Joseph Edward Nuttgens - Stained Glass Artist    

[Notes extracted from his unpublished autobiography by Patrick Nuttgens and Anne Lindley]

For nearly seventy years Joseph Edward (Eddie) Nuttgens designed and made stained glass windows for churches throughout this country and occasionally abroad. No one is sure how many windows he made. There must be well over two hundred, varying in size from small single—light windows to huge windows with many lights and elaborate traceries, and in type from traditional figurative compositions to abstract unpainted windows in modern churches. The buildings in which his work is to be seen are mainly ecclesiastical they also include a University and some private houses.

Most of his windows are in Great Britain, though there are a few in New Zealand and British Columbia and there is also a big window in Hong Kong Anglican Cathedral. He has also carried out commissions for other artists; Early on in his career he discovered a talent for doing people’s work in their own style. In particular he designed and made a number of windows for Herbert Hendrie, who had worked in London and later became Head of the School of Design at Edinburgh College of Art. Of the huge windows in the transepts of the Anglican Cathedral at Liverpool, those in the south transept are by Hendrie himself; those in the north transept were designed and made by Eddie Nuttgens in Hendrie’s name. Of his own works outstanding examples include the great East Window in St. Ethelreda’s, Ely Place, Holborn, the east window in the recent Catholic Church at Hucknall, near Nottingham, and a small but vivid window in the Catholic church at Ebbw Vale in South Wales.

  He was born in Aachen in 1892, the son of a German tailor’s cutter who bad worked in various European capitals. His mother was English. They moved to London four years later, starting in Willisden Green, and then moving on to Shepherds Bush, Tooting and Cricklewood. His first school was a convent in Hammersmith Broadway, and he later moved to an elementary school in Streatham, leaving at the age of fourteen.

  His first job was as an office boy with a. house agent on Baker St., starting in 1906. He next became a hand at “The Decorative Sandblasting Company. He worked there for six months earning five shillings a week and was “most miserable”. Having discovered a talent for drawing he began to attend evening classes at the Harrow School of Art, and for eight years until the Great War continued to attend them, especially the life classes and classes in portrait drawing and painting.

  His involvement with stained glass arose from his obtaining a job as a draughtsman with Arthur Anselm Orr, in1907 (or 1908), Orr was a freelance glass designer who had worked with the great firm of Hardman’s. He worked for Arthur Orr for five years, mainly drawing in backgrounds and borders. But Orr did not make the windows himself. Eddie Nuttgens therefore took classes in stained glass at the Central Schools in Southampton Row. He was profoundly influenced by Christopher Whall whose book Stained Glass, edited by Lethaby, was first published in 1905. Wha1l insisted on the importance of glass for its own sake; in his view it was essential to handle the glass itself and not merely design for it. It followed that all draughtsmen in the trade should in due course become masters themselves.

  Such a view was in direct conflict with the powerful tradition that had been built up with the revival of stained glass in the 19th century. In a minority of the more fashionable cases it had become the practice for a well—known artist to make designs for stained glass which were then carried out by skilled but uncreative craftsmen. But the bulk of the work was both designed and made by a number of great firms who produced the vast quantity of windows that the prolific church building era of the 19th century required. Their heyday was between 1850 and 1900. They were firms often started by an artist but quickly geared to a system of mass production based upon the division of labour. Clayton and. Bell’s were at one time said to turn out the equivalent of a window a day and. two on Sundays. Hardman’s of Birmingham, often used by Pugin, was perhaps the greatest of these stained glass firms.

  Against this system, with its designers, cutters, painters and. glaziers, voices like that of William Morris in the 19th century, calling for the unity of the artist and the craftsman, were sporadically heard, and rarely, even in Morris’ own case, acted upon. In 1911 Eddie Nuttgens was introduced to a remarkable attempt to correct this situation and enable artists to carry out their own work without incurring the capital cost of setting up a major workshop_. This was the Glass House in Fulham, founded by Miss Lowndes and Mr. Drury and later (after the Great War) renamed after them when the phrase “Glass House” began to have a more sinister meaning. It consisted of five studios with associated cutting, glazing and firing shops, enabling an artist who obtained a commission to hire a studio, work out the design fully, select and paint the glass and. supervise the whole operation. Among the artiste who used the facilities were Karl Parsons (who bad taught him at the Central Schools), Martin Travers (whose assistant he became), Wilhemina Geddes (whom he clearly considered the outstanding artist of them all), Herbert Hendrie and. Henry Holiday.

  In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the Great War, he was arrested. Having been born in Germany, though not speaking German, he was interned; his younger brother, who had been born in England, was called up into the British army and his father, who really was German, was left free.

He was first sent to Frith Hill Camp near Frimley, Surrey. (Some pictures from Frimley) and then on to Stobs Military Camp near Hawick in Scotland. (More about Stobs)

This characteristically English situation came to an end after about a year, during which he had started to draw and paint portraits of his fellow prisoners in the camp and had an order list which would have kept him busy for most of the war. He returned to Martin Travers as his chief assistant until 1922. For a few months he was instructor in stained glass at the Royal College of Art, but was asked to leave when it was discovered that he was not English.

  In 1922 he moved to Chipping Campden as a glass painter in the studio of Paul Woodroffe, The Cotswolds and Chipping Campden were a new and wholly absorbing experience. He married Kathleen Clarke, who was tutoring Woodroffe’e son; she had been a member of the Sinn Fein party in Ireland. She studied at the National University of Dublin and had taken some part in the rising of 1916. They moved in 1924 to Buckinghamshire — at first to two rented rooms in a farmhouse at Cobblers Hill, then to Whiteleaf, and finally to North Dean and, after the death of his first wife, to Pigotts Hill, where his house end studio stand, at the top of the hill.

  At Pigotts he met Eric Gill, who had moved there from Wales in 1928. Gill’s work and writings have been only an indirect influence on him, but it is an influence complementary to his own attitudes and thought. In his twenties he became an avid reader. His favourites were Thoreau’s Walden, Kropotkin, Chesterton, Belloo and the HammondsAt the slightest encouragement he would read out passages from Cobbett.

  Kathleen died in 1937. In 1940 he married Daphne Reid, who had studied at the Royal College of Art and worked in a land colony inspired by the ideas of Distributism.

During the Second World War, when stained glass windows were naturally in very slight demand, he was forced to let the house and studio to officers from the nearby Bomber Command at Walters Ash. For a few years he wandered with Daphne and his growing family around the country, staying in various farm cottages and. doing odd jobs to make a living. But after the war there was a relative boom in stained glass work, and. the majority of his windows date from the late forties and, fifties. He continued to make windows up till his death in1982, although there were periods of inactivity when demand almost ceased.

  He had twelve children, most of them artists or teachers, and forty-five grand children.