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The mission of the Charles J. Connick Stained Glass Foundation, Ltd. is to promote the true understanding of the glorious medium of color and light and to preserve and perpetuate the Connick tradition of stained glass.


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Our 2023 Annual Letter:

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. Read More

ALERT! It has come to the attention of the Connick Foundation that certain stained glass firms are offering “free” advice to churches, which promotes needless and costly re-leading of their windows.  A word of warning.

The CF announces Honorary Director Peter Cormack’s recent, stellar book, Arts & Crafts Stained Glass. Purchase information and a review of Cormack’s book by the Foundation’s former president Albert Tannler may be found here. A review by trustee of the Scottish Stained Glass Trust Dr. Elizabeth Cumming may be found here.

At the 2019 Annual Meeting, the CF directors welcomed architect Lance Kasparian as a new director. The Foundation is very excited to have the benefit of his expertise and experience.

At the 2015 Annual Meeting, it was decided by the board to suspend most of the activities of the Foundation, including tours, lectures and newsletters, in order to devote all possible resources to the publication of a much needed book about Charles J Connick, his studio and his art. We are delighted that our friend, Peter Cormack MBE, FSA, HonFMGP, Vice-President of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, has agreed to this project. Details and updates will appear here as warranted.

Inquiries regarding the records of the Charles J Connick or Connick Associates Studios should be made directly to the Connick Collection of the Boston Public Library Fine Arts Department or the Connick Collection of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Rotch Library.

The Boston Public Library holds the extensive document and design archives of the Connick Studio, as well as panels, photographs and other studio artifacts. Many Connick designs are available to view online. To examine correspondence, files or other pieces of the collection, please contact the Fine Arts Department 617-859-2275; fineartsref@bpl.org.

The Connick Collection at MIT’s Rotch Library has been digitized and is accessible online. This collection includes job files, which are a good starting point for researching your windows. To view original items, please contact MIT at 617-324-9773 to make an appointment.

The Charles J. Connick Stained Glass Foundation, Ltd.

Orin E. Skinner, Founder
DIRECTORS AND OFFICERS
Marilyn B Justice, Acting President    Theresa D. Cederholm     Judith G. Edington
Jeremy J.H. Grubman    Charles S. Hayes    Lance Kasparian     David A. Martland
Ann Baird Whiteside
Kristin Knudson, Clerk
HONORARY
Peter D. Cormack    Jonathan L. Fairbanks    Elizabeth B. Johnson
EX OFFICIO
Chris Donnell   Kristin Parker

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New Book from Peter Cormack – Charles J. Connick: America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist

Charles J. Connick: Americas Visionary Stained Glass Artist by Peter Cormack

Charles J. Connick: America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist
by Peter Cormack

Peter Cormack, Charles J. Connick: America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist (to be published by Yale University Press, New Haven & London, summer 2024). Available from Yale University Press.

Read Peter’s blog: https://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2024/05/15/charles-j-connick-stained-glass/

For some years, British art historian Peter Cormack has been researching the life and work of Charles J. Connick, the foremost American stained glass artist of the twentieth century. Here is a brief summary of his new book, which will be published in the USA on June 25th:

Detail of window (1915) at Congregational Church, Marion, MA

Detail of window (1915) at Congregational Church, Marion, MA

Although Charles J. Connick (1875-1945) primarily worked in stained glass, this account of his life and work is wide-ranging and focuses on him not only as artist and craftworker but also as a significant twentieth-century cultural figure in America, whose friends included the poets and writers Robert Frost, Sherwood Anderson, Joseph Auslander and John Holmes, as well as leading architects such as Ralph Adams Cram, Charles Maginnis and Harold Whitehouse. His patrons ranged from Delia McCabe, a domestic servant in New York City, to some of the most celebrated names in US business and industry (the Heinzes of Pittsburgh, the Procters of Procter & Gamble, the Crockers of San Francisco and the daughter of the founder of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, et al.) and notable political figures, such as Boston’s notorious Mayor James Michael Curley.

Detail of Holy Grail window (1919) at Procter Hall, Graduate College, Princeton, NJ

Detail of ‘Holy Grail’ window (1919) at Procter Hall, Graduate College, Princeton, NJ

In many ways Connick’s life-story is quintessentially about the ‘American Dream’. Born into poverty in rural Pennsylvania and having received very little formal education, he rose to become the undoubted leader of his art in America, with an international reputation and the award of honorary degrees from Princeton and Boston universities, as well as medals and other distinctions from international exhibitions and professional institutions.

In its examination of Connick’s career as a stained glass designer and master-craftsman, the book encompasses the profound influences of medieval art – especially the windows of the great European Cathedrals (Chartres, Paris, Rheims, Canterbury, York, etc.) – and of the British Arts & Crafts Movement, with which he had close and fruitful connections. Yet Connick was decidedly not – as he has sometimes been wrongly characterised – a ‘Gothic Revivalist’. He was committed to a modern vision of his chosen art form and, in his mature works, developed a wholly convincing idiom in design and technique that was boldly graphic and dynamic while also enriched by traditional technique and materials.

William Blakes poem Tiger, window

William Blake’s poem ‘Tiger’, window (1928) at Peirce Hall, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH

He was especially concerned to create windows that would resonate for his contemporaries, and introduced specifically American themes never previously represented in stained glass – notably at Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh. An avid reader of classic and modern literature, Connick loved to depict literary subjects, whether on an epic scale, as at Princeton University Chapel, or on the more intimate and domestic scale of his glazing scheme at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

Amongst the many ecclesiastical commissions that were undertaken in his studio (at 9 Harcourt Street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood), which was organised in accordance with Arts & Crafts precepts, are major glazing schemes for St John the Divine Cathedral and St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York and for Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Connick himself was a charismatic communicator about the history and practice of his craft: he lectured throughout the country and his 1937 book Adventures in Light and Color, widely recognised as a classic of craft literature, was praised by Lewis Mumford, who spoke of the ‘ecstatic brilliance’ that Connick’s windows had brought to American churches.

Detail of St Hilda of Whitby (1933) window at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA

Detail of ‘St Hilda of Whitby’ (1933) window at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA

Connick’s stained glass can be seen throughout the United States, in religious buildings, universities, schools and libraries, business offices and in private homes and many examples are illustrated in the book. They are, in the author’s words, ‘among the nation’s greatest cultural treasures’.

Peter Cormack MBE, FSA, HonFMGP, is the former Curator of the William Morris Gallery, London, where he researched and organised many exhibitions on William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Vice-President of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, Honorary Brother of the Art Workers Guild and Honorary Curatorial Adviser for William Morris’s country home, Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. His books include Arts & Crafts Stained Glass (Yale University Press, 2015) and The Stained Glass Work of Christopher Whall (Charles J. Connick Foundation & Boston Public Library, 1999).

Pioneer Farmer and Cougar detail of window (1937) in Heinz Memorial Chapel, Pittsburgh, PA

‘Pioneer Farmer and Cougar’ detail of window (1937) in Heinz Memorial Chapel, Pittsburgh, PA

This book is listed on Christies “The Best Art Books to Look Out For” in 2024.

Virgin Mary detail of window (1931) at Church of the Covenant, Erie, PA

‘Virgin Mary’ detail of window (1931) at Church of the Covenant, Erie, PA

2023 Annual Letter

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.