Gleaming from the past

Press, 14 April 1984, Page 20

Gleaming from the past

In the Light of the Past: Stained Glass Windows in New Zealand Houses. By Jock Phillips and Chris Maclean. Oxford University Press, 1983, 143 pp. $4O. (Reviewed by John Wilson) Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is that although the authors had to start from scratch, they have produced a volume which is both a pleasure for what it reveals and likely to stand as the definitive work in its field for many years. Anyone with an interest in New Zealand buildings must have been vaguely aware that stained glass was used extensively to decorate houses at different periods. But this awareness seldom went beyond a vague “that’s nice” reaction when a window was seen glowing through the dusk. There has been nothing to focus or refine this untutored appreciation of domestic stained glass. There are simply no earlier books on the subject. Realising this lack, the authors took to the road, looked, asked, pried about and took photographs, and came back with the pictures and information which provide the basis for this book. But the book is not a random collection of pretty windows. The authors have thought carefully about what they saw in houses up and down the country; they drew to the extent they could on works about domestic stained glass in other countries, and identified trends in stained glass design and styles which tell us much about

changing New Zealand tastes. The result is a book that is not only a delight to browse through, because its many pictures show us what is there, but is also informative. The text enables interested students of New Zealand architecture to identify particular windows as belonging to particular periods or styles or, in a few cases, as being the work of particular stained glass artists. This adds valuable historical dimension to the purely aesthetic appreciation of the windows which is all that has been possible up to now. The book does this without detracting from sheer delight in the colour and line of the windows. The windows pictured were all photographed “in situ” using available light. This has meant, inevitably, some lapses in photographic standards, which stand out only because the best of the photographs are superb, doing justice to the many magnificent windows they depict. “In the Light of the Past” provides a framework within which more detailed studies will almost certainly be undertaken — about particular styles of stained glass or particular stained glass artists. The further studies would probably not have been done had these two enterprsiing authors not first encouraged us to look more closely and carefully, with an historical as well as an aesthetic eye, at a neglected element of New Zealand’s architectural and artistic heritage.