1 2 Mr. James Taylor on 



remains to be done in the furtherance of this attractive form of 

 art. Many popular misconceptions call for correction, and the 

 warfare against the traffic in commercial glass must be carried on 

 almost as relentlessly as ever. The notion that modern craftsmen 

 should model their designs after those of medieval times is still 

 widely held, and although the commercial houses have been com- 

 pelled to raise the general standard of their work, both as regards 

 colour and design, it still remains true that a large proportion of 

 present-day work is entirely destitute of aitistic value. Real 

 progress will only be possible when the public come to under- 

 stand that stained glass is a decorative art whose expression and 

 application alike are governed by technical conditions, and that 

 the glass painter cannot enter into any sort of rivalry with the 

 painter in oils or water colours. The uninitiated invariably 

 insist on obtaining the effects of pictorial art, but this is exactly 

 what the glass painter cannot supply. The primary object of a 

 window is to admit light and to exclude the atmospheric elements, 

 and the decorative possibilities of the glass are secondary to that 

 object. In so far, indeed, as the glass painter is a genuine artist, 

 his work will frankly recognise and turn to good account the iron 

 bars and lead lines which the untrained mind would so gladly 

 dispense with. Knowing the technical limitations under which 

 his material is applied, his chief concern will be to enhance the 

 beauty of the glass itself. Window decoration of the best kind 

 has always been, and is still, a mosaic art, and the laws of mosaic 

 prevent the glass-worker competing on equal terms with the 

 painter in oil or water colours. To say so is not in any way to 

 despise the power of glass in the hands of a competent artist. 

 Every form of art is more or less limited in its application. The 

 painter in oil or water colours can never attain to the perfection 

 of rounded form produced by the sculptor's chisel, nor can the 

 glass-worker apply his colour with the subtle gradation of tone 

 demanded by the more complicated forms of pictorial art. His 

 composition is executed in innumerable pieces of coloured glass 

 arranged within a framework of arbitrary formation, and such a 



