Louis Davis and James Powell & Sons, Benedicite windows (1910), St Colmon Parish Church, Colmonell, South Ayrshire.

Photo: St Colmon Parish Church

Louis Davis and James Powell & Sons, St Louis of France, detail of Benedicite windows (1910), St Colmon Parish Church, Colmonell, South Ayrshire.

Photo: St Colmon Parish Church

St Colmon Parish Church, Colmonell, South Ayrshire

Address

St Colmon Parish Church, Manse Rd, Colmonell KA26 0SA

Highlight

Three lancet Benedicite windows above the pulpit

Artist, maker and date

Louis Davis and James Powell & Sons, 1910

Reason for highlighting

A fantastic example of Louis Davis’s work. Although each of the three lights is a separate design, each interacts with the other with a rhythm that unifies the whole design.

Other comments

Before he received the commission for the Benedicite windows Davis had already made a single light, Nativity window (1903) and windows for the porch and the organ chamber (1910). Shortly after completing his work at St Colmon, Davis worked on his most famous commission, the six magnificent choir windows at Dunblane Cathedral. A war memorial window, also made by Powells, was added in 1919-20.

Davis’s window is complimented on the north wall by a window on the theme of The Good Shepherd by Douglas Strachan c.1925.

Artist/maker notes

Louis Davis (1860-1941) was an English watercolourist, book illustrator and stained-glass artist. As Cormack notes, “Amongst English artists of the Arts and Crafts progressive school of stained glass, only Louis Davis approached Christopher Whall’s pre-eminent position. His most important commissions date from the decade or so before 1914, and almost all were for buildings in Scotland, although Davis always worked and lived in England.”

Sources:
Arts & Crafts Stained Glass by Peter Cormack (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2015)
Louis Davis on Wikipedia

James Powell & Sons was formed when James Powell purchased Whitefriars Glass, an old established glass works, in 1834. His sons developed the business to be one of the major firms of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Especially notable is their work with Charles Winston in the 1840s and 1850s to improve the quality of glass available, and the many fine designers with whom they worked. The company’s innovations extended beyond stained glass, with the company developing a formidable reputation in a number of fields, including tableware glass, where Whitefriars Glass remains highly collectable. The stained glass department finally closed in 1973, and the company in 1980.

Sources:
James Powell & Sons, Whitefriars by Jacqueline Banerjee, PhD, Associate Editor, The Victorian Web
Victorian & Edwardian Stained Glass by Marta Galicki (Historic England, reprinted by Morris & Juliet Venables, 2001)

Highlighted dates at this location

1910 (Go to date search)