Church of St Mary, Norton-sub-Hamdon, Somerset
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Church of St Mary, Norton-sub-Hamdon, Somerset, TA14 6SURecommended by
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East window of the south aisle chapelArtist, maker and date
Designed by Henry Wilson and made by Shrigley and Hunt, 1904Reason for highlighting
Henry Wilson is not best known for his stained glass, but, like many Arts and Crafts architects he turned his hand to many different art forms. Metalwork he crafted with his own hands, but he designed for many other media,, using others to fabricate his designs. In this case, glass company Shrigley and Hunt made the window. The window is dedicated to Charles and Susan Trask for their golden wedding anniversary. Charles was the head of stone and woodcarvers, Trask and Co., with whom Wilson often worked.
To the left Life ushers Love up to the Virgin, and on the right Labour brings the fruits of his work. These classicising figures, full of calm and compassion were perhaps inspired by the work of Henry Holiday. Behind them in typical localising Arts and Crafts fashion, are cottages in the village, with the hills behind, and the church tower and dovecote.
Artist/maker notes
Henry Wilson (1864-1934) was one of the leading figures in the British Arts and Crafts Movement. He was an architect, designer of church fittings across all media, a metalworker, a jewellery designer and much more. He trained and worked with John Oldrid Scott (1841-1913), John Belcher (1841-1913) and J. D. Sedding (1838-1891). Wilson became Sedding’s assistant, taking over his practise after his early death. He finished for Sedding such key Arts and Crafts projects as Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, London, John Betjeman’s ‘Cathedral of the Arts and Crafts’, and designed churches as grand as St. Bartholomew, Brighton, and as seemingly humble as St Mark’s, Brithdir, Gwynedd. He taught metalwork at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art. He was the president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from 1915 to 1922, which meant he was in charge of the major Arts and Crafts retrospective at the Royal Academy in 1916. In 1917 he became Master of the Art Workers Guild. C. R. Ashbee called him ‘perhaps the greatest artist of the lot.’
Sources:
Henry Wilson Practical Idealist by Cyndy Manton (James Clarke and Co Ltd, 2009)
Henry Wilson on Wikipedia
Other comments
Wilson was commissioned to restore St. Mary’s after a fire in 1894. This area of south Somerset was one he and his mentor the architect J. D. Sedding knew well. Sedding was from Devon originally, but Norton-sub-Hamdon was where Trask’s, the woodcarving firm that he and later Wilson preferred to use, was based. The company was very much still a family firm using traditional methods. Their workmen, used by Sedding’s cousin Edmund at Ermington in Devon, also trained Violet Pinwill and her sisters in what would become another highly successful west country woodcarving business. Charles Trask was also the chairman of the Ham Hill and Doulting Stone Company. It was Trask who recommended Wilson for the job, and his firm did the work under Wilson’s supervision. Wilson rebuilt the tower, adding a new west window in Prior’s Early English glass, reliant, like Sedding and E. S. Prior, on the leading to create geometric and foliate designs, including the popular Arts and Crafts heart motif. The west door, made from timber salvaged from the fire, is a tour-de-force of wood carving, with innumerable small animals from the English countryside worked into the heraldic scheme. It, and the exquisite alabaster font and wooden cover, demonstrate the love for nature and natural forms shared by Arts and Crafts practitioners.