The Tiffany window at Kimbolton

click photo to enlarge
The stained glass windows and lamps of the U.S. designer, Louis Comforty Tiffany (1848-1933) are internationally renowned. The colours, style, drawing, shapes and lines that he used show him to be allied to the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. His work was popular at the time of its creation and remains so today. There are examples in the British Isles - the Haworth Art Gallery at Accrington has Europe's largest collection of pieces - and windows can be found in private houses, and a few public buildings. However, unsurprisingly, most of his work is in the United States.

Bearing that in mind, imagine my surprise when walking around the church at Kimbolton in Cambridgeshire (formerly in Huntingdonshire) and coming upon one of Tiffany's stained glass windows. All the more remarkable because it isn't mentioned at all in the relevant county edition of Pevsner. Had it been taken away for repair when he visited? Who knows? The window is at the east end of the south aisle where it adds an unearthly glow to that corner of the church. It was commissioned by the widow of the Duke of Manchester as a memorial to her two daughters who both died young. The Countess was an American of Cuban extraction so that may account for the choice of stained glass artist. Unfortunately the tops of two eighteenth century memorials impinge on the bottom corners of the window, so a full view (or photograph) of the stained glass is impossible to achieve. The composition shows Christ with two girls, surrounded by children and angels, all set in traditional architectural canopies with putti gazing down from the tracery above. One of the most interesting features of the window is that none of the clothing is represented by a single colour: rather, multiple colours are softly blend together. This gives an overall iridescence to the piece that put me in mind of some Symbolist work by the likes of Gustave Moreau.

When I first saw the window I was captivated because, compared with most English stained glass it is unusual. Moreover, it has a rich, jewel-like quality. However, I was also unsettled by it because, for me, the richness of the effects that Tiffany deploys evoke something akin to decadence rather than reverence. The quality of the figure drawing doesn't help in that respect: the flanking children look odd, gaunt, emaciated even. I've read somewhere that Tiffany wasn't especially keen to tackle religious subjects in stained glass, and after viewing this window I can see something of why that might be. His techniques seem more suited to secular and non-figurative subjects. Looking at the approach of the Kimbolton window again I can see it being more successfully applied to, say, an Arthurian illustration or something from the Norse sagas.

I occasionally come across stained glass windows where the style of the artist seems at odds with the subject. Last year I wrote about Walter Crane's "psychedelic" window in Holy Trinity Hull, and several years ago I was taken to task by someone over what I think is a downright weird, "storybook" window by the wife of Whistler in Orton church, Cumbria. On the whole I'd put Tiffany's window at Kimbolton alongside those two: interesting, not without some appeal and certainly bravely different in approach, but ultimately unsatisfactory.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

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Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 105mm
F No: f4
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ISO: 1000
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Image Stabilisation: On

The bridge chapel, St Ives

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Today's photograph shows the old bridge over the River Great Ouse at St Ives, Huntingdonshire*. It is one of only four bridges in England that still have their complete medieval chapels (the others are at Rotherham, Wakefield and Bradford-on-Avon). This crossing was built in the 1420s, replacing a wooden bridge that dated from around 1100, which itself superseded the shallow ford on the gravel river bed - the original method of getting from one bank to the other. Traffic used the single lane of this ancient bridge until 1980 when a new crossing was built on the town by-pass road further downstream.

Bridges have long had religious associations. In Britain many Bronze and Iron Age artefacts have been found deliberately placed in rivers next to fragments of wooden structures that may well have been bridges. The remains of a Roman bridge has altars dedicated to Neptune and Oceanus nearby. In the medieval period chapels were often built at one end of a bridge, or actually on the bridge. This continued the old association, but was also because the church frequently funded the construction of a crossing and then collected a toll to pay for its upkeep. Travellers would receive a blessing from a priest at the chapel after they made their payment. A few bridge chapels (such as that at Wakefield) were chantries, funded by a private individual, where mass was said daily for the salvation of their souls. During its lifetime the chapel at St Ives also saw use as a private residence, an inn and a doctor's surgery (though never a prison, the fate of some bridge chapels).

St Ives' bridge is unusual in having two newer, rounded arches to the left (as we look at it), and original fifteenth century pointed arches to the right. This came about because in 1645, during the Civil War, Cromwell's Republican army pulled down two arches and replaced them with a drawbridge in case of Royalist attack. The arches were rebuilt in 1716 to a design that reflected the fashion and constructional theories of the time. I visited this location on a late September morning of bright sunshine, and couldn't resist using the mute swans as foreground interest, despite the difficulty that their bright, white plumage presented in terms of metering the scene.

* For a number of reasons I tend to use the historic county names and boundaries that preceded the local government reorganisation of 1974. Consequently I assign St Ives to Huntingdonshire rather than Cambridgeshire in which it now resides for administrative purposes. For more information on this see the Association of British Counties.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 14mm (28mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
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Exposure Compensation: -1.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On