St John’s Kirk, Perth
Address
St John's Kirk, St John's Place, Perth PH1 5SZRecommended by
Highlight
Great east windowArtist, maker and date
Douglas Strachan, 1920Reason for highlighting
Magnificent depiction of the Crucifixion spread across five lights, with the Last Supper across the lower part of the window.
Artist/maker notes
Robert Douglas Strachan (1875-1950) was born in Aberdeen and initially trained as an artist. Indeed Strachan admitted later in life that he had been slow to realise that stained glass would be the best outlet for his artistic vision. It was a vision that enabled him to become the foremost British stained glass artist of the generation after Christopher Whall. From 1909 to 1911 he was head of the Crafts Section at the recently founded Edinburgh College of Art, before handing over to his brother, Alexander, through pressure of work. His windows are found throughout Scotland and England, and are recognisable for their bold use of colour, and strong sculptural design and use of lead. Overseas he is renowned for his windows at the Peace Palace in The Hague, The Netherlands.
Sources:
In Praise of Douglas Strachan by Peter Cormack, Journal of Stained Glass, Vol. XXX, 2006
Arts & Crafts Stained Glass by Peter Cormack (Yale University Press for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2015)
ECA Glass Alumni Exhibition Catalogue, pages 11-12
Other comments
The church has produced an excellent booklet on the stained glass, ‘Through a Glass Brightly – The windows of St John’s Kirk, Perth’ (2000), which details its fine collection of 20th century stained glass from primarily Scottish artists, including a number by Herbert Hendrie (1926-37) and a graphic Black Watch Memorial window, 1955, by William Wilson.
Also of particular interest are three windows from lesser-known artists. The first two are the Ross window by Isobel Goudie, 1935, and a rare Scottish example of the work of the American artist, Harvey Salvin, whose City of Perth window was dedicated in 1975, at the end of a short period working at the Edinburgh College of Art.
The other is the three-light Shrine Window of 1925, designed by Morris and Alice Meredith Williams, and made and painted by O’Neill Brothers. Both Williamses were talented artists, whose most viewed work is probably the bronze frieze for the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle (1927), for which Alice also created many other features, which led the memorial’s historian, Duncan Macmillan, to describe her as its “star sculptor” and “probably the most important woman artist of the 1920s”.
In 2020 Culture Perth & Kinross published an interesting article by Phyllida Shaw on the history of the commissioning of the Shrine window, and the other work of Morris and Alice Meredith Williams in the church. A tale of two artists and the Memorial Shrine of St Johns Kirk Perth.