ARTISTRY IN GLASS’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 12

ARTISTRY IN GLASS’

(from the London correspondent of "The Press”) A WANGANUIbom artist,. John Hutton, has been working in his London studio for almost 15 months on a commission by the Canadian Government to design and engrave 37 large glass panels to be used in the National Library and Archives, now being built in Ottawa. Mr Hutton Invented a machine to engrave glass with as much freedom and variation of texture as other artists get from pen and brush.

Using his “contraptions,” which he describes as “grinding wheels attached to flexible drives” and which look rather Heath Robinson, Mr Hutton engraved the 80 eight-feet glass panels which distinguish the new Coventry Cathedral. These took 10 years to complete, Two years ago, Mr Hutton was again in the news with a series of engraved glass panels for the new Shakespeare Library opened at Strat-ford-Upon-Avon. But he has not forgotten

how to draw and to paint and he does many preliminary sketches as studies for his glass work. Several Themes Two works inspired by the Canadian Commission were accepted by the Royal Academy for their current summer exhibition. The Canadian panels will be distributed thougbout three floors of the new Ottawa building. Each floor will have a theme.

The theme for the ground floor is world literature, and 15 panels in the front entrance now completed, depict Homer and Sappho, Plato and Sophocles, Horace and Virgil, flanked by Confucious, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy and Rabindranath Tagore. With the exception of the classical groups these figures are identified by literary clues in the form of miniature representations of a celebrated theme from each figure. At the foot of Shakespeare, for instance is a miniature detail showing Bottom and Titania. Canadian Visit Also on the ground floor will be six panels representing ‘the Spoken and Written Word.” Three have been com-

pleted and work is still in progress on the others.

On the first floor will be 9ft figures of Apollo and the nine Muses. These Mr Hutton is at present designing, mainly by means of chalk sketches on black paper.

The second floor will house the archives of Canada, and the glass panels here will be

figures of great Canadian explorers and some of the statesmen who united Canada. Most of the figures will be life-size. Later this year, Mr Hutton will visit Canada for three weeks to get the background on some of the explorers and statesmen he will portray. Mr Hutton has been given

much assistance In the project in his huge studio in St John’s Wood, by his wife. Marigold, and son, Warwick, who recently held a joint art exhibition in Cambridge with his father. The picture shows Mr Hutton'a Hamlet’s Ghoat”