Friday, April 18, 2008

Victorian Things: Stained Glass Window by Henry Holiday

"Moses Leaving the Court of Pharaoh," a stained and leaded glass window by Henry Holiday (1839-1927), was created in honor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in 1891. A larger copy of the same design was among the first windows installed in St Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia.

The window is illustrated in A. L. Baldry's Henry Holiday (London, 1930). Baldry notes that Holiday (DNB bio here; Wiki bio here) first travelled to America and Canada in 1890 where he "found many admirers who gave him the heartiest welcome, and where commissions sufficient to keep him busily engaged for a long time were offered him."

Having established his own glass works in January 1891, Holiday indulged his interest in Egyptian art and the life of ancient Egypt with the design for his memorial to Lee. The window may be intended as an allegory of Lee's reluctant abandonment of the Union, which had trained him, in order to serve as a leader -- and ultimately as general -- of the Confederate Army. Another version, without inscription, can be seen at Ponsonby Church, Cumbria.

The window is 111 cm high by 55.5 cm wide (approximately 3' 7" by 1' 9"). Formerly the property of guitarist Jimmy Page, it sold at a Sotheby's auction in March for £22,100. Click on the image to see an enlargement.

Resources:

Holiday's Stained Glass Windows in Cumbria

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another version of the 'Moses...' window is in Durham Cathedral's South Transept, in memory of Sir Henry Manisty, High Court Judge.

Anonymous said...

I learned to know Henry Holida's art first in "The Hunting of the Snark" (1876). Now I search specialists, who perhaps know, whether there are any utterances from Holiday on Marcus Gheeraerts (the Elder and the Younger), because I think that he built his illustrations in the "Snark" on the etching "Allegory of Iconoclasm" (1566-1568).

See also: http://www.snarkdown.de/picscollection.pdf

best regards from Munich (Bavaria)
Goetz

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