New College Chapel, Oxford, Oxfordshire

Probably one of the most debated stained glass windows in the history of stained glass, the west window in the antechapel of New College Chapel represented for Victorian stained glass artists everything a window shouldn’t be. Designed by distinguished Royal Academy painter, Joshua Reynolds, and painted by the Dublin-born glass-painter Thomas Jervais. The scenes are almost entirely in wishy-washy enamels on rectangular panes of clear glass, placing very few lead lines. The Nativity scene, which dominates the upper tier, spreads across multiple lights, and the painted background appears to be a dredge of smudgy browns, reds and greys. Below the figures representing the Virtues are contained one to each light: Temperance, Fortitude, Faith, Charity, Hope, Justice, and Prudence. In a damning review, one critic described these as ‘third-rate actresses’!

The fact this window survives is likely due to its place within a University of Oxford College Chapel. Although widely admired in its time (even by collector and proponent of the gothic revival Horace Walpole) with portions exhibited in Pall Mall, it was deemed less successful in situ, and universally attacked in the nineteenth century. Yet the figures are dramatically rendered, the almost monochrome tones give a sense of the sublime and are marvellously atmospheric. Today it is a rare glimpse of the style of glass painting which was once so popular, and which today is practised very little, making conservation an enormous challenge.