Stained glass master 80 tomorrow

by Patrick Reyntiens
AA MAN whose contribution to Catholic art in the twentieth century has been considerable. the stained glass artist .I. E. Nuttgens, celebrates his 80th birthday tomorrow at Pigotts Hill, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.
His windows of vivid colour and beautifully worked out design, adorn many churches, and not only in England. His work can be seen in the United States and in the Dominions notably in Hong Kong Anglican Cathedral.
His apprenticeship in stained glass, and for that matter his whole art training, was in many ways the exact reverse of what nowadays is considered correct and desirable.
Eddie Nuttgens was the son of an itinerant tailor's cutter, originally from Aachen (where Eddie was born) who married an Englishwoman, and who, after wandering from capita! to capital, arrived in London in the 1880s.
After an elementary education, leaving school at 14. Nuttgen's first job was an office boy for a local house agent: then he became a hand in a sandblast factory which was responsible for most of the flashed and faceted pub glass of the time.
It was when he was there that he discovered his gifts for drawing and painting through going when he could — to Harrow School of Art. He concentrated on drawing and life painting, portrait and life drawing and became in the six years he spent there fully proficient in design, drawing and painting.
Eddie then came to the notice of Arthur Orr, a freelance stained glass designer, who had once worked in the firm of J. Hardman, one of the great church furnishing firms of the nineteenth century.
It was while he was with Arthur Orr — "filling in the borders and the backgrounds" as he puts it — that Eddie was introduced to the ideals of the arts and crafts movement. This was through reading a remarkable book by Christopher Whall "Stained Glass Work" published by Pitman in 1903.
In it Whall maintained, like Morris and Lethaby before him, that work based on stereotyped
design and mass-produced through division of labour (i.e.,
painters, cutters, stainers, glaziers, etc.) was not a valid way of producing something of quality: you had to do all the work yourself.
In those days great firms such as Hardman's, Clayton and Bell's and Kempe could turn out "a window a day and two on Sundays" such was the demand from the enormous church building programme of the epoch 1850 to 1914. Whall was in total disagreement, and Eddie Nuttgens was convinced Whall was right.
One of the institutions which made designing for stained glass by independent artists possible was the singular studio known as the "Glass House" (before the word became overloaded with sinister meaning) and now as Lowndes and Drury, in Lettice Street. A series of studios which could be hired were above a series of workshops below in which expert advice and attention could be given to designers and artists.
This co-operative system, which in many ways was then far in advance of its time helped such designers as Karl Parsons (whose work he executed), Martin Travers (whose assistant he eventually became) and Wilhelmina Geddes (whom he clearly considers to have been the outstanding artist in stained glass). The eminent stained glass artist Moira Forsyth works there to this day.
After being interned during the 1914 war (because he was born in Germany) while his father (a German) went quite free and his brother was called up into the British Army — a typical English situation — Eddie Nuttgens went to Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire, where the arts and crafts movement had even tually settled. There he worked as assistant to David Woodrolfe. It was while he was at Chipping Camden that he formed his love of countryside flowers, birds, landscape, which burst on him for the first time. He married Kathleen Clarke. who had come from Ireland to tutor David Woodroffe's child. She had studied at the National University and had been an ardent supporter of Sinn Fein. At first life was extremely difficult, living in two rented rooms, but eventually Eddie became one of the most eminent stained glass designers of the thirties, though most of his work for Catholic churches was done in the forties and fifties.
During his thirties he moved his house from the Valley of North Dean, to the top of Pigott's Hill, where Eric Gill had his remarkable establishment. All the time his reading had been broadening, and his interests included the idealism of Reline and Chesterton's distributism as well as Cobbett and Kropotkin. After his first wife's death he married Daphne Reid, a student at the Royal College of Art who had been attracted by the ideas of Eric Gill. His family had been four and it was to grow eventually to 12.
After a bitter experience of loss of work and poverty during the 1939-45 war, when he was forced to leave his home and travel around the countryside looking for work, Eddie Nuttgens came back to his house and built up the practice which produced so much of beauty in the 1940s and 50s.
He still gets up early and practises Bach for an hour on his piano before work. After a lull of two or three years he finds he has almost more work than he can cope with. Tomorrow almost 200 people from all over the world will gather at Pigott's Hill to celebrate Eddie's 80th birthday. They will include his 12 children and 22 grandchildren and his many friends and assistants of previous years. He remains as active and virile an exponent of the ideals of the art movements of the early twentieth century — that art and life are indivisible, the one reflecting the other.