Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian
Address
Rosslyn Chapel, Chapel Loan, Roslin, Midlothian, EH25 9PURecommended by
Highlight
The Transfiguration windowArtist, maker and date
Patrick Pollen, 1954Reason for highlighting
Rosslyn Chapel, formerly known as the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew, was built in the 15th century and is one of Scotland’s treasures. The Sacristy beneath the main body of the Chapel is believed to be of an earlier date and is of a relatively plain construction, compared to the flamboyance of the main Chapel. However, it holds a treasure in the form of the only window in Scotland by Patrick Pollen.
Artist/maker notes
Patrick La Primaudaye Pollen (1928-2010) was a distinctive artist in several media, drawing and mosaic among them, but principally in stained glass, in which he leaves a large corpus of work, some of it in Britain and the United States, but most of it executed for churches in Ireland between the 1950s and the 1980s.
Sources:
Patrick Pollen obituary by Louis Jebb, The Independent
Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass, revised new edition, edited by Nicola Gordon Bowe, David Caron & Michael Wynne (Irish Academic Press, 2021)
Other comments
The Chapel is in the care of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust was founded in 1995 to oversee the Chapel’s conservation. To mark its 25th anniversary the Trust commissioned a new stained glass window by Joe Tilson RA, one of the leading figures associated with the British Pop Art movement in the 1960s.