Stained Glass and Decorative Arts

Ford Madox Brown designed pictures that belonged to windows, furniture and the edges of other pictures. These commissions asked him to think about the shape of a useful object, the work of other makers and the movement of a design between materials. He was an original partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., founded in 1861, and supplied designs for stained glass alongside furniture and other decoration. ^[1]

The distinction between designing and making is essential here. A drawing by Brown, a window made by the Morris firm and a later copy of that window are different objects. Following those differences reveals a working practice in which invention could be individual while execution depended on several people.

An Artist in a Commercial Partnership

Ford Madox Hueffer's 1896 biography describes the new firm as a cooperative venture supplying artistic furniture and surroundings both to its members and to the public. Partners contributed designs as demand arose and received payment for their work before any profits were divided. The account names several possible originators of the idea, recording Rossetti's claim and a competing recollection that Marshall had first suggested it to him. Even this family history resists reducing the business to one founding inspiration. ^[1]

The structure gave Brown a sustained outlet for design. Hueffer records an earlier window for Powell & Co., but identifies the Morris partnership as the opportunity that made stained-glass cartoons a substantial part of Brown's work. His catalogue places biblical figures, narrative scenes and secular subjects beside one another. The business could ask for a saint, a king, a poet or a labourer; Brown's task was to make a recognisable figure or incident within the required format. ^[1]

This was also a change of audience and setting. An easel painting could be moved between rooms or sold independently. A window had to occupy an opening in a building, while a painted cupboard panel belonged within a piece of furniture. The viewer encountered the image together with surrounding architecture or joinery. Its border was part of the problem from the beginning.

The names of William Morris , Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti recur throughout this work, but partnership did not erase their individual contributions. An object's maker credit can refer to the firm while the design credit belongs to one artist. Conversely, a single commission may combine several artists' designs.

Furniture before and beside the Firm

Brown's furniture interests preceded the partnership. Hueffer describes designs for Brown's own household and requests from Holman Hunt for sketches of furnishings. He also records a substantial table with a barrel-shaped top and pierced lockers beneath. Furniture was already a field in which Brown could invent structure and form, rather than merely supply a painting to an existing object. ^[1]

According to the same account, Brown sent furniture designs to a Hogarth Club exhibition in 1859. Their rejection helped provoke his resignation. Hueffer thought the committee had probably objected to their status as fine art rather than their quality as designs. The committee later persuaded Brown to withdraw his resignation. Hueffer's explanation remains an inference, but the episode makes the contested boundary between exhibiting a picture and exhibiting a design unusually concrete. ^[1]

The Furniture History Society identifies a washstand and towel horse at Kelmscott Manor among Brown's early furnishings. It also discusses an Egyptian-style chair associated with him, while describing a round-seated Sussex chair as only a possible example. Those qualifications matter: the broad popularity of Morris furniture cannot establish Brown's authorship of every chair sold by the firm. The Society also distinguishes his role from Philip Webb's extensive furniture and architectural design work. ^[3]

Furniture therefore offers two different ways to encounter Brown. He could design a household article or contribute painted decoration to a structure conceived by someone else. The distinction becomes especially clear in the King René cabinet.

What a Glass Cartoon Does

A cartoon carries a composition towards another object. Brown's own account of historical painting, published in The Germ in 1850, already gives drawing that function. After research, imagined action, an oil sketch and model studies, he recommends an outline design. For a small painting it could be traced at full size; a larger one could be squared for transfer. This is a description of preparing paintings, rather than a glass-making manual, but it establishes how closely he connected invention with the practical passage from one surface to another. ^[4]

Laura MacCulloch catalogues Birmingham's Christ Blessing Little Children as an 1862 Morris-firm working copy after Brown, in brush, ink and wash over pencil, squared for transfer. She separately identifies three 1909 watercolours by Thomas Matthews Rooke after Brown's Tamworth windows. These require different credits from drawings executed by Brown. ^[2]

In the Christ Blessing Little Children sheet, the action gathers tightly around the central figure. Christ bends forward towards the small standing child while lifting his other hand above the surrounding heads. Adults lean in from both sides. A seated woman and an infant occupy the foreground, bringing the group almost to the lower edge. The picture communicates through the relationships between bodies: reaching, holding, turning and watching.

Compare that crowded group with the upright figures in the cartoons of Zachariah and The Young Milton , reproduced alongside it in MacCulloch's illustrated volume. One figure swings a censer beneath an elaborate outer garment; the other holds a book and hat. Large areas of clothing give each a clear silhouette, while a few hand movements explain the activity. The contrast between a many-figure story and a single standing person shows how varied the compositional task could be.

MacCulloch transcribes colour notes on Zachariah . A working drawing could carry practical instructions alongside its depiction of a figure. ^[2]

Hueffer's Appendix C, headed as designs for glass executed by Morris & Co., is explicitly incomplete. It was drawn from Brown's account with the firm, yet Hueffer knew other cartoons absent from it. Its entries are consequently evidence of recorded design work, not a complete census of surviving windows. Nor must an account date automatically become the installation date of the finished glass. ^[1]

The list nevertheless gives a vivid sense of range. It includes a David and Goliath design in 1866 and another specified for Jesus College in November 1872; it also records Homer, Newton, Roger Bacon, Aristotle and Cicero in 1870. Sacred history and secular learning could draw on the same designer's ability to give a figure a distinct pose, implement and presence. ^[1]

The Cleveland Museum of Art holds the 1872 David and Goliath cartoon for Jesus College. Its record identifies charcoal and graphite on Japanese paper, supported by wove paper, with a sheet measuring 52 × 41.7 cm. This is a drawing for the window, not a piece of the glass. ^[5]

David kneels across the giant's body and lifts the severed head by its hair. His other hand holds the enormous sword low across the foreground. The two arms stretch in different directions, binding together the head above and the body below. Behind that close encounter, small soldiers watch from the upper left and a shield-bearing figure runs towards the right.

The giant occupies much of the lower sheet, yet the lifted head becomes its point of greatest intensity. Broad curves of armour and limbs surround the smaller features of the face. Brown makes the story legible through a few strong relationships of scale and gesture before the viewer begins to examine the individual marks.

Windows within an Ensemble

Jesus College, Cambridge, dates the glazing of its Outer Chapel to 1867–78 and names Morris, Burne-Jones and Brown as designers. Its account describes a programme of virtues, Old Testament subjects, Evangelists and saints, and emphasises Burne-Jones's contribution. This shared setting does not make every light a Brown design. The College also records the later reuse of designs in new Anglican churches elsewhere, showing how a composition made for one commission could acquire another architectural setting. ^[6]

Hueffer provides a narrower connection to Brown himself: besides David and Goliath , his list specifies Noli me Tangere and The Incredulity of Thomas for Jesus College in July 1874. A named commission and a named design provide firmer ground than assigning the whole chapel to whichever artist interests us most. ^[1]

The ensemble also changes how one looks. A figure may be encountered from a distance, beside other figures, through the repeated divisions of the windows. Reading a single cartoon in isolation can clarify its gesture while concealing those relationships. Reading the installed scheme without asking who designed each part can conceal the collaboration.

King René: A Programme Shared among Artists

John Pollard Seddon designed King René's Honeymoon Cabinet in 1861 and exhibited it the following year. Writing in The Magazine of Art in 1897, he recalled commissioning the new Morris firm to paint four large panels representing architecture, painting, sculpture and music, with six smaller scenes of associated arts and crafts. Brown suggested the imaginary honeymoon programme: the royal couple would build and decorate a palace and then enjoy music within it. ^[7]

Brown painted Architecture at the left; Burne-Jones painted the two central scenes, Painting and Sculpture ; Rossetti painted Music at the right. Seddon describes the king considering a plan in Brown's panel, carving and drawing in Burne-Jones's pair, and working an organ's bellows while kissing his queen in Rossetti's scene. His account makes artistic labour and affection parts of the same invented domestic story. ^[7]

Seddon's family firm made the furniture. Morris designed the large panels' arched surrounds and the decorative backgrounds. Of the smaller panels, the V&A identifies Rossetti's Gardening and Val Prinsep's Embroidery , leaving Pottery , Weaving , Ironwork and Glass Blowing unattributed. Seddon's 1897 assignment of the small scenes other than Gardening to Burne-Jones should therefore be treated as a retrospective claim, rather than the current attribution. ^{[8] [7]}

Seen as a whole, the cabinet's long horizontal top holds together four upright pictures. The larger central doors project slightly beyond the outer pair. Patterned borders run around each scene and across the furniture, while the upper shelf supplies another, smaller sequence of pictures. Individual paintings invite close attention, but the repeated ornament keeps returning the eye to the entire structure.

David Kopp's discussion of Seddon's separate 1898 booklet quotes the architect's explanation that this was office furniture for his professional drawings. It also reproduces his account of the inlay and painted metalwork, including William Burges's contribution of the heraldic lion. These details place the famous painted scenes within a working architect's personally designed environment. ^[9]

Architecture Moves into a Library Window

The V&A's Architecture panel, CIRC.516-1953, names Brown as designer and Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. as maker. It is stained and painted glass from Myles Birket Foster's library at The Hill in Surrey. Its individual record dates it 1862; the cabinet record describes the glass adaptation around 1863. Those differing dates should remain visible rather than be collapsed into a spurious certainty. ^{[10] [8]}

The related coloured King René's Honeymoon composition makes the subject easy to recognise. The king's compasses and the drawings at the couple's feet identify architecture, while their inclined heads turn professional discussion into a private exchange. Red clothing forms a strong mass on the left; the queen's pale, patterned dress spreads towards the lower right. A plan lies between the figures and the viewer.

Moving that invention from a cupboard door to a window changes its physical relationship to a room. The design can remain recognisable without the finished object being interchangeable with its predecessor. Brown's contribution is the pictorial invention; the maker's work and the new setting give it another material existence.

Tiles, Books and the Life of a Design

Hueffer's list places tile designs among the earliest work for the firm: Lady with Hawk , Cutting Trees Down , Sowing and Sheep-shearing appear under 1862. Their inclusion in an appendix nominally about stained glass is revealing. The account records a designer working across several forms of decoration, rather than a career confined to one material. ^[1]

MacCulloch follows He that Soweth from a November tile design for Queens' College Hall to a Dalziel wood engraving in the 1868 Lyra Germanica . Joseph Swain and Thomas Bolton engraved Brown's other illustrations there. Reuse involved translation by named craftspeople. ^[2]

This traffic between materials makes “original” a difficult shorthand. The first design, a workshop drawing, a glass panel and an illustration may all preserve an artist's composition while recording different stages and different hands. The fuller histories of the drawings and their printed translations belong with Brown's drawings and prints and illustrations .

Frames as Part of the Work

Brown's involvement could continue around a painting's edge. Lynn Roberts reproduces his letters to James Leathart about the frame for Lear and Cordelia . In January 1863 Brown described combining his own design with Rossetti's pattern; in February he discussed allowing the maker Green to use his patterns more widely. Her account also quotes his July 1864 letter about Oure Ladye of Good Children : Brown had undertaken lettering, designed an angel for repeated circles and involved an assistant in completing the decoration. The letters document adjustment and shared labour, rather than a frame simply selected after the painting was finished. ^[11]

The National Portrait Gallery supplies a contrasting case. On 2 July 1872 Brown asked Charles Dilke if he could order the frame for the Fawcett double portrait. He proposed a Venetian pattern available from Green & Co., while inviting the patron to express a preference. Jacob Simon identifies the surviving frame as a Watts pattern in gilt pine with composition ornament. Brown's concern for framing could therefore involve choosing a suitable established pattern as well as designing a new one. ^[12]

These cases suggest a practical way to approach the boundary between painting and decoration. Look at what the frame does to the image: how it establishes an opening, gives the painted surface an edge, carries words or repeats a motif. Then ask who designed it, who made it and whether its present form is documented. An artist's strong involvement does not mean he personally carved, gilded or lettered every part.

Decoration and the Wall

Brown returned to the relationship between images and buildings in his 1893 essay “Of Mural Painting”. He argued that the wall-picture should preserve the sense of a solid wall, rather than seem to open a hole through it. Whatever the limits of his dislike of landscape decoration, the argument shows him considering painting as something physically encountered within architecture. ^[13]

The same essay insists on subjects intelligible to a broad public. Brown connects the choice of incident with the people who will see it and questions the usefulness of obscure allegory for such an audience. This is his stated position late in life, not proof that every early decorative design followed a single theory. It nevertheless gives a voice to a concern visible across the work: a figure must communicate through its action, even when it belongs to a complex decorative whole. ^[13]

His Manchester murals develop that architectural relationship at another scale. Windows, cupboard doors, frames and walls each set different conditions. Brown's decorative practice is most rewarding when those conditions remain tangible: a drawing has to become glass, a picture has to share a cabinet, or a painted incident has to hold its place within a public building.