The life and work of Charles J. Connick (1875-1945), America’s foremost stained glass artist working in the first half of the twentieth century, is the subject of Peter Cormack’s richly-illustrated book, Charles J. Connick: America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist. It is the first comprehensive account of Connick’s career, documenting his childhood in rural Pennsylvania and impoverished upbringing in industrial Pittsburgh, his early training in stained glass and his self-education as a master craftsman, leading to his independent career in Boston where he became part of a movement committed to ‘Modern Gothic’ design and architecture. Recording the inspirational impact of Connick’s many visits to Europe, the book traces the evolution of his style towards an expressive fusion of ancient tradition and modern expression, his friendship with poets such as Robert Frost and his quest for a democratic and distinctively American idiom in stained glass.
Through these six examples, author Peter Cormack takes us on an adventure through the stories of Connick’s work. Charles J. Connick: America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist is available now.
1. Saint Catherine, detail of Julia Champlin memorial window (1912), All Saints’ Church, Brookline, MA.
After a lengthy and increasingly frustrating apprenticeship in the ‘art glass industry’, designing and making windows using Tiffany-style opalescent glass, Connick was at last able to explore the craft’s medieval origins on his first visit to Britain and France in 1910. The Julia Champlin memorial window, a major early commission, is full of details that evoke the splendours of Chartres, Rheims and Canterbury, all studied during his European tour. The almost kaleidoscopic colour scheme of ‘antique’ glass with its assertively graphic leading, and the emphatically two-dimensional character of the design, are a distinct contrast to the muted tints and pictorial realism of contemporary glass by Tiffany and his followers. Connick designed, cartooned and painted the window himself – a reflection of his enthusiastic response to the Arts & Crafts precepts of the leading English designer-craftsman Christopher Whall, whom he met during his visit to London and who remained a lifelong influence. Within a year of this commission, Connick established his own studio-workshop at 9 Harcourt Street, in Boston’s Back Bay area.
2. Angels of the Grail, detail from the Holy Grail window (1919), Procter Hall, Princeton University Graduate College, Princeton NJ.
Awarded a Gold Medal at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition (where he had been dubbed ‘the Burne-Jones of America’) in 1915, Connick received the first of several prestigious commissions for Princeton University, just as the USA entered World War One. The ‘Holy Grail’ window at Procter Hall is one of the most spectacular modern renderings of the Arthurian legends, in which Connick developed a Pre-Raphaelite- and Arts & Crafts-inspired idiom perfectly suited to the intricacies of the many narrative scenes. ‘I have lived with Malory and his high imaginings for a very long time’ wrote Connick of his deep absorption in the window’s subject-matter, for which he skillfully negotiated the complex requirements of both his university patrons and the supervising architect, his longtime collaborator Ralph Adams Cram. Almost all the glass he used was imported shipments from England, which had thus undergone the perilous transatlantic journey at the risk of German submarine attacks.
3. Vanity Fair, detail of Bunyan window (1929), Princeton University Chapel, Princeton NJ.
For the newly-built University Chapel at Princeton, Connick was commissioned in the 1920s to make all the windows in the Choir, including four depicting ‘Christian Epics’, literary works by Dante, Malory, Milton and Bunyan. They mark a momentous transition in the style of his work, combining traditional materials and methods with a dynamic approach to design in which forms are increasingly treated as symbol and pattern. The dense network of leading, always a crucial element in Connick’s stained glass, not only serves to intensify the luminosity of the glass but also imparts an almost expressionistic rhythm to the imagery. Here, the characters Christian and Faithful enter Vanity Fair, covering their ears to resist the blandishments of the various temptations. In recognition of Connick’s achievement in the Chapel windows, Princeton awarded him the rare distinction of an honorary degree in 1932, citing his genius for blending ‘the glow of the older tradition with the new light’.
4. Peacock Sandwich glass medallion, c.1930. (Private Collection)
In 1926, when a friend leased the former premises of the 19th-century Boston & Sandwich Glass Company at Sandwich, Cape Cod, Connick was given the opportunity to excavate a huge hoard of discarded glass fragments found on the site. Recognising that this waste material revealed ‘a beauty in direct light that is curiously like old French stained glass’, he devised a way of re-assembling the bits of broken glass to make them into small leaded ‘medallions’ or miniature windows. The Peacock medallion, made out of pieces of vases, bowls and ornaments, is a superb example of this ingenious recycling. Connick relished the challenge of piecing together the rich colours and brilliant textures to create luminous new images – of animals and semi-abstract scenes – or to illustrate verses by his friend Robert Frost (including ‘Birches’ and ‘Stopping by Woods’) and by other poets. Designed to be hung against daylight in domestic windows, the medallions, which varied ‘in size between three and twelve inches and in price from ten to two hundred fifty dollars’, could be purchased by visitors to Connick’s Boston studio. Many were also given by him to patrons and friends.
5. St Hilda of Whitby, detail of apse window (1932), Grace Cathedral, San Francisco CA.
Connick was asked to design windows for the new Grace Cathedral (built following the 1906 earthquake) in the 1920s and the ambitious glazing scheme occupied the remainder of his career. The commission was beset with difficulties – not least because the building remained only partially completed during his lifetime – and he once described it as his ‘Heartbreak House’. Ultimately, however, he was able to see it as a ‘Mighty Masterpiece’, which eloquently embodies his creative re-imagining of twelfth- and thirteenth-century glazing traditions in an expressively modern form. The dramatic figure of St Hilda of Whitby is one of several monumental female and male Saints featured in the great Choir windows of Grace Cathedral. They are notable for the extensive use of sparkling yellow and amber glass, reflecting the notion (suggested by the cathedral’s architect Lewis P. Hobart) that ‘Gold is California’s color’.
6. The Boone Family, detail from one of the transept windows (1938), Heinz Memorial Chapel, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA.
In his semi-autobiographical book Adventures in Light and Color (1937), Connick wrote of his aspiration to make ‘American windows that will gloriously celebrate the American scene, its heroes and adventures as they symbolize the eternal aspirations and agonies of the human spirit’. A munificent commission from the family of Pittsburgh industrialist Henry J. Heinz enabled him to realise that dream. Connick was eventually entrusted with the design and execution of all the Heinz Memorial Chapel’s stained glass, including the four colossal transept windows, each seventy-feet tall. Amongst an array of religious, historical and artistic figures throughout the glazing, many characters and incidents from America’s pioneer history are portrayed. The family of Daniel Boone, making their way to Kentucky and surrounded by scenes of their encounters with Native Americans, exemplifies Connick’s vision of the nation’s story. Remarkably, all twenty-five of the Heinz Chapel windows were completed by Connick and his studio colleagues within a period of just two years. The Chapel and its stained glass are one of the USA’s greatest twentieth-century cultural treasures: as a child visitor in 1938 said of the experience, ‘It’s like being inside a rainbow’.
Charles J. Connick: America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist is available now. Purchase from Yale and get free postage (UK only), or find it in your local bookshop.
About the author
Peter Cormack MBE FSA is a former curator of the William Morris Gallery, London, and for the last twenty years has been Honorary Curatorial Adviser for Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s country home. He has been a Research Fellow at the V&A Museum and is a Vice-President and Honorary Fellow of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters. His Arts & Crafts Stained Glass was published by Yale UP in 2015.
You might like this video…
In this short video, author Peter Cormack introduces MIT’s collection of Charles J. Connick archival material.
