Editorial

Welcome to the February edition of Vidimus. We hope it will provide plenty to interest you and a welcome distraction from this week’s very dark world news.

Our Feature is an explanation by David King of the varied glass at the National Trust’s Elizabethan House Museum in Great Yarmouth. The Feature is based on David’s long-term research for his forthcoming CVMA Summary Catalogue of Norfolk glass. David explains that the glass is mainly from the Netherlands, Germany and France, mostly dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The glass includes important fragments from the monastery at Steinfeld in Germany, and a collection of Dutch roundels, two depicting amusing genre scenes and the rest ships – well-suited to a museum in a maritime port with close links with Holland. 

In our News, we note with sadness the death in December of Jan Van Damme of the Belgian Corpus Vitrearum. We also share more memories of Patrick Reyntiens OBE, renowned as a collaborator of John Piper, who died last October.

Looking forward, we have news of the Stained Glass Museum’s Study Weekend in Kent, which has been postponed for the last couple of years but is now taking place from 21st-24th April 2022. The deadline for booking forms is 4th March, so please don’t delay! 

We also report a fabulous new acquisition by the Stained Glass Museum – the last window designed by Wilhelmina Geddes, just before her death in 1955, and made to her designs by Charles Blakeman in 1956.

We have a review by Dr Adam Sammut about an exhibition in St Paul’s Church, Antwerp, of two oil sketches by Abraham van Diepenbeeck, known as Rubens’ most truthful follower. The oil sketches depict the apostle Paul brutally stoned and scourged and are designs for two out of ten now lost stained glass windows in St Paul’s Church narrating the life of St Paul, commissioned in 1633 by the Dominican order.

Turning to books, Jasmine Allen discusses the special issue of Folia Historiae Artium (published in 2019 by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków) which focuses on the international study of 19th and 20th-century stained glass. Jasmine very helpfully analyses the many points of connection to be made across contributing essays. 

We also have notices of several new publications to tempt you: Les vitraux voyageurs, by Yvette Vanden Bemden; The Stained Glass Windows of Exeter Cathedral, a new booklet by Dr Stuart Bird, and Victorian Stained Glass by Trevor Yorke. 

As always, we welcome submissions for articles, notes and queries, news and reviews, so please do get in touch if you have something you’d like to submit for a forthcoming issue.

Finally, Vidimus will have a new editor from March, when Professor Sarah Brown, chairman of the Corpus Vitrearum (Great Britain) takes up the reins. 

Anya and Christopher will be focusing on their own research projects for longer term CVMA publications, although Christopher will also be staying on as part of the Vidimus team. Anya would like to say that she has very much enjoyed being part of the editorial team, and has learned a huge amount from her editing role.

Dr Anya Heilpern and Christopher Parkinson

Co-editors 

——————

On behalf of everyone at Vidimus, we thank Anya for her time, dedication and hard work, ensuring that high editorial standards have been maintained. She will be very much missed and we wish well with her research and hope that she will publish some of it in future editions of Vidimus!

Christopher Parkinson and the Vidimus team