Hidden stained-glass masterpieces finally go on display in Glasgow
A museum dedicated to Scotland’s stained-glass heritage is due to open next year inside a former Glasgow church, finally putting two long-hidden masterpieces on public display.
Glasgow earned its reputation as the “workplace of the world” through shipbuilding and locomotives, but the city was also a major centre of stained-glass production in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some pieces were exported as far as Budapest, where James Guthrie’s Thistle window hangs in the city’s museum of decorative arts; others were fitted into ocean liners and survive only in old photographs. Hundreds more remained in Scotland, inside churches, civic buildings and private homes.
Two of the finest examples spent nearly a century visible only to the congregation of Lansdowne Church: the eight-scene Templeton Window, depicting the life of Christ, and the three-panel McCowan window, showing Holy Week. Both were created in the early 1900s by Alf Webster. Researcher Dr Karen Mailley says the windows go well beyond religious decoration: “Alf Webster uses a range of religious iconography, but also natural symbols so anybody coming into the church would be able to ‘read’ the window from top to bottom. That’s something we’ve lost nowadays, and we’d love to help people to understand what’s actually going on in the windows.”
That goal lies behind the Alf Webster Museum of Stained Glass, which heritage charity Fact Three has been developing since 2013, when Lansdowne’s last congregation departed. “Our role was to make sure the building survived and had an income stream,” says trustee David Robertson. New conservation methods allow individual panels to be removed, repaired and replaced without disturbing a whole window, raising hopes of rotating in loaned pieces from collections such as Glasgow Museums so visitors see something different each time.
Webster was born in Glasgow’s southside in 1883, trained at the Glasgow School of Art, and apprenticed at the Adam Studio, taking it over in 1910 after founder Stephen Adam Senior died. He went on to design around 40 windows across Scotland, Lansdowne’s among them, before his career was cut short: a year after completing the McCowan window in 1914, Webster was seriously wounded while serving with the Gordon Highlanders at Ypres and died soon after, aged 31. “This incredible talent was snuffed out at the age of 31,” Robertson says, adding that because churches rarely open to casual visitors, “few people have been able to see them, so we’re now finally revealing the talent of Alf Webster.”
The Templeton window remains in its original setting, while the McCowan window was taken down in 2007 and stored until museum plans advanced; restoration has since been funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, Glasgow City Heritage Trust, the Architectural Heritage Fund and a public crowdfunding appeal. Scotland holds a wealth of stained glass but few places to display it, and the museum plans a viewing platform for close-up access. Mailley calls the timing urgent: “We’re at a crucial point in our history. There are 800 churches being sold off. That’s a lot of stained glass. So having a centre like the museum to promote techniques but also elevate it as an artwork is incredibly important.”
Glass studios of its own once clustered thickly around the Lansdowne Church site, a hundred years back. Today a small conservation team — Rab MacInnes, Eilidh MacKenzie and Gordon Muir — trains apprentices and volunteers to maintain existing work and create new pieces. One of MacInnes’s own windows links the building’s two modern uses: it decorates the Kelvin Bar downstairs, where comedy-club patrons gather before heading up to the museum. “We quite like the contrast of being used for comedy but also this more culturally traditional offering upstairs,” Robertson says. “I like the fact that the two things are in the one building. I hope the public will feel the same.”
Source: BBC News