H. Blairman & Sons Ltd

Designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98)

Manufactured by Morris & Co (1875-1940)

Stained glass and lead

6.5 x 4 m (approximately)

English (Merton Abbey), 1890-91

St James’s Church, Westmoreland Street, Marylebone (1891-1907); All Saints’ Church, East Twickenham (1907-2026); removed for safekeeping by the Diocese of London, 2026

A. C. Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle – A Catalogue (New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 1975), 70, 129, 191

Gavin Stamp, An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Junior (1839-1897) and the Architecture of the Late Gothic Revival (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2002), 142-144 (for St James’s Church)

A Frederick Hollyer platinotype of Burne-Jones’s original design is in the William Morris Collection at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 2000.5.2045 (see below).

The window has been removed from All Saint’s and a full conservation report, by Reyntiens Glass Studio, describing the history of the window, its context, and conservation requirements is available upon request.

The Good Shepherd

A stained glass window designed by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Bart. (1833-1898) and made by Morris & Company, Merton Abbey, 1890-91.

The Good Shepherd originally formed part of a three-light stained glass window installed at St James’s Church, Westmoreland Street, Marylebone. It was commissioned by the Souter family in memory of R. H. Souter, a parishioner of St James’s, which was sometimes known as the ‘Haweis Chapel’ after its incumbent, the Revd Hugh Reginald Haweis (1838-1901). Note 1 Burne-Jones and Morris & Company may have been commissioned to design and manufacture the window at the instigation of Haweis or his wife, the well-known writer, illustrator and feminist Mary Eliza Haweis (1848-1898), whose books on interior decoration championed the Morris firm’s products. Note 2

St James’s Church was a Georgian building – originally called the Tichfield or Welbeck Chapel – dating from the 1770s. It underwent a number of architectural elaborations in the Victorian period, including the addition of the Morris & Co. window (1890-91) of three lights in the church’s western (street-facing) elevation. All three lights were round-arched: the broad central light depicted the Good Shepherd within a sheep-fold populated by sheep and lambs and with a landscape background, whilst each of the flanking side-lights depicted an Angel playing a Lute.

Burne-Jones drew the preliminary scale-design Note 3 and the cartoons for the Good Shepherd and the two Angels playing Lutes in either late 1889 or early 1890. Note 4 An entry in Burne-Jones’s Account book (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) for 1st January 1890 records his charge of £140 to Morris & Company for his designs and cartoons for the window. Note 5 Although the full-size cartoons appear to have been lost, it is likely that they were photographic enlargements (made by Frederick Hollyer’s studio) from Burne-Jones’s original scaled designs, to which he would have added all the full-scale details to be copied by the glass-painters.

The stained glass was manufactured by Morris & Company at the firm’s Merton Abbey workshops during 1890-91. William Morris probably had some involvement in the initial selection of coloured glass, working with George Campfield (1828-1910), the long-serving foreman of the stained glass workshop. The actual painting on the glass was then carried out by John Henry Dearle (1859-1932), who painted both the Good Shepherd light and the left-hand Angel light, and by Thomas George Bowman (1836-1917), who painted the right-hand Angel. Note 6 It is certain that much of the glass would have been supplied by Messrs. W. E. Chance (of Oldbury, Birmingham) through their London agents James Hetley & Co. of Soho Square. Chance’s had made almost all the glass, especially the ‘ruby’ colours, used very extensively in the Burne-Jones/Morris & Co. chancel windows at St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham. These windows, the Ascension (1885), Nativity (1887-88) and Crucifixion (1888), along with the Last Judgement west window (1897-98), at Birmingham Cathedral are widely regarded as Burne-Jones’s most accomplished masterpiece in stained glass design, and arguably the supreme achievement of the nineteenth-century stained glass revival. Note 7

Both in style and technique, the Good Shepherd window is closely related to the Birmingham windows, with which it also shares a dominant colour-scheme of red (‘ruby’) and crimson glass. It reflects Burne-Jones’s particular interest in Byzantine and Early Christian art, an influence that was especially stimulated by his work on the monumental scheme of mosaic decoration (1881-94) for the American Episcopal Church of St Paul-within-the-Walls in Rome. Note 8 The elongated figure-drawing of Christ as the Good Shepherd, along with the stylised sheep-fold landscape and the quasi-tessellated blue sky, are all features found in the slightly earlier Birmingham windows, and which are derived from Burne-Jones’s inspirational study of Byzantine mosaics and other artefacts.

Although Morris & Company’s stained glass closely followed medieval precedent in both its technique and materials, its methods diverged from the ancient craft in one important respect, which was the use of a flesh-coloured vitreous enamel pigment for the painting of faces, hands and feet combined with ‘plating’, i.e. the application of an additional protective layer of clear or lightly-tinted layer of glass leaded over the flesh-painted areas. On close inspection – although not when the stained glass would be seen in its normal architectural context – this technique is clearly visible in the Good Shepherd window. Doubling of the glass within the same leading was also used by Morris to modify colours, e.g. to achieve a particular green tone in the landscape areas of the Good Shepherd window. There is evidence of Morris utilising this technique of colour-modification from at least the 1870s – for example, in the large south transept window of Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge – and the recent (2023) conservation of the Burne-Jones/Morris & Co. Birmingham Cathedral windows revealed many areas of both ‘protective’ and ‘tonal’ plating throughout the Cathedral’s three chancel windows and the west window. Note 9

The Morris & Co. three-light window of the Good Shepherd and Angels was only in its original installation at St James’s, Westmoreland Street, for less than twenty years. When the church was demolished around 1907, Note 10 the three lights of the window were returned to the dedicatee’s family. Miss Souter then gave the central light, The Good Shepherd, to the newly-built (by the architect J. S. Alder) All Saints’ Church, East Twickenham, where it was divided into three parts and installed in the three central lights of the large (five-light) west window; subsequently, Miss Souter gave the two side-lights of lute-playing Angels to her composer friend Cyril Scott (1879-1970). The Angels lights were at first installed in Scott’s London house, but in 1949 were given to the Methodist Chapel at Exford, Somerset. After the Chapel closed in 1979, both windows were removed and were subsequently acquired (in 1987) by the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery:

 https://whitworthcollections.manchester.ac.uk/collections/item/f294fbe3-fc17-348d-a9d5-23e99e3b4023/ and https://www.pubhist.com/w19705

The Good Shepherd remained as part of the west window of All Saints’, East Twickenham, until its removal, following the church’s redundancy, in 2026.

The Good Shepherd window is an outstanding example of Burne-Jones’s later stained glass, designed specifically for a prestigious central London location and embodying in its stylistic character and technical features many of the most significant developments in Burne-Jones’s mature career.

Note 1. Details of the commission are fully documented in A. C. Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle – A Catalogue (New Haven and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 1975), 70, 129, 191. For details of St James’s church, see: Gavin Stamp, An Architect of Promise: George Gilbert Scott Junior (1839-1897) and the Architecture of the Late Gothic Revival (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2002), 142-144.

Note 2. See the biography of Mrs Haweis by Bea Howe, Arbiter of Elegance (London: Harvill Press, 1967.)

Note 3. Photograph of Burne-Jones’s original design in the William Morris Collection at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, USA.

Note 4. Morris & Company’s ‘Catalogue of Designs’ assigned the Good Shepherd cartoon the reference numbers WB13, and the two Angels cartoons WB42 and WB47.

Note 5. See the two articles by Douglas E. Schoenherr in The Journal of Stained Glass: Burne-Jones Special Issue, Volume 35 (2011): ‘Edward Burne-Jones’s Account Books with Morris & Company (1861-1900): an annotated edition’, 78-183; and ‘Annotated checklist of Edward Burne-Jones’s designs for Morris & Company in order of entry in his Account Books’, 184-241.

Note 6. For details of Morris & Company’s craftsmen, see: Tony Benyon, ‘Stained glass workers employed by James Powell & Sons, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company and Morris & Company’, Journal of Stained Glass: Burne-Jones Special Issue 35 (2011), 242-256.

Note 7. For recent studies of Burne-Jones’s Birmingham Cathedral windows, see the two articles by Peter Cormack: ‘Stained glass by Burne-Jones and Morris & Company in St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham: “an event in the history of my connexion with the firm”’, Journal of Stained Glass, 47 (2023), 12-28; and: ‘Noble thought and work carried to the pitch of perfection’, William Morris Society Magazine (Summer 2024), 6-11.

Note 8. Burne-Jones’s American Church mosaics are discussed and illustrated in detail in Andrea Wolk Rager, The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones (London & New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 2022), 163-204.

Note 9. For technical details of Burne-Jones and Morris & Co.’s stained glass technique, see the articles by Peter Cormack cited in Note 7 and also: Steve Clare, ‘Divine Beauty: conservation of Burne-Jones windows at St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham’, Journal of Stained Glass, 47 (2023), 86-106.

Note 10. Some sources say the building survived until 1914, but c.1907 is the date given for its demolition in the recent Survey of London: South-East Marylebone, Vols. 51 & 52, (London: Yale University Press, 2017).

Peter Cormack MBE FSA HonFMGP

July 2026

Photography: Isabelle Davies

The photograph of the design courtesy of the Henry Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens