As mentioned in Vidimus 66, the BSMGP Autumn Lecture will take place on Friday 11 October. The lecture, given by Michael Peover and Elise Learner, is entitled ‘The renewal of the painted glass at Strawberry Hill’ and opens at 6.15pm for a 6.45pm start.
Fig. 2. Restored Stained Glass in the Great Parlour at Strawberry Hill. © Richard Holttum.
When Horace Walpole created his gothic extravaganza of Strawberry Hill, his mix of Netherlandish roundels and English armorials reflected on a domestic scale the monumental windows of King’s College Chapel where in his time at Cambridge he had researched their painters. After two major reorganizations of his collection of painted glass, and the sale of much of the English glass, the ongoing restoration of his house presented the chance to display the glass as originally intended, and to recreate some of the lost items from surviving original designs. The recreated displays make use of newly discovered contemporary watercolour sketches and fragments of the original coloured glass employed in the settings [Fig. 2]. The strategies used in the conservation of roundels with faded and missing detail, and their mounts, will be described. A particular problem in the use of enamel paints is to achieve the intensity and hue of the original using modern equivalents, and results of recent research on their combinations with modern glass will be presented.
