Church of St Mary, Longworth, Oxfordshire
Address
Church of St Mary, Church Lane, Longworth, Oxfordshire OX13 5DYRecommended by
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East windowArtist, maker and date
Designed by Heywood Sumner, and made by James Powell and Sons, 1899Reason for highlighting
The east window is a rare stained-glass work by Heywood Sumner. It shows an extremely pared back design and execution that echoes his better-known work in sgraffito in its bold use of colour and leading that drives the scheme with hardly any glass painting. Thick, irregular slab glass gives the necessary texture to the glass.
The window is dedicated to Rev. John Illingworth, a member of the Lux Mundi group that gave the window. Lux Mundi was a book by the Anglo-Catholic group edited by Charles Gore, with a contribution by Illingworth. This evidently drove the subject matter, although this iconography is also typically Arts and Crafts! It shows Christ on a tree of life rather than a cross. ‘A Light into the World’, this is a Christ triumphant over death, ‘come’, as the text says, ‘not to judge the world but to save the world.’ The rectangular leading makes a dramatic background to the image, the clear glass ahead of its time, recalling both the interwar and beyond fashion for clear glazing, and continental work by artists like Kolomon Moser.
Artist/maker notes
George Heywood Maunoir Sumner (1853–1940) was an artist and illustrator, as well as a local historian and archaeologist. He became part of the burgeoning Arts and Crafts circle in the 1880s, along with his brother-in-law W. A. S. Benson. He came from an ecclesiastical family, his grandfather Charles Sumner having been the Bishop of Winchester and his mother Mary founding the Mother’s Union. He designed both stained glass and sgraffito for churches, for example the sgraffito work at Llanfair Kilgeddin, Powys, completed 1888. He was one of the founders of the Fitzroy Picture Society providing low-cost prints for missions, schools and churches, believing that good art should be for all. He moved to Hampshire in 1903, and devoted his later years to the study of the history, landscape and archaeology of his local area, producing several books. His stained glass can be found at Christ Church, Crookham in Berkshire (1901), and also an important scheme for All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, London, now the Russian Orthodox Cathedral (1897), and St. Mary, Great Warley, Essex (1902).
Other comments
There is another small window by Heywood Sumner in the church, showing a simplified Agnus Dei and a Pelican in Her Piety, 1914.
There is also an exceptional Arts and Crafts reredos by Kate and Myra Bunce, 1904, under the Heywood Sumner window.
A couple of miles down the road is Buckland, which has two wonderful windows by Henry Holiday, the one from the early 1890s part of a chapel created out of the south transept with mosaics by Holiday on the theme of that other typical Arts and Crafts text, the Benedicite, and stalls and other fittings by him, too, all executed by Powell’s, for whom Holiday was a designer at that time. The east window is later, 1919, from when Holiday had his own studio.