How American artist Charles J. Connick’s poetically reimagined Medieval stained glass

Nov 06, 2024

A detail from Hope (1922), Charles J. Connick’s window at First Universalist Church, Haverhill, Massachusetts

Photo: Peter Cormack

In early 20th-century North America, stained glass was primarily associated with the artist-designers John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, who both used the novel technique of opalescent glass. Its opaque texture and painterly design bore little relationship to medieval stained glass. In this new study of the work of Charles J. Connick, Peter Cormack, an expert in post-medieval stained glass and author of Arts & Crafts Stained Glass (Yale 2015), while denouncing “the simpering vulgarity of opalescent windows”, describes Connick’s distinctive use of the medieval technique.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1875 to a poor family, Connick showed talent as an artist despite almost no formal training and first worked as a newspaper illustrator for Pittsburgh Press. But an encounter in Pittsburgh with J. Horace Rudy, a partner in the stained-glass firm Rudy Brothers and Reich, led to a post as an apprentice designer. The books of N.H.J. Westlake (A History of Design in Painted Glass, four volumes, 1881-94) and Lewis F. Day (Windows: A Book About Stained and Painted Glass, 1909) awoke him to the character of medieval glass.

After moving to Boston he met the distinguished architect Ralph Adams Cram, who particularly admired the English Arts and Crafts stained-glass maker Christopher Whall. Cram’s enthusiastic support was crucial to Connick’s career. An interview in 1909 led to a commission for a window for All Saints, Brookline, Massachusetts, and in the next year Connick made the first of several visits to Europe, touring England and meeting Whall, and then travelling to France, where he was bowled over by the elaborate windows in the 13th-century cathedral of Notre-Dame at Chartres. Finally in 1913 he opened his own studio and workshop in Harcourt Street, Back Bay, Boston, and began to assemble his team of artists and glaziers. He was an excellent employer and was rewarded by devoted loyalty.

Cormack describes the development of Connick’s style, which was never slavishly historicist. It was ideally appropriate to the mostly Gothic revival churches being erected at the time. His commissions included such important buildings as the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, and Princeton University Chapel, New Jersey. The Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh, a lofty and elegant neo-Gothic shrine designed by Charles Z. Klauder, where the transept windows are 70ft tall, is among his masterpieces. At Princeton the iconography covers the authors Dante Alighieri, John Bunyan, John Milton and Thomas Malory, Dante being the most remarkable—the result of detailed study by Connick. For the Heinz Chapel, Connick chose the theme of Christian virtues for the chancel and the four elements for the transepts. The figures include the writer Emily Dickinson; William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania; Gyantwachia, the Seneca chief; President Abraham Lincoln; and the pioneer nurseryman Johnny Appleseed.

In 1937 Connick published a large and sumptuous book, Adventures in Light and Colour: An Introduction to the Stained Glass Craft. The mention of “light” in the title was significant, as he attached the highest importance to its effect on glass. Despite his lack of formal education, he was deeply interested in literature, especially poetry, and, as hinted above, the subjects of his windows were suggested by his extensive reading. They include a notable number of women, as well as a sympathetic representation of Native Americans. He was a quiet but charming and humorous man, with a deft gift for a neatly turned phrase, for example: “I like to say that stained glass windows need peaceful sleep when the sun goes down, as do the rest of us, and so I like the idea of letting them take their places in the light of day, and gently ignoring them at nightfall.” After his death in 1945 his team carried on the work in the same spirit until 1986.

Cormack justly claims that “Connick’s imaginative, poetic exploration of ancient stained glass, and his recognition of the fundamentally anti-realist, non-pictorial nature of the medium as it had originated in the early Middle Ages, were increasingly manifested in his work as a potent means of contemporary visual expression.”

The book is the result of profound research and informed appreciation, based on a thorough understanding of the artistic and technical foundation of Connick’s work. It is superbly illustrated. All lovers of stained glass will be grateful to Cormack for his exemplary study and passionate advocacy of Connick’s work.

• Peter Cormack, Charles J. Connick: America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist, Yale University Press, 376pp, 297 colour & b/w illustrations, £60/$75 (hb), published 14 May/25 June

• Peter Howell’s latest book is The Triumphal Arch (Unicorn Publishing 2021)