Paperback, 80pp, profusely illustrated in colour. Glasgow Museums Publishing for the Burrell Collection, 2025. £10.00. ISBN 978-1-908638-49-6.
Available to buy online: https://shop.glasgowlife.org.uk/products/introducing-stained-glass
Reviewed by Sarah Brown, University of York
Written by curator of Medieval and Renaissance Art Edward Johnson, this new publication is welcome evidence of a reviving curatorial interest in the extraordinary stained glass in the Burrell Collection. Not long after Sir William (1861-1965) acquired the outstanding panels from the Carmelite church at Boppard, Wilfred Drake congratulated his friend and client on being the possessor of ‘the finest private collection [of stained glass] in existence’. This book is a visual celebration of some of the finest pieces in this collection, dwarfed in size only by the V&A in London and The Met in New York, but ceding nothing in quality and interest to either.
The text is organised chronologically from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, with standardised catalogue-style entries for each featured piece. These are interspersed with more discursive texts related to a selection of ‘Objects in Focus’. A helpful glossary of terms and a slightly uneven selection on ‘Further Reading’ complements the main text.
This format allows for an informative and thematic treatment of the selected panels and the readable text is supported by excellent illustration throughout. However, the rigidity of the catalogue structure creates its own problems. The panels illustrating the front cover (and p.20), for example, are documented as coming from the Augustinian Church in Erfurt, where much-restored companion panels remain on view, as the author explains. Panels illustrated on page 24 are firmly stated to have been ‘made in Switzerland’, while the roundel of a man playing an organ (p.28) is even more precisely identified as having been made in York. In neither of these instances is the basis for these attributions made clear, although elsewhere the catalogue entries abound with the qualifiers ‘possibly’ and ‘probably’. The technical descriptions also follow a standardised form, and only in the chapter on the seventeenth-century is this adapted to include the use of the term ‘enamel paint’, despite the fact new colouring techniques are heralded in the introduction to the sixteenth century and the early 16th-century Augsburg roundel illustrated (p. 59) clearly displays an early use of blue enamel. With the author now focussing his research on the collection (back cover), let us hope that in due course a full catalogue, on the scale of the magnificent Tapestries from the Burrell Collection by Elizabeth Cleland and Lorrain Karafel, published in 2017, might be forthcoming. This attractive and affordable book certainly whets the appetite!