Catholic Church of St. Catharine, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire
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Catholic Church of St. Catharine, Lower High Street, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, GL55 6DZRecommended by
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A pair of nave windows dedicated to Richard and Marion Lynch-StauntonArtist, maker and date
Paul Woodroffe, 1920sReason for highlighting
These two windows are fine examples of the clearly delineated style of Woodroffe’s maturity. His highly formal canopies are made of stylised, heraldic-looking Tudor roses and other foliage, inspired by Christopher Whall, but with a very different, much more graphic feel. His figures have great sweetness but are rendered with precision of line and stippling shading. The reduced colour palette of these windows is particularly effective, and echoes the 1920s and 1930s fashion for paring back colour and introducing clear or white glass.
Woodroffe married Frances (known as Dorothy) Lynch-Staunton, daughter of one of the leading Campden families, in 1907. These two windows are dedicated to his parents-in-law, Richard, d.1922, and Marion, d.1928. Richard’s window in the north aisle represents the conversation of a Viking by an Irish saint, and Marion’s in the south aisle shows St. Agnes with her lamb, and St. Margaret of Scotland.
Artist/maker notes
Paul Vincent Woodroffe (1875-1954) originally worked as an illustrator, training at the Slade School of Art from 1893. He started his stained glass training in the late 1890s with Christopher Whall, and was designing and making glass by 1900, using the facilities of Lowndes & Drury. A friend of C. R. Ashbee, in 1904 he was drawn to Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, setting up a studio and home in a cottage that Ashbee altered for him. As well as friendship and camaraderie with between himself and his craftsmen with the artists and craftspeople of Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft, he also became friends F. L. Griggs, one of the finest etchers of his time, who had moved to Chipping Campden in 1903.
A long-standing studio member was Joseph Edward (Eddie) Nuttgens, who Woodroffe asked to go into partnership with him when he was not well in the 1920s, though Nuttgens declined.
His most important commission was for the Lady Chapel in St. Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral, New York, completed between 1912 and 1934. Woodroffe’s work can be seen around Britain in both Anglican and Catholic churches, including St. Mary’s Catholic church in Uttoxeter, Our Lady and St. Peter, Leatherhead, and St. Mary and St. Egwin, Evesham. He also designed a war memorial window for his old school, Stonyhurst, and a panel showing Little Miss Muffet for Dover’s House, in Chipping Campden, rented by F. L. Griggs.
His archive of designs and photographs can be found at The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum in Cheltenham, along with another nursery rhyme panel.
Source: ‘Paul Woodroffe, stained glass artist’ by Peter Cormack in Originality and Initiative: The Arts and Crafts archives at Cheltenham, ed. Mary Greensted and Sophia Wilson (Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum in association with Lund Humphries, 2003)
Other comments
This small Catholic church where Woodroffe worshipped showcases his stained-glass career, with windows dating from 1909 to 1930.
The earliest window, 1909, is to Charles Noel, the second Earl of Gainsborough, and his wife, Ida, who died in 1881 and 1867 respectively. The Noels were the lords of the manor in Campden, and had been Catholic since 1850. Their son, the third Earl, had given land and money for the building of this church. Charles is represented as St. Charles Borromeo and Ida as St. Ida in a lavishly decorated gown. This window shows an earlier, more painterly style, but the rest of the windows are in the clearly delineated style of his maturity noted above. In addition to the windows dedicated to his parents-in-law, there is a further window in the same style, dedicated to Helen Macaulay, in the north aisle of the nave. Often missed is the window at the west end of the south aisle with a portrait of Thomas More based on the Holbein portrait, apparently a baptismal window, from 1930.
Woodroffe’s friend and fellow Catholic F. L. Griggs designed the rood, and it was made by former Guild and School of Handicraft carver Alec Miller.