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This research explores the world of Thomas and Drake, a transatlantic art dealership formed by landscape painter George Grosvenor Thomas (1856-1923), his son Roy Thomas (1886-1952), and glass-painter and glazier Wilfred Drake (1879-1948). Together, they were the only art dealers to have specialised solely in the selling and adaption of Medieval and Renaissance stained glass during the first half of the twentieth century, and did so on an unprecedented scale. Handling thousands of panels, their stock now underpins many collections worldwide, underlining their status as exceptionally important and prolific vendors. This thesis provides an in-depth and sustained study of the activities of Thomas and Drake, and its predecessor, the Grosvenor Thomas collection. Unravelling their rich stock, often sourced from English country houses (often from those that were the receptacles for high quality displaced continental stained glass, collected by British aristocrats during the early nineteenth century), this work provides part of the next chapter in the story of the trade and dispersal of European glazing schemes. Stained glass is situated as an important interior design element, especially popular in the revival style mansions of the extremely wealthy, where other original architectonic salvages from once great country estates were also accommodated. The ways in which their stock was physically transformed, both before and after sale, is revealed, as well as the firm’s origins, operations, collaborators, and customers. Sustained analysis of the different phases of collecting undertaken by Glasgow-born William Burrell (1861-1958), the firm’s most longstanding customer (and founder of the internationally significant Burrell Collection museum) illustrates Thomas and Drake’s work in context. This is enhanced by new reconstructions of the layout and glazing of Burrell’s final home, Hutton Castle (Scottish Borders), and transcriptions of the extensive correspondence between Wilfred Drake and William Burrell have been reproduced in full for the first time.

The visual system generates the perception of a world of meaningful three - dimensional objects from a stream of retinal signals – in the psychologist Richard Gregory’s words ’images in the eyes’. When this perception is consistent with information from other sources such as the ears and the muscles that guide movement, all is well and we are almost entir ely unaware of this process. But when it is not, we see illusions. To adopt Gregory’s phrase, ‘strange phenomena that challenge our sense of reality’ 1 . The project is inspired by the work of the German artist Ludwig Wilding (1927 – 2010), who refined appr oaches to the everyday phenomenon of moiré interference patterns to generate dramatic illusions of depth and movement in shallow box frame structures. 1 Gregory Richard L. 1990. Seeing Through Illusions . Oxford: Oxford University Press. p186 Based on the principle that the intersection of two sets of parallel lines generates the appearance o f a third set of lines, or moiré bands, Wilding’s innovation lay in the discovery that, by introducing a shallow space between the two layers of printed lines and by tilting and rotating them , the size and orientation of the se moiré bands can be manipulate d to produce converging contours and texture gradients that are perceived by the visu al system as forms in depth. This thesis builds on these observations to investigate the potential of the material and optical qualities of glass in combination with moiré interference effects to generate inconsistencies between th e images in the eyes and the objects that produce them, creating illusions of space.

Á la fin du XVIIIe siècle, la technique du vitrail est menacée de disparition en France. En réaction, les tentatives en vue de retrouver les procédés de cet art se sont multipliées, aussi bien dans le milieu artistique que scientifique. Le but de cette thèse est de faire le point sur les avancées technologiques mises en œuvre pour la réalisation de vitraux au XIXᵉ siècle à travers l’étude de l’ensemble des brevets déposés au XIXᵉ siècle concernant les techniques de fabrication et de décoration du verre. Par l’étude de ces brevets, nous avons pu montrer que ces innovations ont été les plus nombreuses dans la seconde moitié du XIXᵉ, en relation avec la montée de la demande en vitraux. Les innovations sont de deux ordres : d’une part celles concernant la fabrication du verre et de verres spéciaux (coloré, opalescent, irisé, etc.), d’autre part celles concernant les techniques de décoration du verre (peintures vitrifiables, procédés de gravure et procédés d’impression). Les peintres verriers ont été des acteurs actifs pour le développement de ces innovations, comme en témoignent les brevets qu’ils ont déposés et les vitraux qu’ils ont réalisés avec ces nouvelles techniques. / At the end of the eighteenth century, the technique of stained glass was endangered in France. In response, attempts to rediscover this art process increased in both the artistic and scientific communities. The purpose of this thesis is to determine the technological advances for making stained glass that were implemented during the nineteenth century through the study of all patents submitted at this time for techniques of glass manufacture and decoration. By studying these patents, we have shown that these innovations were the most numerous in the second half of the nineteenth century, in connection with the rise in the demand for stained glass. Innovations are twofold: firstly those related to the manufacture of glass and special glass (colored, opalescent, iridescent, etc.); secondly those concerning glass decoration techniques (enamels, printing and engraving processes). Glass painters were active players in the development of these innovations, as evidenced by the number of patents they filed and the amount of stained glass work they produced with these new techniques.

The world is a fractured place, faceted and fascinating in variety but broken in strife. Artist Gerhard Richter, said “Art is the highest form of hope” and the thinker Martin Heidegger said that art is a “happening of truth”. Marc Chagall hoped his art connected with people’s lives and sufferings and would become infused with prayer for redemption. How does visual art (and thinking theoretically and theologically about art) contribute toward hope and truth that bring the fragments of society into personal and communal connection? This is a practice-based (or studio-led) thesis in stained glass making at the juncture of the interdisciplinary fields of visual culture and religion. Making the visual art of stained glass windows involves collaborating, selecting, breaking, combining – processes that embody the unifying of disparate pieces. There are three projects and three chapters included in this research that work cohesively to show how visual art can facilitate a shift in us to see with compassion that guides our actions to care, and the word “EidenSight” is introduced to give vocabulary to this. Research draws primarily from reflections on collaborative studio work, visual art and visual artists, aesthetic theory (especially of Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”) and thinking theologically through these sources. Stained glass has been a profession of work and a profession of faith; here the ancient art is created for contemporary places and raises questions theoretically and theologically and identifies themes that contribute to an understanding of how art affects us. Over the centuries, stained glass has contributed to architecture, art history, and theological aesthetics, as well as viewers’ personal and social experiences, from ecclesial settings to public spaces. This research contributes three commissioned site-specific stained glass installations (two in the US and one for the University of Stirling’s Art Collection) that lead the written thesis which is embedded full of images and has a correlating website: www.eidensite.weebly.com. The results are visual and verbal: requirements for the practice-based thesis include a heavily documented practical element in correlation with a shorter written component (30-80,000 words). Within the limits of these parameters, this research offers completed stained glass windows and a written thesis that includes insights from those projects, plus three chapters on: the material of glass, the space of the window, and the implications of being stained and a main conclusion that ties those elements together contributing to the overall thesis question: can art help us see with compassion that leads to care. Three institutions now have an original work of art substantiated by written theory, and the submitted thesis is substantiated by works of art viewable on different continents.

This thesis examines the Great West Window at Exeter Cathedral designed by William Peckitt of York (1731-95). Peckitt was arguably the most important glass designer of the eighteenth century and undertook prestigious commissions at York, Oxford and elsewhere. In 1764 he was contracted by the Dean of Exeter, Jeremiah Milles, to supply glass to complete the restoration of the Cathedral’s glazing and to make the new window, which has often been considered to be his masterpiece. Peckitt’s Great West Window is no longer extant (although portions of it have been salvaged), having been replaced in 1904 with a window, designed by Messrs Burlison and Grylls, which was itself destroyed by enemy action in 1942. The Burlison and Grylls window was more in keeping with the Gothic revival aesthetic typical of the later nineteenth century and its proponents had argued forcefully that Peckitt’s Great West Window was an aberration that needed to be removed. The thesis provides initially an account of the debate that raged in the national press and beyond about the propriety of replacing Peckitt’s window. This documentary evidence gives a valuable insight into attitudes towards the adornment of churches at the turn of the century: should respect for the extant fabric include Peckitt’s one-hundred-and-fifty year-old contribution or should the building be renovated with a modern medieval-revival window. Until recent times it was largely the case that eighteenth-century glass was regarded as wholly inferior to the medieval glass that preceded it and it is widely accepted that glass making in Britain only recovered with the nineteenth-century Gothic revival and the modern glass that followed it. In this thesis it is suggested that the denigration of eighteenth-century glass and in particular that of William Peckitt at Exeter, ignores its qualities, practical and intellectual, and the Great West Window is used to reveal the seriousness of such endeavours. Peckitt’s work is positioned within the context of the particular circumstances of the restoration of Exeter Cathedral in the mid-eighteenth century under two successive Deans, Charles Lyttelton and the aforementioned Jeremiah Milles, both of whom were nationally significant antiquarian scholars. Peckitt was knowledgeable about medieval glass techniques, worked sensitively in restoring medieval glass and when designing a completely new window for the Cathedral worked closely with Milles to provide an iconographical scheme that was appropriate for the Cathedral, its history and its patrons. The evidence brought forward suggests that it is wrong to presume that glass designers like Peckitt had little understanding of medieval glass manufacture nor any interest in using the medium of glass appropriately in the context of a medieval building.