The Burne-Jones window

Image credit: Evelyn Simak; licence

One of the notable features in the church of St Andrew and St Mary is a stained glass window in the north wall, ‘Faith and Hope’, installed by Morris & Co. in 1894 and designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. You can view it in context here.

Edward Coley Burne Jones (the hyphen came later) was born in Birmingham in 1833. At the age of 11 he began attending the local King Edward VI Grammar School; at 15 he transferred to Birmingham School of Art before, aged 19, going up to Exeter College to read theology. At Oxford he became acquainted with William Morris; together with some of Jones’s friends from Birmingham, they formed a society they called The Brotherhood. They read the works of Ruskin and Tennyson, visited churches and idealised the aesthetic of the medieval period, which became central to Burne-Jones’s style. Later, influenced further by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelites, he developed his own, unique, artistic voice. Indeed, it was Rossetti who encouraged him to abandon the ministry for the life of an artist.

In May 1877, at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, he exhibited three major pictures, the Days of Creation, the Mirror of Venus, and the Beguiling of Merlin: from then on his reputation was assured.

The Beguiling of Merlin

Birmingham in the nineteenth century might be said to be the very crucible of British manufacturing, with a special emphasis on high-value engineering. The Brotherhood and Burne-Jones’s style can be seen as a rejection of that. His association with Morris lasted till the latter’s death in 1896 (Burne-Jones himself died in 1898).

Burne-Jones (L) and William Morris, from a photograph by Frederick Hollyer  

Morris & Co. produced hand-crafted work such as wood-carving, stained glass, metalwork, tapestry, printed fabrics and carpets, and Burne-Jones’s designs feature in many of these. His stained glass windows are to be found all over the country. One of the best known is ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford:

The three theological virtues are also depicted at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel,

Image © cambridge2000.com

while Humility is added at St Margaret’s Church in Hopton. Note that the cartoons used there are the same as those at Christ Church Cathedral:

Image credit: Evelyn Simak; licence

Of the theological virtues, St Paul averred that ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity’. (King James Bible, 1 Corinthians, 13:13.) In later English versions of that verse, the word is translated as ‘love’. The Latin word is caritas, which has the sense of the Greek ἀγάπη (agapē), denoting brotherly as opposed to sexual or parental love. C S Lewis uses the term to denote the highest variety of love known to humanity: a selfless love that is passionately committed to the well-being of others. It is an acceptance that in each of us is reflected the divine.

An earlier (1860s) window very similar to Langham’s is in All Saints, Sculthorpe. Yet another local Burne-Jones window is in St Peter and St Paul at Cromer.

A stained glass window is an engineering as well as an artistic feat. Various metals or metal oxides must be added in precise quantities to the glass in its molten state to achieve the required tints; alternatively the glass may be enamelled with pigments fused into it in kilns. Strips of lead hold each piece of glass in place, and every joint must be weatherproof. The whole structure must be robust enough to support its own considerable weight and to withstand high winds – and of course it has to fit the window-aperture exactly.

Paradoxically, in many of its enterprises, Morris & Co. depended on the sort of skills which had made Birmingham so prosperous. It was also an example of the astonishing energy and prowess of the Victorians in almost everything they undertook.

The company’s aesthetic continues to influence British design, and in fact is undergoing a resurgence. More and more people, like The Brotherhood before them, are turning away from modernity and yearning for a simpler and more human way of life. In some measure we already have that in Langham. Our Burne-Jones window gives us Faith and Hope, the essential precursors of Charity, which here is not in short supply, despite the lack of a window dedicated to it.