The following articles are reproduced with kind permission from from The Artist's & Illustrator's magazine and The Artist magazine. The second piece is take from an article by Ian McKay on the history of glass painting and has been transribed below.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Gainsborough is one of many artists who enjoyed painting on glass. As an encouragement to other painters to try this art form for themselves, Ian McKay looks at the history of the technique Some of the earliest examples of painting on glass are to be found in the remnants of ancient Egypt. Artists there used glass as a support for paintings in gold. In the middle ages gold leaf was adhered to glass to embellish the paintings on windows and ornaments and still today a small number of artists employ similar techniques to explore the possibilities of painting on a glass support. whilst glass painters are well known in the field craft and the applied arts, those who work within the context of the fine arts are fewer and far between. But Gainsborough was one of many who, at the height of his career, saw the potential for painting on glass and, as we shall discover, he was by no means alone. Known examples of painted glass from the British Isles date from around the latter part of the 16th century. Glaziers of this period began painting glass either as an alternative or as an enhancement of their stained glass windows. Louis XIII of France contributed to the use of painted glass when during the war of 1633-6 he ordered the destruction of the glass furnaces of Lorrraine. Glaziers all over Europe began using white glass and decorating it with colours by enamelling. As Michael Quinton Smith has shown, 'designers, no longer restrained by the need to lead together irregularly shaped pieces of various coloured glass, felt themselves free to imitate pictorial styles current in contemporary easel painting.' By the 1700s windows throughout England were installed and admired. By the mid-18th century, many examples within Oxford colleges were renowned for their high quality and innovatory style and in 1782 Sir Joshua Reynolds designed the west window of New College Chapel, which was actually constructed by Thomas Jervais. Gainsborogh may be seen, however, as one of the first artists to have realised the potential in glass as a fine art medium. Whilst Reynolds' works in New College Chapel did function as both paintings and windows, they are first and foremost decorative articles of the applied arts and were probably conceived as such. Gainsborough was approaching glass from quite a different angle. He had witnessed an exhibition of work on glass by Jervais, possibly the one devoted to 18 small works, mostly effects of candlelight and moonlight, which was held in London in the early 1780s. Both Reynolds and Gainsborough had been suitably impressed around the same time by Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon which was on display from 1781. As John Sunderland has explained, the Eidophusikon or 'image of nature' was 'a small scale animated stage - set with sound and lighting effects used to present literary stories and sublime landscape phenomena.' Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was primarily a landscape painter pre-occupied with themes of the Sublime or Picturesque. His first engagements in London had been a result of his friendship with David Garrick who helped him become a scene designer in the theatre. He never realised the true potential of glass as a support for paint however (a crucial feature of the Eidophusikon), and in later life lapsed into the field of pharmacy and faith-healing. Gainsborough, on the other hand, saw the unique potential of this medium and set about designing his exhibition box, or show box as it has come to be known. The show box, now residing in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is a closed wooden construction with a lens which may be animated to suggest distance in painted glass transparencies which are lit by candlelight, diffused behind a fine silk screen. Whilst Gainsborough is celebrated as the inventor of such a construction, there had nevertheless been many excursions by painters into the potential of such a viewing-aid. The earliest may have been Alberti's own which he made in 15th century Italy. The Florentine humanist is most celebrated for his theoretical writings and, for the most part, historians have passed over his little experiment, mistaking it for a camera obscura. John Taylor too, an amateur landscape painter, had experimented with a similar device in the 1760s but with less success, and so the first major realisation of painting for its own sake on a glass support may be recognised as Gainsborough's. The show box in the V&A has with it seven glass paintings which show a variety of experiments with lighting techniques. From a River Scene with a Boat and Woodland Scene with Tree Stump, to the Downland Scene with River and Bridge, probably the most revealing of the show box's ability to enhance an image, are slides such as A Cottage in Moonlight and Woodland Scene with Pond and Cattle. These images are an example of Gainsborogh's real joy in painting. Removed from any patronly pressure they are exquisitely relaxed and free sketches. Jonathan Mayne, who is responsible for probably the only known research into Gainsborough's box, has contributed the following to its celebration: 'In fact all the evidence suggests that when Gainsborough's intimate friends called upon him and sat and sipped tea, they were, perhaps without knowing it, assisting at the birth of some of the most original and attractive inventions. The show box, for all its air of being little more than an amusing toy, was in reality an important tool in the forging of Gainsborogh's late style in landscape.' The specific method that Gainsborough used in painting his glass plates is really very simple and not unlike the method of painting in oil on canvas. The oil paint was thinned with a hard resin varnish and applied in perhaps a more reticent manner than upon canvas for the reason that glass offers an incredibly fast surface. Artists everywhere during this period were experimenting with a variety of new methods brought about by a whole gamut of new industrial processes. Enamel on glass was another method which had grown in popularity upon the design and manufacture of purpose built kilns. Constance-Anne Parker has surmised as to why Stubbs, for instance, chose to experiment with enamel paint in the 1760s. 'Stubbs may have felt,' she says, 'that enamels are less changed by darkening and cracking than oils.' Stubbs continued to experiment with a set of pigments which would guarantee permanence and durability and though he preferred to work with them on copper plates, even there Parker encourages the view that he was pursuing a 'glassy' quality. Glass painting in the field of window decoration continued unbroken through the remaining years of the 18th century and well into the 19th whereupon workshops of the artsand crafts movement revived many methods of production which had been either abandoned or simply forgotten. Nevertheless, one of the most astonishing examples of glass painting in the 19th century is not in fact from the latter part of that century but conceived and executed in 1831. When Isaac Alexander Gibbs completed a pair of glass door panels, each with six scenes of classical ruins and gothic arcades, a European industrial revolution was still in its infancy. Artists travelling abroad on the grand tours still had to negotiate fatiguiing and often heroic journeys by coach or on foot, then by rail, as was soon to become the case. What Gibbs was to achieve in his window paintings was the depiction of a literary ideal, probably conceived for the purpose of decorating the house of a learned family well versed in the fine writing of romantic poets and subsequent travel itineraries of the day. In her research of the two windows held by Asprey's of London, Jane Holdsworth, manager of the antique glass department, has revealed that Gibbs was advertised in the catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (where he exhibited windows in the gothic style) as a designer and producer of windows at Camden Town. Of 14 children, three continued in the profession that their father had provided for them with Isaac Alexander junior continuing until the turn of the century. Little is known of Gibbs' technique, though it is likely that his methods differed little from traditional ecclesiastical glass painting methods for which he had been commissioned in the past. Didier Carpentier and Joel Bachelet have published an enlightening book on painting on glass which covers both these complex methods, including the etching employed by Gibbs for the vine leaf ornament on the side panels and as a far simpler direct painting technique with today's factory produced window of crystal glass. Apart from the oil application thinned with a hard resin varnish as favoured by Gainsborough (still an option for today's glass painters), there are probably three alternatives each providing a quite different result. 'Stained glass paints', otherwise known as transparent paints, are sold by craft shops more often than reular art stockists and are in actual fact merely coloured varnishes. Experimenting with adding pigments to varnishes is often problematic and costly though certainly this was the method that many glass painters of the past employed. Gold ceramic paints are another application which when dry take on a kiln-fired appearance. For quite a different result acrylic or gouache paints may be used. When painted on the reverse of the plate they necessarily are applied in reverse also, with detail work being laid on first and body colour last so that when the plate is turned and the unpainted, viewing side is shown, the paint may be enhanced by the depth and sheen of the plate itself and the detail work is the most prominent. Glass has to be scruplously cleaned and free from grease before paint is applied, for unlike canvas or other traditional supports, it has no tooth or grain to which the paint may adhere. Whatever one's favoured medium, as glass painter Jack Kramer warns, practise sessions will be essential. 'If you are already proficient in oil painting,' he says, 'you will find a new dimension when you try it on glass.' Essentially there are no dos and don'ts that cannot be ignored and should anything go wrong, the work may be removed from the pane with a sharp blade and a little patience. Of the more innovatory styles of contemporary glass painters, Alex Pearl offers encouragement with his very free and experimental compositions which exploit the very essence of painting on glass. Pearl employs a variety of paints and pigments from a water-based German pigment for glass and ceramics to ordinary household gloss. Showing his work regularly in London and abroad, it is the vital zestful depth that glass adds to his colours that attracts attention. Of late he has experimented with a series of 'fluid compositions' which he referes to as 'transparent palettes on which the paints mix themselves.' Whatever the desired outcome, clearly there is for the painter much to be revealed by painting on glass.
Further reading: Painting on Glass by Jack Kramer (Litton Educational Publishing, 1977); Painting on Glass by Carpentier & Bachelet (EP Publishing, 1982); By Hammer & Hand Crawford (Ed.) (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1984); Women Stained Glass Artists (William Morris Gallery, 1984).