did such grisaille work as the "Five Sisters" window at York. Every bit of this last must have been put together and painted by a real craftsman delighting in his work. The drawing is free and beautiful; the whole work is like jewellery, the colour scheme delightfully varied and irregular.

The work was loved: each bit of gla.s.s was treated on its merits as it pa.s.sed through hand. Working in this way all things are lawful; you may even put a thin film of "matt" over any piece to lower it in tone and give it richness, or to bring out with emphasis some quality of its texture.

Some bits will have lovely streaks and swirling lines and bands in them--"reamy," as gla.s.s-cutters call it--or groups of bubbles and spots, making the gla.s.s like agate or pebble; and a gentle hand will rub a little matt or film over these, and then finger it partly away to bring out its quality, just as a jeweller foils a stone. This is quite a different thing from smearing a window all over with dirt to make it a sham-antique; and where it is desirable to lower the tone of any white for the sake of the window, and where no special beauties of texture exist, it is better, I think, to matt it and then take out simple _patterns_ from the matt: not _outlined_ at all, but spotted and streaked in the matt itself, chequered and petalled and thumb-marked, just as nature spots and stripes and dapples, scatters daisies on the gra.s.s and snowflakes in the air, and powders over with chessboard chequers and lacings and "oes and eyes of light," the wings of b.u.t.terflies and birds.

So man has always loved to work when he has been let to choose, and when nature has had her way. Such is the delightful art of the basket and gra.s.s-cloth weaver of the Southern seas; of the ancient Cyprian potter, the Scandinavian and the Celt. It never dies; and in some quiet, merciful time of academical neglect it crops up again. Such is the, often delightful, "builders-glazing" of the "carpenters-Gothic" period, or earlier, when the south transept window at Canterbury, and the east and west windows at Cirencester, and many such like, were rearranged with old materials and new by rule of thumb and just as the glazier "thought he would." Heaven send us nothing worse done through too much learning! I daresay he shouldn't have done it; but as it came to him to do, as, probably, he was ordered to do it, we may be glad he did it just so. In the Canterbury window, for instance, no doubt much of the old gla.s.s never belonged to that particular window; it may have been, sinfully, brought there from windows where it did belong. At Cirencester there are numbers of bits of canopy and so forth, delightful fifteenth-century work, exquisitely beautiful, put in as best they could be; no doubt from some mutilated window where the figures had been destroyed--for, if my memory serves me, most of them have no figures beneath--and surrounded by little chequered work, and stripes and banding of the glaziers' own fancy. A modern restorer would have delighted to supply sham-antique saints for them, imitating fifteenth-century work (and deceiving n.o.body), and to complete the mutilated canopies by careful matching, making the window entirely correct and uninteresting and lifeless and accomplished and forbidding.

The very blue-bottles would be afraid to buzz against it; whereas here, in the old church, with the flavour of sincerity and simplicity around them, at one with the old carving and the spirit of the old time, they glitter with fresh feeling, and hang there, new and old together, breaking sunlight; irresponsible, absurd, and delightful.

CHAPTER XV

A Few Little Dodges--A Clumsy Tool--A Subst.i.tute--A Gla.s.s Rack--An Inconvenient Easel--A Convenient Easel--A Waxing-up Tool--An Easel with Movable Plates--Making the most of a Room--Handling Cartoons--Cleanliness--Dust--The Selvage Edge--Drying a "Badger"--A Comment.

Here, now, follow some little practical hints upon work in general; mere receipts; description of time-saving methods and apparatus which I have separated from the former part of the book; partly because they are mostly exceptions to the ordinary practice, and partly because they are of general application, the common-sense of procedure, and will, I hope, after you have learnt from the former parts of the book the individual processes and operations, help you to marshal these, in order and proportion, so as to use them to the greatest advantage and with the best results. And truly our stained-gla.s.s methods are most wasteful and bungling. The ancient Egyptians, they say, made gla.s.s, and I am sure some of our present tools and apparatus date from the time of the Pyramids.

A CLUMSY KILN-FEEDER.

What shall we say, for instance, of this instrument (fig. 64), used for loading some forms of kiln?

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 64.]

The workman takes the ring-handle in his right hand, rests the shaft in the crook of his left elbow, puts the fork under an iron plate loaded with gla.s.s and weighing about forty pounds, and then, with tug and strain, lifts it, ready to slip off and smash at any moment, and, grunting, transfers it to the kiln. A little mechanical appliance would save nine-tenths of the labour, a stage on wheels raised or lowered at will (a thing which surely should not be hard to invent) would bring it from the bench to the kiln, and _then_, if needs be, and no better method could be found, the fork might be used to put it in.

Meanwhile, as a temporary step in the right direction, I ill.u.s.trate a little apparatus invented by Mr. Heaton, which, with the tray made of some lighter substance than iron, of which he has the secret, decreases the labour by certainly one-third, and I think a half (fig. 65).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 65.]

It is indeed only a sort of half-way house to the right thing, but, tested one against the other with equal batches of plates, its use is certainly less laborious than that of the fork. And that is a great gain; for the consequence of these rough ways is that the kiln-man, whom we want to be a quiet, observant man, with plenty of leisure and with all his strength and attention free to watch the progress of a process or experiment, like a chemist in his laboratory, has often two-thirds of it distracted by the stress of needless work which is only fit for a navvy, and the only tendency of which can be towards turning him into one.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 66.]

A GLa.s.s-RACK FOR WASTE PIECES.

Then the cutter, who throws away half the stuff under his bench! How easy it would be, if things were thought of from the beginning and the place built for the work, to have such width of bench and s.p.a.ce of window that, along the latter, easily and comfortably within reach, should run stages, tier above tier, of strong sheet or thin plate gla.s.s, sloping at such an angle that the cuttings might lie along them against the light, with a fillet to stop them from falling off. Then it would be a pleasure, as all handy things are, for the workman to put his bits of gla.s.s there, and when he wanted a piece of similar colour, to raise his head and choose one, instead of wastefully cutting a fresh piece out of the unbroken sheet, or wasting his time rummaging amongst the bits on the bench. A stage on the same principle for _choosing_ gla.s.s is ill.u.s.trated in fig. 67.

But it is in easels that improvement seems most wanted and would be most easy, and here I really must tell you a story.

AN INCONVENIENT EASEL.

Having once some very large lights to paint, against time, the friends in whose shop I was to work (wis.h.i.+ng to give me every advantage and to _save time_), had had special easels made to take in the main part of each light at once. But an "Easel," in stained-gla.s.s work, meaning always the single slab of plate-gla.s.s in a wooden frame, these were of that type. I forget their exact size and could hazard no guess at their weight, but it took four men to get one from the ground on to the bench.

Why, I wanted it done a dozen times an hour! and should have wished to be able to do it at any moment. Instead of that it was, "Now then, Bill; ease her over!" "Steady!" "Now lift!" "All together, boys!" and so forth. I wonder there wasn't a strike! But did no one, then, ever see in a club or hotel a plate-gla.s.s window about as big as a billiard-table, and a slim waiter come up to it, and, with a polite "Would you like the window open, sir?" quietly lift it with one hand?

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 67.]

A CONVENIENT EASEL.

Fig. 68 is a diagram of the kind of easel I would suggest. It can either stand on the bench or on the floor, and with the touch of a hand can be lifted, weighing often well over a hundredweight, to any height the painter pleases, till it touches the roof, enabling him to see at any moment the whole of his work at a distance and against the sky, which one would rather call an absolute necessity than a mere convenience or advantage.

Some of these things were thought out roughly by myself, and have been added to and improved from time to time by my painters and apprentices, a matter which I shall say a word on by-and-by, when we consider the relations which should exist between these and the master.

AN IMPROVED TOOL FOR WAXING-UP.

Meanwhile here is another little tool (fig. 69), the invention of one of my youngest "hands" (and heads), and really a praiseworthy invention, though indeed a simple and self-evident matter enough. The usual tool for waxing-up is (1) a strip of gla.s.s, (2) a penknife, (3) a stick of wood. The thing most to be wished for in whatever is used being, of course, that it _should retain the heat_. This youth argued: "If they use copper for soldering-bits because it retains heat so well, why not use copper for the waxing-up tool? besides, it can be made into a pen which will hold more wax."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 68.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 69.]

So said, so done; nothing indeed to make a fuss about, but part of a very wholesome spirit of wis.h.i.+ng to work with handy tools economically, instead of blundering and wasting.

AN EASEL WITH MOVABLE PLATES.

But to return for a moment to the easel. I find it very convenient not to have it made all of one plate of gla.s.s, but to divide it so that about four plates make the whole easel of five feet high. These plates slip in grooves, and can be let in either at the top or bottom, the latter being then stopped by a batten and thumbscrews. By this means a light of any length can be painted in sections without a break. For supposing you work from below upwards, and have done the first five feet of the window, take out all the gla.s.s except the top plate, _s.h.i.+ft this down to the bottom_, and place three empty plates above it, and you can join the upper work to the lower by the sample of the latter left in its place to start you.

HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF A ROOM.

The great point is to be able to get away as far as you can from your work. And I advise you, if your room is small, to have a fair-sized mirror (a cheval-gla.s.s) and place it at the far end of your room opposite the easel where you are painting, and then, standing close by the side of your easel, look at your work in the mirror. This will double the distance at which you see it, and at the same time present it to you reversed; which is no disadvantage, for you then see everything under a fresh aspect and so with a fresh eye. Of course, by the use of two mirrors, if they be large enough, you can put your work away to any distance. You must have seen this in a restaurant where there were mirrors, and where you have had presented to you an endless procession of your own head, first front then back, going away into the far distance.

HOW TO HANDLE CARTOONS.

Well, it's really like insulting your intelligence! And if I hadn't seen fellows down on their hands and knees rolling and unrolling cartoons along the dirty floor, and sprawling all over the studio so that everybody had to get out of the way into corners, I wouldn't spend paper and ink to tell you that by standing the roll _upright_ and spinning it gently round with your hands, freeing first one edge and then another, you can easily and quietly unroll and sort out a bundle of a dozen cartoons, each twenty feet long, on the s.p.a.ce of a small hearth-rug; but so it is (fig. 70), and in just the same way you can roll them up again.

NEATNESS AND CLEANLINESS.

You should have drawers in the tables, and put the palettes away in these with the colour neatly covered over with a basin when you leave work. Dust is a great enemy in a stained-gla.s.s shop, and it must be kept at arm's length.