Sometimes they are not.
Here are examples (one from my previous post on Henry Wynd Young, one by d’Ogries and a third by Bolton Morris) of three church artists’ take on St Dunstan, patron saint of church artists. As I mentioned previously there is a genealogy, and an inheritance, passed from one teacher to the next and Young, d’Ogries, and my mentor Bolton Morris were in a direct line of descent. For more of Morris’ work see: http://boltonmorris.wordpress.com/
How does one make comparisions? First d’Ogries’ take is more elegant (and he used the charming tongs as an emblem wherewith he caught the devil’s nose!) while Young’s drawing is more conventional. Yet, for all d’Ogries’ interest in modern art (and he surely was interested in it), Young’s color is much more abstract in this example. Morris then (though this is merely a woodcut and not an example of his glass) moves on fully in the vein of abstract art that made d’Ogries jealous as he wanted to work in a fully modern vein, yet was constrained by his clients to “give them 15th century”.
The d’Ogries example is from the sacristy of the Church of St James the Less in Philadelphia – the first example of ecclesiological gothic architecture in the New World. I’ll be following up with examples of all his lovely tiny sacristy windows in the next post.
