Date:  July 21, 2008  |  

With a long and storied history dating back to the Middle Ages, stained-glass windows were traditionally used in churches as pictorial representations of scenes from the Bible to educate illiterate parishioners. The mouth-blown glass, which was colored with metallic salts, was painstakingly assembled between strips of lead and painted by hand, making the expensive and time-consuming process realistic only for the great cathedrals of Europe. However, the windows became more and more obtainable and affordable as technology improved, and by the Victorian era, a process called cathedral glass, by which the colored glass was poured and cooled on long metal tables, made the beautiful, hand-made windows available even for residential use.

It’s these turn-of-the-century geometric and floral residential windows, primarily from northern England, that antiques dealer Buford Blackwell has collected in his store, Blackwell Antiques in Bryant. “I always thought the windows were beautiful,” he says, “and when we began importing English antiques, they were a natural extension of that.” The windows were often used in homes’ façades, as sidelights or transoms and even in doors, because they allow in light but also provide privacy. However, as the Victorian homes were remodeled, the stained glass was removed in favor of more contemporary options, and the windows made their way to Arkansas, although the supply is becoming limited.

Still encased in their original frames, these glass creations are ideal to hang in a window or pass-though or on a porch. According to Buford, the highly sought-after pieces are those with the most color and the greatest number of individual glass pieces, and he cautions buyers against removing them from their frames. “They’ve been painted so many times, and they’ve been held in place so long, that you really need a professional to remove them,” he says.

Probably part of a set of stained-glass windows used to form a semi-circle, this geometric design with green and purple accents would have been used above a grand front door.	The pebbled texture of the cathedral glass method of making stained glass, which varies in size in this square window, was created when the glass cooled on a metal table, creating one smooth and one pebbled surface.
Varying in size and shape, these windows would have been made to coordinate with a series of windows in a home’s front façade, such as the transom above the door and sidelights flanking it.	Combining plain, textured and colored glass in a single window provides a surprisingly contemporary geometric design.