Stained Glass Windows at Grace

Grace Church is fortunate that many of its original stained-glass windows, dating from 1866, are still in place.  Twenty of them were designed by William Gibson, who emigrated from Edinburgh and opened one of the first stained-glass workshops in America, in New York City, in 1833.  Although Gibson was prolific and successful, very few of his windows are known to have survived.  Thus, Grace Church may be the best place in the world to see the work of this master, who considered himself “the Father of Stained Glass in America.”

Please click on the thumbnail to see the larger photo.

How were they made?

Glass has been known since the second millennium B.C.E.  It is formed by heating together silica (usually sand), sodium carbonate (often from wood ash), and calcium oxide (lime).  Adding metallic salts or metallic oxides produced colors:  cobalt for blue, iron and chromium for green, sulfur or cadmium for yellow, and gold for red.  Such glass was known as pot-glass, and by the Middle Ages artisans had learned how to produce fairly thin, flat pieces of it.  Pieces could be joined using strips of lead, which allowed larger sheets to be assembled, just about the same time as Gothic-era architects began figuring out how to cut larger window openings into walls without having them collapse.

Pot-glass windows require a new piece of glass every time another color is needed, however.  Craftsmen experimented with adding paint to show further detail, such as fingers or facial features, but the paint tended to flake or rub off over time.  Glassmakers next came up with the idea of creating a vitreous enamel paint by mixing ground colored glass with a binder like gum-arabic.  After the paint dried, the glass was fired a second time.  The ground glass melted, the binder was driven off, and the design was permanently fused with the glass substrate.  This revolutionized the art of stained-glass, enabling multiple colors to co-exist on a single piece of glass and intricate designs to be executed.

Photographs by Grace parishioners Nancy Lowry, Doug Moore, and Ken Samonds.  All Rights Reserved.

The windows richly repay a visit in person, if you are able to make one.

For a more complete description and additional photographs, see Ken Samonds, A Slant of Light:  The Stained-Glass Windows of Grace Church (Amherst, MA:  Combray House, 2022).