First Draft

We've had a first draft of a week here in York.  We didn't experience it off the top of our heads, oh no, but, though it was fairly well planned, it was in fact the first run-though, and I think we all identified ways in which the next draft, the week coming up, will benefit from what we learned in the first.  A second draft should not be a tweaked first, that would be boring, but it should have the first's heart beating inside it.

It's a good heart, and worth preserving.  We walked until our legs and feet were sore.  We stared upwards until our necks were sore.  We squinted in dark corners of churches and shaded our eyes on brightly sunlit walls and towers.

There will soon be several posts (now just through their first drafts) to this blog detailing and commenting on some of these experiences.  I here offer one of my own.

Anne? 

My studies in York, back in the early modern era of the 1970s, were entirely focused on the medieval period.  The churches I admired were all active during the first centuries of the last millennium and have had their current form, more or less, for 600 years.  But in these churches, life has gone on, day by day, births, marriages, deaths, through all those centuries.  About halfway along in that time, in the second half of the 18th century, there lived, in the parish of St Martin cum Gregory, a painter named William Peckitt and his wife Mary, nee Mitley.  William was a famous painter, mostly of glass.  His techniques were those of painting on porcelain, so window paintings look like luminous canvases, very different from their medieval counterparts, where line was lead, and color came from the glass itself instead of from paint on the glass.  Pekitt has magnificent windows in the Minster and in Cambridge Colleges.  He also helped to maintain the Minster glass.

Memorial Window Inscription

In the humble and settled little parish church through whose ancient door he and Mary walked with their family in all weathers most every Sunday for 50 years, he has painted a memorial window for two of his daughters who died before their time, Anne as an infant and Charlotte at age 20.  The window shows an adult female figure pointing upward to an infant female figure who in turn is pointing upward to heaven.  I think the infant is Anne.

One window further north is a memorial painted by Mary (though she does not write her name), William's "afflicted" widow, in 1796, a year after William's death.  Mary very clearly was a stained glass artist in her own right, probably working her entire life as a respected member of her husband's studio.  The Peckitt style painting in the central light is impressive enough, but around it are compositions in colored leaded glass, original in design and remarkable in composition, that show her to have been something of a genius, many years ahead of her time.

From Side Light of the William Peckitt memorial window, designed and executed by Mary Peckitt

The photos in this post are from a remarkable collection of glass photographs by Gordon Plumb.