New Observations Concerning the Stoke Poges Windows 1

DOSSIER NEW OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE STOKE POGES WINDOWS 1 NEW OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE STOKE POGES WINDOWS YAO-FEN YOU Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan, USA ABSTRACT RESUMO The Stoke Poges windows in the Detroit As janelas Stoke Poges no Instituto de Artes Institute of Arts have long intrigued scholars de Detroit têm, desde há muito, intrigado of stained glass, especially the question os estudiosos de vitrais, especialmente a of their earliest provenance and the questão da sua mais antiga proveniência e identification of the workshop responsible for a identificação da oficina responsável pela making them. This paper explores the strong sua execução. Este artigo explora a forte possibility that they were imported from possibilidade de que eles foram importados Germany in the nineteenth century rather da Alemanha, no século XIX, em vez de than made in England by continental glaziers fabricados na Inglaterra por vidreiros do in the sixteenth century. continente, no século XVI. KEYWORDS PALAVRAS-CHAVE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF INSTITUTE DE ARTES DE ARTS | STAINED GLASS | STOKE POGES, DETROIT | VITRAL | STOKE POGES, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE | WILLIAM RANDOLPH BUCKINGHAMSHIRE | WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST | JEFFRY WYATVILLE HEARST | JEFFRY WYATVILLE 2 RHASÉRIE W03 mong the highlights of post‑medieval glass in the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) are Asix large, rectangular panels of full‑length figures that once featured prominently in an annex to the Church of Saint Giles in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. [FIG. 1] Located to the west of London, Stoke Poges is perhaps better known as the final resting place of the poet Thomas Gray, and it is believed that the graveyard of Saint Giles, where he is buried, provided the inspiration for “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Dating to the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the windows are notable for their monumental conception, the quality of their glass, the fine application of paint, and the extensive use of silver stain and stipple shading — all distinctive features of Lower Rhenish glass. Two panels represent the Virgin holding the Christ child; the rest portray saints Adrian of Nicomedia, Anthony the Abbot, Barbara, and Wenceslaus. [FIGS. 2–4] Each panel measures approximately 180 by 59.5 cm. 1 Two non‑figural panels comprised of architectural motifs were also associated with this grouping in the nineteenth century at Stoke Poges. [FIG. 5] Five of the panels came into the DIA collection in 1958. Little can be established about their provenance prior to the middle of the nineteenth century. What is sure is that by 1929 the original group of eight panels had been removed from the church annex. On March 9, 1926, Colonel Albert George Shaw, then owner of the nearby Tudor manor house, entered into a contractual agreement with the Stoke Poges Parochial Church Council to remove the “Flemish stained Glass Windows” from the church annex, which was technically a freehold of the manor’s owner. In exchange, the church was given property title to the annex (“vestibule”), which was “situated on land belonging to Colonel Shaw.” The right to removal was valid for five years and made on the condition that Shaw “refill the spaces formerly occupied” with “suitable glass to the reasonable satisfaction of the Council and at his own expense.” 2 By 1929, a year after the famous Ashridge sale, Shaw had consigned the eight panels as a set to Sotheby’s, where they were purchased for 2,500 GBP by Lionel Harris of the Spanish Art Gallery. Harris was most likely bidding on behalf of French & Company, as the panels very quickly entered the extensive collection of the newspaper magnate and insatiable art collector William Randolph Hearst, one of their most valued clients. 3 Sotheby’s catalogued them as “fine early German stained glass” and was silent on their provenance before Colonel Shaw. The panels remained together in storage at Hearst’s warehouse in Bronx, New York, until his massive liquidation sale starting in 1941 at Gimbel Brothers. The pair of architectural panels was the first to go at a bargain basement price. Saint Adrian was purchased by the industrialist John Woodman Higgins in 1943. 4 The remaining five windows eventually made their way to Detroit in 1958 as part of a larger transfer of objects between the DIA and Hearst’s estate. 5 With the closing of the Higgins Armory Museum at the end of 2013, the DIA found itself in a position to acquire Saint Adrian, thus reuniting the figures for the first time in sixty‑one years. The whereabouts of the architectural panels remain unknown. 6 On the basis of nineteenth‑century sources, scholarship has maintained that the panels were moved to the church annex from the nearby Tudor manor house when it was demolished in 1789. Whether they were commissioned for a chapel in the manor house and made by Continental glaziers of mixed origins active in England, or whether they were imported in the seventeenth or eighteenth century from Europe remains a point of discussion, but there is general agreement that they were in Stoke Poges by the late eighteenth century and transferred to the church upon the manor’s demolition. This paper explores the strong possibility that the panels were instead imported to England in the first half of the nineteenth century, most likely from the area around Cologne, during the vogue for Rhenish glass in England that peaked between 1815 and 1835, and that the annex was purpose built to house them. 7 The first part surveys the written sources, including some previously unpublished, while the second part submits to close analysis the windows’ nineteenth‑century architectural setting, taking into account issues raised by the condition and physical makeup of the panels. DOSSIER NEW OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE STOKE POGES WINDOWS 3 The Nineteenth-Century Sources The earliest mention of the panels is a nineteenth‑century county history of Buckinghamshire, The History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham, by the physician and antiquarian George Lipscomb. The entry on Stoke Poges is in volume four, which was published in 1847. Lipscomb mentions the glass towards the end of his lengthy entry, singling out the pairings of Saint Adrian and Saint Anthony in one window, and St. Wenceslaus and the Virgin as Queen of Heaven in another: The cloisters of modern erection, contiguous to the north side of the Church, contain many beautiful specimens of painted glass, collected out of the ruins of the old Mansion at Stoke; and exhibit full length portraits of Saints, Martyrs, &c, of which the most remarkable are in a window towards the west, in which is a whole length figure of a man in armour, his sword drawn in his hand. At the top: “Sante… ora pro.” Another effigy has a book open, with this legend: “O Pater Sanct. Antoni ora.” In another window, the Virgin and Child, and “Regina Deorum ora p…” A male figure girt with a sword: and a devotee praying. 8 The “old Mansion at Stoke” refers to the Tudor manor house north of the church, which was completed in 1555 by the Hastings family and mostly torn down by John Penn in 1789 in favor of a late Georgian mansion, Stoke Park, he had built elsewhere on the estate. 9 By Lipscomb’s time, only one wing of the Tudor manor house remained and Stoke Park’s imposing Doric columns, designed by James Wyatt, dominated the landscape. Lipscomb’s assertion that the windows were “collected out of the ruins of the old Mansion at Stoke” has encouraged scholars in the field of stained glass to assume that they were in Stoke Poges as early as the sixteenth century, and that they were possibly the products of foreign glaziers working in England. As much as the panels retain dominant stylistic traits of Rhenish glass, they also exhibit some characteristics associated with Lowland artists working in French lands. The small heads and long bodies of Saint Barbara and the Virgin with Christ Child Holding a Top [FIG. 4] recall the figures of Arnoult de Nimègue, a South Netherlandish glass painter who was active in Rouen from about 1500 to 1510. Given the mixture of stylistic features and the dominance of immigrant glaziers in England during the early years of the sixteenth century, the authors of the Corpus Vitrearum thought it “not inconceivable that the windows had been commissioned from foreign artists for a manorial chapel.” 10 Standing against the compelling evidence of mixed workshops of glaziers in sixteenth century England is the unreliability of the source upon which most arguments about dating and provenance depend. The genesis of the History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham was admittedly quite complicated. Volume one came out in 1831, but due to lack of financing, the remaining three volumes only appeared in print in 1847. Indeed, Lipscomb, who died on November 9, 1846, did not live to see the finished product. Nor could he claim sole authorship, despite having poured his heart and soul into it. In 1824, Lipscomb inherited Reverend Edward Cooke’s life’s work for a history of Buckinghamshire that Cooke himself had planned to write. Lipscomb, who was, coincidentally, the executor of Cooke’s estate, graciously acknowledged his use of the rector’s “valuable and important materials” in the preface to his History and Antiquities, but there were some who felt Cooke was not given his full due. 11 The author of Lipscomb’s obituary in Gentleman’s Magazine emphasized that, “Mr. Cooke, had his life been spared, was eminently qualified to have produced an able history, from the strength and simplicity of his style, and the clearness and nervous precision of his diction.” 12 Another obituary, which appeared in the Records of Buckinghamshire, cautioned that “the works of our most eminent historians are not faultless, and to pronounce Lipscomb’s work to be strictly accurate and in every minute detail without errors, would be saying too much for it.” 13 In short, the reliability of History and 4 RHASÉRIE W03 Antiquities was already being called into question at the time of its publication, and it is worth asking if Lipscomb ever saw the Stoke Poges windows in person.

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