Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

fragments as being from the Archbishop of Paris’s palace, which was ransacked in the
Revolution of 1830. 91 This seems more likely. But what is most remarkable about the glass
fragments is that they are just that, fragments.
The trade in Continental stained glass was as lively as that in carved wood and here too
the English could make the dubious boast of having collected more than any other country.
Today, in the ‘churches, country houses and museums’ of England ‘one may see examples of
glass-painting from most of the countries of Europe and of every period from the thirteenth
century onwards’. 92 Some collectors bought entire sets of windows others bought small roundels
as ‘cabinet pieces’. They chose them, like the carved wood, for their aesthetic qualities. What the
Loshes had was a collection of broken glass, some pieces just a few inches wide and none
amounting even to a whole figure or scene, probably picked up from the ground. These were
incorporated by Sara into the borders of the semi-abstract windows she commissioned from the
Newcastle glass maker William Wailes and had made to her own design. If their placement is not
random, there is no discernable order. The effect is more subtle but not unlike that of the
Waterloo souvenirs at Abbotsford, marking the point at which the life of the antiquary coincided
with a great moment of history, which is then woven back into autobiography. It is also, perhaps,
not fanciful to think that by rescuing these scraps of medieval glass from violence and placing
them in her church there is a gesture towards healing or redemption, the giving of new life to
artefacts as, in the church as a whole, resurrection and the life cycles of nature are the dominant
theme.
The end of the Antiquarian Interior
Arguably the antiquarian interior never came to an end, indeed as ‘interior decoration’
developed in the second half of the nineteenth century into a significant element of middle-class
91
Lonsdale, Worthies of Cumberland, p.229.
92
Rackham, ‘English Importations of Foreign Stained Glass’, p.86.
196