This year has been an exceptionally busy one for the Charles J. Connick Foundation, with several important new developments that will further our aim of bringing the glorious work of Connick and his fellow artists and craftworkers to the attention of the widest public.

The Foundation is delighted to announce that, after several years of detailed research, Peter Cormack’s book Charles J. Connick, America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist will be published by Yale University Press (of New Haven and London) in June 2024. The author of Arts & Crafts Stained Glass (published by Yale in 2015), Mr Cormack is a leading historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century stained glass who first became interested in Charles Connick’s work in the 1980s, when he explored the significant links between Connick and the English artist Christopher Whall. The new book, which is the first comprehensive account of Connick’s career, will be richly illustrated with photographs of many of the artist’s most important commissions in buildings throughout the USA, as well as archival images of the Connick studio and its personnel. Its twelve chapters tell the story of Connick’s remarkable progression from early poverty in rural Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh to becoming the USA’s most renowned twentieth-century artist, craftsman and educator in stained glass – described by Lewis Mumford as the ‘modern master’ who had ‘brought into dozens of contemporary churches the ecstatic brilliance of the early medieval windows’. The book will be available through the Yale University Press website – yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300272321/charles-j-connick – and can also be pre-ordered from leading bookstores.

The Connick Foundation has recently received a very significant donation of fifty stained glass windows, which were made by Connick and his studio colleagues for the ‘Play Room’ of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. The windows were commissioned in 1926 by Marianna Procter Matthews (daughter of the co-founder of Procter & Gamble) for the newly-built Hospital, which was designed by her architect son, Stanley Matthews. Each window depicts characters from literary works popular with young people, including Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Mother Goose and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Some years ago, the windows were removed and carefully stored when a new hospital building was constructed. The Connick Foundation is most grateful to the CCH Trustees for this magnificent gift, which movingly embodies Connick’s ambition to create stained glass for people of all ages and with a wide range of unusual subject-matter. The Foundation’s Directors are planning to make these splendid windows available for public display in suitable institutions.

Readers of this newsletter may recall that the City of Newton, MA, decided last year to replace the former Newtonville Library – which housed two superb Connick windows illustrating poems by Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost – with a new Senior Center building. Whilst many will regret the loss of the fine neo-Colonial style Library (designed by Connick’s friend Donald Robb), the Foundation, in negotiation with the City of Newton, agreed to oversee the conservation of the Connick windows, which will to be carried out by an expert conservation studio, prior to their re-installation in the new building. The pair of windows was a gift to their local library from Charles and Mabel Connick, who were both present at the dedication ceremony in December 1939, when Connick’s friend Frost read some of his poems.

With several exciting new projects, this year has been especially demanding on the Foundation’s resources. We trust that donors will continue their generous support of our activities. All your contributions are deeply appreciated and will ensure that Connick’s adventures with light and color will continue to inspire future generations.

The Connick Foundation Directors wish you a light-filled Holiday Season.