View allAll Photos Tagged window
This photo has been published in the book xgray vision 2008, which is available for purchase through my my online bookstore at blurb.com.
St Peter, Nowton, Suffolk
Nave, north aisle windows. Continental and English glass, 16th and 19th Century.
To stand at Nowton church, or the almshouses where the friendly keyholder is, you would not think that we could be so close to Bury St Edmunds. Here, in rolling west Suffolk, woods and copses hide the next parish in any direction, creating an intimacy that is not belied by the occasional hazy distant view from a ridge or hilltop. Nowton church sits on one particular hill, a long track leading up from the nearest road into the silence of its tree-shrouded churchyard, an oasis of lush botanical green in the agricultural expanses.
A mile or so off in the Bury suburbs is Nowton Country Park, one of the main recreational areas of the town, and the former grounds of Nowton Hall. The Hall was the home of the fabulously wealthy Oakes family, and in 1811 Elizabeth Frances Oakes, wife of Orbell Ray Oakes and Lady of the Manor, died at the age of 42. She was buried in Nowton church, which must have been a very plain and ramshackle structure in those Georgian days. However, over the next ten years something extraordinary happened here, as we will see.
Essentially, the church in which Elizabeth Oakes was buried was a 14th century building with surviving Norman details, before the Victorians went to work on it. Walking around it, the graveyard is a strikingly beautiful adornment, still with an air of the early 19th century, with the kind of trees that Lords of the Manor and Rectors-of-leisure liked to plant in those days, including a glorious cedar. Stepping inside, this is a pleasant, shipshape little church. All around are memorials to the Oakes family in the 19th and 20th Centuries, but it probably won't be them that catches your eye, because Nowton is home to one of the largest and best collection of continental glass in England.
Not far from Nowton is Rushbrooke, which in the early 19th Century was the home of the eccentric Colonel Rushbrooke, an avid antiquarian and carpenter who I am afraid was not above the odd spot of forgery. He refurnished Rushbrooke church in the manner of the Cambridge college chapel of his youth, giving it a Henry VIII royal arms into the bargain. Items that he collected can be found in several churches in the eastern counties, for Colonel Rushbrooke spent many happy months in the first decade of the 19th century trawling around the Low Countries and buying up wooden panels and painted glass from monasteries. Many of these monasteries had been closed and ruined in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the following Napoleonic Wars, and their treasures were easily acquired for the right price.
At this time, Orbell Ray Oakes was struggling with a way to make Nowton church into a more fitting and beautiful last resting place for his wife. His solution was to purchase perhaps as many as eighty continental panels from Rushbrooke. They were installed between about 1816 and 1820 by the Norwich stained glass artist Samuel Yarington, who was an expert in these matters, working with the Norwich antiquities dealer Christopher Hampp to supply and install continental glass, mostly depicting scriptural and allegorical subjects, to English churches, mainly in the Norwich area. In those days before the great revival of church art later in the century, most English churches were very plain, especially in puritan East Anglia, and in any case coloured glass of English manufacture was not easily come by. The installation of panels of continental glass would be an easy solution, and even a few panels would be an adornment to a simple church. The Nowton scheme, of course, goes much further than this.
The panels are to be found in every window except the west window. The panels in the east window are set in nine groups of five, the larger panel in the centre of each group and four smaller panels orbiting around it in a sea of Yarington's patterned glass. There is no obvious sequential order or theological structure, and so it must be assumed that Oakes' intention was purely decorative, to beautiful his wife's last resting place. The panels were reordered on two occasions later in the century as Nowton church was restored and extended, but the original configuration of the east window in particular was not altered much. There are slightly odd panels depicting knights on brasses by John Sell Cotman set at the base of someof the aisle windows. When the glass was restored in 1970, some panels from the demolished Dagnams Hall in Essex were added at the bottom of the east window to replace glass of Yarington's that had perished.
At the west end of the south aisle is the elegant memorial to Elizabeth Oakes by John Bacon Jr. It shows her praying against an angled tombchest on the other side of which are a cross and an open book reading Thy Will Be Done. Under the tower, a brass plaque tells us that this church was embellished & decorated with painted glass collected from the Monasteries at Brussels, an Organ erected with a Peal of Six Bells, at the Expense & Gift of Orbell Ray Oakes Esq. The inhabitants inscribe this tablet as a memorial of his liberality, 1820.
Orbell Ray Oakes died in 1837 as the Victorian era began, and his son Henry James Oakes, the new Lord of the Manor, bankrolled a considerable restoration of the church under the architect Anthony Salvin. The construction of a neo-Norman north aisle necessitated the moving of some of the panels, and possibly the acquisition of some more. The nave and chancel were essentially rebuilt and the building was reroofed. The elegant remains of the medieval screen were retained, and all in all this must have been a very shipshape little building by the end of the 1870s. The Oakes family continued to live in the parish at Nowton Court, built in the 1830s. In the 20th Century, Nowton Park was acquired by St Edmundsbury District Council. The last of the Oakes family is still alive today, in her nineties, but after her the dynasty will be no more.
Around the walls of the church, memorials recall members of the Oakes family, some dying out in the Empire, some of the younger ones falling on the battlefields of France in the First World War. But having said all this, I do think this building escapes being merely a mausoleum to the Oakes family. Perhaps it is the simplicity of their memorials, or the sense of life in the building, despite its remoteness. Even so, the overwhelming feeling is of the century that rebuilt it and adorned it, which is just as it should be.
I saw this before I even had my glasses on this morning, and went around the house taking photos as soon as I got up.
From the Richardson Complex open house this evening. So cool to finally see the inside of this place!
East window in All Saints' church, Waldringfield, Suffolk. Attributed by Birkin Haward to Lavers & Barraud. c1864. This window, showing the Baptism of Christ, the Crucifixion and the Last Supper was installed in the church during the Victorian reconstruction of the 1860s.
It is sometimes referred to as the Coprolite window, as the restoration was financed from the profits of the local Coprolite trade, a thriving business at the time, in which nodules were dug out of the glebe lands, washed on the nearby beach, then transported by barge down the Deben to Ipswich, where it was mixed with sulphuric acid to make an early form of superphosphate fertiliser.
Willemswerf Building
Rotterdam, TheNetherlands
Enjoy Flicker's machine tags:
document, text :)
As much as they get it wrong sometimes, the words can help one visualize a photo in a new and creative way.
Councillors Lounge room in Edinburgh City Chambers.
Sir Walter Scott writing in 1827 stated; "Sir Sic itur ad Astra; This is the path to heaven. Such is the ancient motto attached to the armorial bearings of the Canongate, and which is inscribed, with greater or less propriety, upon all the public buildings, from the church to the pillory, in the ancient quarter of Edinburgh which bears, or rather once bore, the same relation to the Good Town that Westminster does to London"
I guess the Stained Glass refers to Holyrood Abbey which was found in 1128 and hence refers to the Canongate area of Edinburgh.
The Legend states that in 1127 while King David I was hunting in the forests to the east of Edinburgh during the Feast of the Cross, he was thrown from his horse after it had been startled by a hart( deer). Tthe king was saved from being gored by the charging animal when it was startled either by the miraculous appearance of a holy cross descending from the skies, or by sunlight reflected from a crucifix which suddenly appeared between the hart's antlers while the king attempted to grasp them in self-defence. As an act of thanksgiving for his escape, David I founded Holyrood Abbey on the site in 1128.
Looking south to the North York Moors National Park. The columns and radiating roof beams are of laminated Austrian spruce.
One of two matched sets of choir stalls faces into the body of the church, from which the nuns chant for five hours each day, no doubt grateful for the built-in misericords. The stalls are of sycamore wood and were designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley. John Griffiths of ooma:design in Bath made them.
Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, North Yorkshire.