ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

1873. 217 The second window depicts St Editha as abbess. She is seen on the left,
surrounded by her nuns who are picking flowers to present to the Virgin and Child, on the
right.
The subject of the last window is St Editha and Marmion. On the left is William
the Conqueror presenting a charter to Marmion who holds the deed to Tamworth in the
next
light. The lights on the right show Marmion asleep and St Editha poking him with
her crozier. According to the legend Marmion evicted Editha’s nuns from their abbey
and in anger she haunted him in his dreams. In 1874 Brown's cartoon of
Abraham and
Isaac (see cat.
no. 92) was also used for one of the lights in the chapel of St George
located in St Editha’ s.
The designs appear to have caused some controversy as a letter from Dante Gabriel
Rossetti
to Jane Morris suggests:
Some of cartoons of Old Brown’s (made for Top’s [Morris’] firm)
are being
published in an architectural paper. Really I must say they are inconceivable.
Every figure (it is a long series) is passing one hand through the stone mullion
of the window into the next panel of glass!!-each panel containing one figure.
It is called the Story of St Edith. I must say if this series was what reduced
Top to desperation, I think every one would have sympathised with him
218
[replacing Brown as designer] if he had only shown the cartoons.
Evidently
not everyone thought Brown’s cartoons were badly conceived and at some
point between 1877 and 1878 Brown sold the cartoons to Charles Rowley of Manchester
(four of them are now at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester).
The three watercolour copies
of the windows were commissioned by J. R. Holliday, an
avid collector of Morris and Co. stained glass cartoons, from Thomas
Matthews Rooke
(1842-1942). According to a letter written in 1935 by G. S. Holliday
Mr Holliday
took photographs of [the windows] & enlarged them & prepared
them for Mr. Rooke … to colour from the originals. Mr Rooke spent some
weeks [at Tamworth] on the work (by special arrangement with Mr Holliday
who was satisfied that it was a good reproduction of the colour in the
windows themselves). 219
Rooke
worked as Burne-Jones' studio assistant from 1869 until the latter's death in 1898.
From 1878 until 1893 Rooke also spent half of his time producing watercolours for
Ruskin's project to record old buildings threatened with demolition or restoration. Rooke
was a talented painter in his own right and produced watercolours and oils of religious,
imaginative and architectural subjects. On the back of the board on the watercolour of
217
This cartoon is illustrated in op. cit. at note 158, p. 42 and Charles Nugent, British Watercolours in the
Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of Manchester: A summary Catalogue of Drawings and
Watercolours by Artists born before 1880, London, 2002, p. 64.
218
John Bryson and J. C. Troxell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris Correspondence, 1976, letter
50, p. 86.
219
Unpublished letter from G. S. Holliday to Dr Bonseer, 29 March 1935, BMAG.
287