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Hidden Gems: stained glass at Llanwenllwyfo
About two and half years ago I revisited the Church of St Gwenllwyfo, Llanwenllwyfo, in northern Anglesey, and began a conversation that has resulted in a new book on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Continental stained glass at the church.
When I first attempted to write about the stained glass on the online ‘Stained Glass in Wales’ catalogue, I turned to the notes written by J.O. Hughes that were produced as a small unillustrated booklet in 1995. The booklet left a lot of unanswered questions as it did not list any sources, but, when writing Stained Glass from Welsh Churches in 2013–14, I was able to find further writing about the stained glass of the period in scholarly articles and catalogues which alluded to the dating, provenance and attribution of the panels at Llanwenllwyfo.
Some of this writing confirmed what J.O. Hughes had written about much of the earlier sixteenth-century glass, which was thought to have originated at the Leuven Charterhouse, and the important article by Yvette Vanden Bemden and Jill Kerr identified a number of them among the ‘Anglesea Group’, which also encompassed similar panels elsewhere. Some writers went further, and Hilary Wayment attributed couple of the panels to the Master of the Mass of St Gregory, the painter of a roundel of that name now at the V&A, or to his workshop. Although I admit that I found some of the arguments confusing, in the absence of any writing that I could find at the time to contradict this attribution, I broadly adopted Wayment’s attributions in Stained Glass from Welsh Churches. I also used his attributions in an article on the stained glass for Vidimus, published early in 2014, hoping that I might receive some feedback from scholars more versed in the stained glass of the Low Countries on the validity of these attributions.
Around the time that I visited Llanwenllwyfo again in 2014, a small bequest from the family had been set aside to publish the research of J.O. and Catherine Hughes as a small book, and I was very pleased to be asked to design and produce the book. This consisted of an introduction about the gentry families involved in the building of the church and the acquisition of the stained glass, and then descriptions of each of the main panels.
I also took the opportunity to look more closely at each of the panels and collate the writing on them in other sources. It was during this process that the attribution to the St Gregory Master appeared to me to be increasingly doubtful, mainly because the similarities between a group of the panels, here and elsewhere, seemed to be greater with each other than to those attributed to the St Gregory Master. I was also struck by their similarity to panels that had recently been associated with Jan Rombouts by Yvette Bruijnen. These panels were also from the collection of Sir Thomas Neave, but now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at Prittlewell, Essex. Some of these conclusions will be published shortly in a feature for the online journal Vidimus, and are alluded to in a short contribution that I have written for the new book.
That it has been such a long time since Avril Lloyd at the church first discussed the draft of the text that she had prepared from the notes of J.O. and Catherine Hughes about two years ago is down to a variety of reasons. These included other commitments on my part, the time taken for the texts to be translated and checked and finally securing the funding to print the book as intended. The book is now available this autumn on my Sulien Books website for £10 + postage, and from the church.
Extending the Stained Glass in Wales Catalogue
I mentioned the comments facility on the online Stained Glass in Wales Catalogue in my last post, but didn’t expand very much about the resource. The site was launched in June 2011 and the development of the site is outlined on a page on the website. At the time of the launch it contained a large proportion, but not all, of the photography that I had done of stained glass in Wales, and this was made possible by a few small grants that paid for the cataloguing of the windows on the database (on top of what was already prepared as part of the Imaging the Bible in Wales Project.
Since then I continued to research stained glass for the book, Stained Glass from Welsh Churches, and my archive has grown significantly, but without the funding to continue cataloguing the work. In some cases I have added some of this research, but it has not been possible to keep pace with the fieldwork. Similarly, I have done much archival work, that has brought dates, makers and other details of windows to my attention, both for windows already on the site, and for many others not yet listed.
In the future I am hoping to seek further funding to add many more attributions, dates, archival information and bibliographic references to the material currently online, in addition to adding many hundreds of new windows to the resource. This cannot be undertaken in any quantity without further funding. In the short term, I will at least attend to any corrections to information that I become aware of, and will hope to add further records as time permits (but with my current commitments, not much!).
After the launch of the catalogue I wanted to make it possible for others to enlarge the resource if they wished. This is possible in two ways. Firstly, comments – new information, corrections and so on – can be submitted by clicking on the links found beneath records for windows, sites and artists/makers. Furthermore, it is possible to add records of other works in glass, with or without images. Some have kindly submitted records for all of windows from their churches, which have been added with images. Please contact me if you would like to do this. The records for windows can be very brief or very detailed, and information is particularly welcomed from sites other than churches. None of these submissions are published without checking and I edit them if necessary for consistency, and add subject references and links to artists/makers, with any other information that I have to hand.
I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank the staff of the National Library of Wales, on whose servers the Stained Glass in Wales Catalogue runs, and Nigel Callaghan, of Technology Taliesin, who ensures that the site continues to work properly. Recently he fixed a bug that we weren’t aware of that seems to have blocked some user comments. This only came to our attention because I was told about the problem by a user, so please contact me if something doesn’t seem to work properly.