ALan Younger; stained glass artist
Hyfler/Rosner
May 31, 2004, Monday
Stained-glass artist, ever-conscious of his responsibility
to the buildings he worked in, whether great cathedrals or
small parish churches
Alan Younger, stained-glass artist, was born on March 13,
1933. He died on May 12, 2004, aged 71.
At a time when the craft of stained glass making seemed to
be losing its way,Alan Younger was one of its outstanding
exponents, working in the tradition of William Morris and
the Arts and Crafts Movement. The designs of his windows at
Westminster Abbey, at Durham and St Albans Cathedrals and
elsewhere was poetic, and their technique proclaimed his
careful joy in the processes of making.
Alan Younger was born in southeast London in 1933 and first
excelled as a sportsman before beginning his artistic
career. At Alleyn's School in Dulwich, and then at Rossall
(to where his school was evacuated), he was an accomplished
cricketer, and as a National Service subaltern in Egypt, he
played for the Combined Services Mediterranean team.
Although he rarely played cricket later, his prowess in
tennis and swimming was the envy of much younger friends.
After leaving the Army in 1953, he studied fine art at the
London County Council's Central School of Arts and Crafts
while simultaneously working as an assistant in the stained
glass studio-workshop of Carl Edwards (then at Apothecaries'
Hall in the City). Helping with Edwards's major commissions
at Liverpool Cathedral and the House of Lords gave Younger
valuable insights into how to design and organise
large-scale architectural commissions.
The new Coventry Cathedral windows by Lawrence Lee, Geoffrey
Clarke and Keith New, exhibited in London in 1956, made a
deep impression on Younger. His six years working with Carl
Edwards were followed by six in Lee's studio, where he
absorbed a more spontaneous glass- painting idiom, which was
equally adaptable to abstract or figurative treatment.
In 1961 he won first prize in the Worshipful Company of
Glaziers' annual competition, and in the following year he
was awarded the Glaziers' travelling scholarship. He bought
a small car and, with his wife and infant daughter, made an
intensive study-tour of medieval and modern stained glass in
France and Germany.
By 1966, when he set up his own London studio, his dozen
years of apprenticeship and study had fully equipped him to
begin an independent career.
His first notable commission, in 1967, was for the east
window of Boldre church, Hampshire, a semi-abstract but
tightly disciplined design, using the smouldering colours
and expressive lead-work that were to become characteristic.
Another early window, at Haselbech church, Northamptonshire,
was one of his own favourites and successfully blended
elements of abstraction with figures.
He was always conscious of the stained glass artist's
responsibility to the building which his windows are
supposed to adorn, whether a cathedral or a village church.
His Bede window in the Galilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral,
installed in 1973, for instance, demonstrates this
sensitivity to context and is a lesson to more strident
contemporary designers.
With only a few exceptions, he was responsible for all the
craft processes of selecting, cutting, painting and firing
the glass for his windows. Because he worked on his own, he
rarely made full size cartoons from which to paint his
glass, but instead worked directly from his preliminary
design at 1/12th scale, retaining the spontaneity of the
original conception and developing ideas not on paper but in
the glass, paint and lead themselves.
Clients and friends were fascinated to see how he would use
brushes, a rag or a crumpled ball of paper to apply texture
to his glass-painting. His studio -in the garden of his
Crystal Palace home -seemed far too small to accommodate his
more ambitious commissions, but he had a gift for the
logistics of his craft and considerable ingenuity in
constructing solutions to any technical challenges.
After the Durham window, Younger's career continued with a
number of smaller commissions for parish church windows. He
combined his stained-glass work with a part-time post as
lecturer in fine art at the American International
University at Richmond in London. He also designed a number
of glazing schemes (carried out by others) for mosques,
palaces and public buildings in Saudi Arabia. The scale and
largely geometric character of these windows was to prove a
useful preparation for his next major cathedral project,
when in 1987 he was asked to glaze the north transept rose
at St Albans.
The window's crude neo-Romanesque stonework, designed by
Lord Grimthorpe in the 1870s, was one of the ugliest
legacies of the cathedral's Victorian restoration, but it
was transformed into one of its glories by Younger's stained
glass, which was unveiled by Dian, Princess of Wales, in
1989. The window's 46 sections, each rhythmically related to
its companions, glow like jewelled constellations piercing
the masonry. It is a triumph of orchestrated colour and one
of the very few modern rose windows which can compare with
those of the early Middle Ages.
Less spectacular but equally thoughtful were his three
windows, commissioned by the Duke of Westminster, in the
south nave of Chester Cathedral, installed in 1993, which
are an exercise in the use of "white" (clear or lightly
tinted) glass with limited areas of colour. When this
commission led to several others from members of the
peerage, Younger was amused by friends' quips that he was
now "glazier to the nobility".
In 1998 he won the competitive commission for the clerestory
east window of Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster Abbey.
In this case, he later wrote, he wanted his window of the
Virgin Mary and Angels to reveal its content "slowly after a
first impression of abstraction and rich jewel-like colour".
The window is the product of much distilled thought about
iconography and technique, and of his concern to work in
harmony with the chapel's architecture.
Until his cancer was diagnosed earlier this year, Younger
was busy with several stained glass commissions, including
windows for St Katherine's Foundation in the East End. He
was a vice-president and fellow of the British Society of
Master Glass Painters, a liveryman of the Glaziers' Company
and a trustee of the Stained Glass Museum in Ely.
Tall, lithe and unchangingly handsome over the years, he
invariably dressed like an artist -with unerring panache but
without affectation. His wife Zoe, whom he married in 1957,
trained as an actress and their shared love of theatre and
music, wide circle of friends and ready wit and sense of fun
all brought added dimensions to his art.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters.