In November 1999, I received a welcome phone call from Gary Wagner concerning a stained glass commission. Wagner had taken over Herman Hassinger’s architectural practice and was redesigning the entrance hall at the Good Shepherd Evangelical Lutheran church in Somerville, New Jersey.
The plan was to make a new entrance and connect it to the existing building with a large room to be used as a gathering place before and after church. The new doors, accompanying side panels and transom would be plate glass. Along one side, a ribbon of clerestory windows would run the length of the room. The plan would also include a four-foot, round stained glass window.
Wagner’s completed space was great for gathering, but the light was a little overpowering for painted glass. I was informed that I would have to work with it and just consider it a design limitation. Another design limitation, one that could have been even more difficult to handle, was that the donor already had a design in mind. He wanted me to replicate a painting of “The Nativity” by N. C.
Wyeth.
I’ve always liked Wyeth’s work and thought I knew most of it, but I could not recall a Nativity. Wagner had a good picture of it taken by the donor and sent it to me. After I saw the image, I began to worry. It was a night scene, absent of any lines and very painterly. The color was limited to dark blues, grays, with some
ochers, umbers and a touch of muted red in some of the garments. It was not at all suited to stained glass, or at least the kind I was used to designing. My work depends on definite lines and a large color palette.
Through my initial research, I found the piece in a book called N.C.
Wyeth: The Collected Paintings, Illustrations, and Murals, written by Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen Jr.
Allen Jr. was the donor and the owner of the painting. He was a painter himself and one of the most fervent admirers of Wyeth I have ever met; he wrote the book.
Allen Jr. invited me to his home to spend an afternoon and see the actual painting. I took along some of my glass painting to illustrate the way I would approach the project. My cousin, James Cannon, a painter himself and a great Wyeth fan, went along. He pursued a career in stained glass back in the ‘60s, which he left when he went into the army and never resumed. He retained his interest, and some knowledge of what went into painting a window this complicated. On the way home he turned to me and said, “How in the world are you ever going to make a window that looks like that painting?” I answered, “I don’t know; it’s going to take a little thought.”
I had shown the Allens (Doug and Bea) a panel painted in the last year of my apprenticeship. It was a copy of an old steel engraving of the Betrayal, done on clear glass, using glass paint for tracing and matting, and silver stain and Jean Cousin rouge for color. I had not painted anything like it in years, but it was a night scene much like the Nativity. The artist with whom I apprenticed, R. H.
Buenz, had me paint a number of these panels and critique them. Most of the time he would tell me to wash off the glass and start over. It was great practice for painting technique, but rough on my ego. I would start by mixing the paint, applying it and firing the finished panel (if he thought it was worth firing.) He was emphatic about using paint that would last as long as the glass, a result of his German training. For tracing and matting he used Drakenfeld Bistre brown and tracing black, mixed four parts brown to one part black, with a small amount of gum Arabic. For a carrier he used vinegar, which he made himself from acetic acid and water. He thought the commercial vinegar had too much sugar in it, and sugar caused the paint to fry. Since then, I have seen painters add sugar to the paint, so I am not sure about his theory. In the beginning, he made his own silver stain by dissolving silver coins in nitric acid. Later he started to use the ready-made silver stain.
Buenz knew what he was talking about when it came to glass paint. His most valued color was Jean Cousin couleur rouge. This red-brown stain, formulated in 19th-century France, produced a beautiful, rosy flesh color and was far more permanent than any other. It was a true glass stain, not just a surface color. According to Buenz it had not been manufactured since before WW II, and he had some of the last Jean Cousin that was made. I wondered, if it was so good, why did they stop making it? He told me that the main ingredient - dog urine - was no longer available, and it was very hard for the makers collecting it and even harder on the dogs, giving that the process killed them. I was sorry I asked and never brought it up again. In my years of working around New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia, I never ran into anyone else who used, had, or even knew much about it. I more or less forgot about it until I showed this panel of the Betrayal to the
Allens. And now I needed to find some Jean Cousin
couleur.
I began my search by asking Helene Weis, who has spent most of her adult life researching and writing about stained glass. If anybody could find information on Jean Cousin, it was her. She found a French book called Le Vitrail Vocabulaire Typologique Et Technique by Necole
Blondel, that more or less described the ingredients — iron sulfate and peroxide, and one other ingredient we were unable to translate, probably the one Buenz had referenced earlier. John Nussbaum, John Kebrle and Dick Millard were familiar with the stain. Kebrle was willing to part with some of his; greater love hath no man.
The glass paint Buenz used was high quality, but the color was wrong for this window; I needed a red-brown to help emulate the glowing light at the center of the Wyeth painting. I asked Kebrle and Millard about that, too. They both told me it was an English color made by Hancock called tracing brown #1. (It looked red to me, but if they called it brown that was ok as long as it was the right stuff. Thanks to Kebrle and Millard, it was.)
Once I had collected all the necessary paint and stain, I began drawing the full size cartoon in charcoal, just the way I used to back in my apprentice years. What started out as a difficult job was turning into a trip back in time. I almost felt 21 again (maybe not 21, but a little more juvenile then usual.) The cartoon was submitted and approved by the donors and church committee.
The following week I made the patterns and cut the glass, mostly brown, ocher, yellow and some muted blues and grays. I selected a mixture of Lamberts flashed streaky glass and some Blenko yellows and blue grays. I cut the glass and started painting. The trick was not to over paint, because of the ambient light, but to paint enough to get the fade from very light to very dark; I wanted a Rembrandt look to the light.
During this time I painted until the sun set and then went home and read everything I could find about
Wyeth. I felt like I was getting paid to get an education, and the whole process became really enjoyable. It was almost as if I was meeting
Wyeth.
The difference between the way Buenz painted then and my painting now was small, except that I no longer use vinegar for my tracing color (I now use water), and instead of water for matting, I use alcohol; aside from that, it was like the good old days. I began to enjoy glass painting again.
It took about another 60 days to paint and fire the window. In the early 1980s, Rowan LeCompte showed me a kiln that one of his fabricators was using, made by Hoaf in Holland. On his recommendation I got one. It was state-of-the-art then and still is. It runs on propane, measures 24 inches by 28 inches, and can handle six to eight firings in an eight-hour day. It’s a great piece of equipment that made firing almost fool-proof.
By the first of June, the panel was fired and glazed. I installed it with the help of Doug and Bea Allen.
Thanks to Buenz for the training I received, to Kebrle and Millard for their help, to the Allens for their generosity and to Wyeth for his great art.
Charles Z. Lawrence has devoted over 45 years to the craft of stained glass window making. He has worked in many of the major East Coast stained glass studios, becoming the premiere designer at Willet Studios in Philadelphia before starting his own company in the early 1980s. His work can be found in churches, synagogues, corporate offices, schools and public spaces across the country, including the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., for which he designed five windows.
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