A Stained Glass Christmas, from Chartres to Baltimore’s Gilded Age

'Like painting in air' with colored light, John La Farge said of his church glass art.

M uch as Christmas shopping, for me, is a year-round practice, I hunt and gather Christmas stories starting in January. I love writing about stained glass and tend to visit churches, museums, and auction houses where stellar, five-star, unsung stained glass is to be seen. This year, I saw some exquisite church stained glass windows treating the Nativity. That’s the central story of Christmas starting, broadly speaking, with the Annunciation — Mary receives news from the angel Gabriel that she will be the mother of God — and ending with Jesus’s birth in a barn and adorations from local shepherds and then from faraway wise men, possibly royals or high priests. John La Farge (1835-1910) called stained glass “painting in air,” his material colored light. Let’s look at some stellar stained glass.

I’m not a Pre-Raphaelite scholar but know Edward Burne-Jones’s biggest hits like The Golden Stairs from 1880 and know Burne-Jones (1833-1898) is, as Pre-Raphaelites go, the most mannered and la-di-da of the Victorian artists who loved Raphael’s dignity and detail but loved more the fancy colors, refinement, and froth of Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, and Botticelli. I knew he designed stained glass with William Morris but didn’t know any of it came to the United States, to Trinity Church in Boston. I visited earlier this year to do some archival work on John La Farge (1835-1910), who bests Tiffany in stained glass, discovered the Burne-Jones Nativity windows, three of them side by side, and felt like a clodhopper for not knowing about them.

They’re from 1882, face the chancel, and depict the Adoration of the Shepherds on the left, the Flight into Egypt (not strictly a Nativity scene) on the right, and, in the center, the grand Adoration of the Magi. Each scene’s embedded in an English Arts & Crafts vine motif and each has angel musicians. I love Medieval illuminated manuscripts for their charming figures and sparkling, precious colors. Stained glass often ups the ante and makes the look cinematic. Trinity Church, so high an Episcopal pile you thirst for a gin martini, opened in 1877, so these windows are part of its core. Burne-Jones designed the windows, conceiving the color scheme as well, but glass painters did the fabricating.

After centuries of English iconoclasm, then Wren’s Palladian revival and Georgian neoclassicism, the Gothic Revival brought stained glass back in style. Why Burne-Jones and William Morris, two English artists? Boston thought of itself as the New London, so importing them wasn’t a tough decision. Burne-Jones was various, too, a painter but also a designer of furniture, textiles, and stained glass. His style wouldn’t jar. And his windows needed to play well with the La Farge wall murals at Trinity. They do. His figures are statuesque and radiant and surprisingly readable since they’re high from the floor. Colors are pure — La Farge’s tonal, opalescent glass inventions came a little later — and black lead lines are thicker. The vines unify.

Phillips Brooks, Trinity Church’s rector, had written the carol “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” in 1868. The Nativity windows are a tribute to Brooks as much as to Christmas.

Colored glass has deep roots in art. First, the recipe: Silica, or sand, an alkali like potash, and a dollop of lime, plus oven heat and hot air, are the basics. Makers add color, often on orders from designers. Stained glass has the same narrative thrust as a comic strip. Lead strips soldered to glass panes hold bits and pieces of the narrative together. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians made colored glass beads, and Romans pioneered colored glass vessels and small windows. Mosaics, light catching but not light filtering, ruled the walls for centuries.

When the French built massive cathedrals, first clunky Romanesque ones, the need for more light meant bigger windows. Builders couldn’t go window crazy since these austere giants needed stone and lots of it to keep standing. Windows were for lighting rather than aura and revelation and tended to be simple, small, and round-headed, sometimes in colored glass, often not. Dyes weren’t plentiful. Cobalt blue couldn’t be locally sourced, for instance, and when we see it in Norman-era windows in France and England it’s usually from ground glass mosaics filched from, say, the Baths of Caracalla, where 40 tons of glass are thought to have been salvaged.

By the mid-1100s, new engineering delivered pointed arches, flying buttresses, and ribbed vaults pushing weight downward and outward. Ceilings grasped for Heaven and windows, taller, rounder, and wider, became tapestries for light, color, and storytelling. Abbot Suger (c. 1080-1151), the monastic administrator and adviser to kings and queens, imagined church light as divinely ordained to promote reflection, especially on otherworldly thoughts. And, as a practical matter, narrative stained glass could teach Bible stories to people who couldn’t read and reinforce them for the monks. His architectural baby, the royal cathedral dedicated to Saint Denis, has a rudimentary Life of Jesus window, but we think most of the church’s stained glass told big stories like the Tree of Jesse, summarizing Jesus’s genealogy. Most of Saint Denis’s glass was savaged by Jacobins in the 1790s, so there’s always conjecture.

Chartres’s Notre Dame cathedral has nearly 200 stained glass windows done over about 300 years and covering Old and New Testament narratives, single saints, scenes of everyday life in France, and pure decoration in shapes from massive rose windows to little lancets. Among the oldest windows, from 1225, are 30 or so scenes from Jesus’s birth through His childhood.

Sainte-Chapelle is a little later and in Rayonnant style where architectural support seems to have disappeared and walls look entirely made of glass and weightless, at least in the upper chapel. The windows are made of thousands of small pieces of glass mostly in ruby red and an intense blue that’s not quite cobalt but is unique to the chapel and called Sainte-Chapelle blue. There are more than 1,100 separate scenes in 15 windows, the vertical ones around 50 feet tall. It’s a royal chapel with lots of little gold castles and fleurs-de-lis in stained glass, lest we forget. The effect’s glittering and immersive. The upper chapel program starts at Genesis, circling the chapel, with the Passion of Christ at one end and the Apocalypse on the other. The stories of St. John the Evangelist and Christ’s childhood unfold in a window between Isaiah and the Tree of Jesse and the Passion.

Stained glass went into not a long decline but a periodic silica expurgation in times like the Reformation, Cromwell’s rule, and the French Revolution when psychos and simps smashed windows galore. Much of the glass we see in French and English churches is heavily restored or reproduced. American Protestant churches didn’t embrace stained glass windows until the rise of Gilded Age Episcopal feeling. Aside from Trinity Church’s Nativity program, two other epiphanies enriched my life this year.

Since I’m a beauty seeker and lover of creativity and stained glass, I wanted to see the three La Farge windows at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I. Robert A. M. Stern’s architectural firm built a niche for them in 2010. It took 15 years for me to get there, but these days I’m on Biblical time — everything takes forever. I got to Newport this spring after seeing an exacting, exotic show on old French wallpaper at the Rhode Island Institute of Art’s museum. La Farge designed the windows for two sisters, both called Mary, whose father, William Shakespeare Caldwell, made a bundle from Kentucky gas, good for him, and bought a place in Newport, financing the Catholic University of America in D.C. along the way. Warm Roman Catholics, the family built a big Newport house with a chapel. La Farge supplied the windows. Mary — the Virgin — and the Baby Jesus, courtesy of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden, inspired the centerpiece. St. Elizabeth of Hungary, depicted on the left, was an heiress who hid bread under her cloak and smuggled it to the poor over the objections of her miserly husband. St. John, an evangelist, Gospel author, and apostle, is the saint on the right, shown with paper and quill.

La Farge invented what’s called opalescent glass: glass mixing transparent and opaque colored layers and looking like both velvety Old Master glazes and translucent watercolor. Decorative details look like veined marble. Opalescent glass created figures with depth and mass, something Gothic glass couldn’t do. Its figures are flat. Burne-Jones couldn’t do it, either.

The sisters married not disastrously but unwell, one to a German this and the other to a Neapolitan that, with both sisters dead by 1910 and the diocese in Fall River getting the windows and displaying them in a convent. The sisters would have been better off marrying a random guy from the first, say, hundred names in the Newport phone book. Newport being Newport, maybe not. A few years ago, the windows went back to Newport and to Salve Regina. The university built a new chapel as their home. Robert A. M. Stern, who died last week, designed it. They’re gorgeous, shimmering on the sunny day I visited.

My dear friend Julia Alexander died in May and got two — deserved — funerals, both in Baltimore, one for close family and friends and the other for the greater arts community she served during her years as director of the Walters Art Museum. While in the Pearl City, weird, rough, and enchanting, I visited the Brown Memorial Park Avenue Presbyterian Church to see its windows, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany in 1905. Tiffany (1848-1933) was, after his father’s death, the jewelry company’s chief designer, but he was already famous as a painter and, via his own company, a stained-glass king. His calling card until his death was stained glass.

The Annunciation to the Shepherds is the most spectacular of the eleven Tiffany windows. It’s got lots of opalescent glass — La Farge felt Tiffany Studios swiped his invention — but also confetti glass for the bonfire and etched glass for the Star of Bethlehem. Brackets to prevent the glass from sagging are ugly but needed. Tiffany’s operatic in his Brown church windows. I’ve seen his windows at the Arlington Street Church in Boston many times. They’re from 1900 and veer toward shlock.

They’re not Christmas-themed, but the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris is getting a new suite of stained glass windows. As part of the restoration after the horrible April 15-16, 2019, fire, President Emmanuel Macron proposed new windows by the south end of the nave commemorating the church’s salvation. The designs for the new windows are now on view at the Grand Palais in Paris. They’d replace windows designed by Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc, the architect who designed Notre Dame’s mid-19th century renovation. Le-Duc’s windows, pretty enough but generic and decorative, not narrative, survived the fire. They’ll go to a museum, not to the salvage yard.

The lords and ladies overseeing the post-fire restoration selected Claire Tabouret (b. 1981), French but living in Los Angeles, a sculptor and figure painter. I can’t say “this being France,” since protests would happen anywhere, but French preservationists launched a petition that got nearly 300,000 signers. The new windows, though, are a fait accompli.

Each window will visualize a passage from 2 Acts in the New Testament, which records the Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus on the 50th day after Passover. Pentecost began with tongues of fire, appropriate given the 2019 debacle. They plummeted from the sky and landed, one each, on the top of the heads of the assembled. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. The six windows will be about 23 feet tall, including glass set in rosettes and tracery, all in a pointed arch format, and alternate between dramatic, dense figure groups and scenes of forests and the sea agitated by fierce wind.

The Grand Palais’s exhibiting Tabouret’s life-size modellos, some ink on paper, some paint on plexiglass. It’s a done deal since Atelier Simon-Marq in Reims, making stained glass since 1640, is already at work fabricating them. Simon-Marq does restoration work but also new work since there’s a stained glass revival now. Marcel Proust called the medium “a rainbow grotto.” As he is with most things, Proust is right. I’m delighted to see stained glass in religious and secular art, representational and abstract, making a comeback.

The market for Gilded Age stained glass isn’t just hot. It’s positively molten. Late last year, Sotheby’s sold the Danner Memorial Window, made for a Baptist church in Canton, Ohio, for nearly $12.5 million — an auction record for stained glass. Tiffany Studios made it in 1913. Not all church glass is packed with saints and their stories. At 16 feet, this scene of flourishing apple trees, poppies, a meandering river, and mountains isn’t didactic but, rather, evocatively religious. What a palette. Crimson, plum, sky blue, peach, violet, navy, emerald, and fiery yellow work with fruit, flora, water, and verdant hills to show us a well-lived life leads to abundance and the reward of eternal bliss. There’s no snow, no Santa, no Magi, and no swaddled Jesus, but it’s art for all seasons, including Christmas.