[James POWELL & Sons, aka WHITEFRIARS Glass] [Risen Christ: a full-size design. [London: c. 1900-20]

[James POWELL & Sons, aka WHITEFRIARS Glass Ltd.] [The Risen Christ: a full-size ‘cartoon’ of a stained glass window design for an unidentified location]. [London: undated but circa 1900- 1920]. Original drawing, in pencil, black ink and wash, on thick wove paper (75 x 18 inches; 1905 x 457 mm).  (Splits, chips, tape repairs to verso). Provenance: rescued from a dumpster, South Kensington, London, in the early 1980s.

These life-size drawings were used to work out the leading, glass size and shape, before creating the finished window: rare on the market as most of the surviving ‘cartoons’ are now in the Corning Museum of Glass, part of the Whitefriars Collection.

“For centuries, James Powell and Sons —popularly known as Whitefriars — was among England’s most prominent glass companies. When the company closed its stained glass business in 1973 and the rest of the company in 1980, its archives were acquired by the Victoria and Albert and the Museum of London. In 2008, the Museum of London gifted 1,800 rolls of Whitefriars stained glass cartoons to the Rakow Research Library. The rolls contain an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 items that document the making of hundreds of stained glass installations in over 30 countries.” (https://www.cmog.org/research/library/collections/discovering-whitefriars-collection)