No . 131 The Trusty Servant vibrant palette than the medieval originals . Kenneth Clark ( B , 1917-22 ) calls the figures ‘ green and purple monsters ’ in his autobiography . Historian Budge Firth ( Coll , 1912-18 , Co Ro , 1922-54 ) deplores the ‘ sloth and vandalism of former ages ’ which had despoiled Wykeham ’ s bequests . Indeed , in 1913 Monty Rendall ( HM , 1911-24 ) launched a fundraising campaign to replace the windows , ‘ universally admitted to be crude in colour and grotesque in design ’, with more authentic versions by Horace Wilkinson , matching the palette of the three surviving side-window saints on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum . A prototype of St Jude was installed on the north side , funded by the architect WD Caroe to commemorate his son ’ s time in the school , but after the First World War Rendall ’ s attentions had understandably shifted to War Cloister and no more was heard of the scheme .
Assuming this opprobrium is justified , to whom should we assign the blame ? A school tradition , keen to shift the blame , lays it firmly on the Shropshire firm . John Le Couteur , author of a 1920 survey of Winchester ’ s glass , argues that the Warden and Fellows were ‘ under the full impression that the original glass of 1393 had been returned in a carefully cleaned and restored condition ’: they had been ‘ shamefully imposed upon ’ by the unscrupulous Betton and Evans , who fobbed the College off with a mock-up while selling off the usable portions of the original glass and discarding the rest . The actual contract is lost , but the note in the 1823 College ledger records payment for ‘ repairing the east window in the Chapel as per contract ’. We also have Huntingford ’ s words , reporting on the completion of the project : the glaziers had been ‘ contracted to retouch the colours ’ and the east window was now ‘ restored to its original brilliancy ’.
Yet it appears that in 1820s parlance ‘ restored ’ could bear the meaning ‘ copy and replace ’ and that Huntingford and the Fellows knew exactly what they were getting . An extract from the diary of Revd FE Witts dated September 1825 describes a visit to Shrewsbury in which he sees a ‘ specimen of the skill of these eminent artists ’ ready to be inspected by Huntingford during a rare visit to his episcopal diocese : ‘ the design was in exact imitation of ancient painted windows , containing two figures of patriarchs , saints or prelates , I forget which , intended to replace some decayed portions in the Chapel of Winchester College ’.
The contemporary assessment was certainly very positive . Huntingford ’ s pleasure above is echoed by the Hampshire Chronicle of December 1822 , which informed ‘ lovers of antiquity and admirers of the art of Glass Staining that they would receive much pleasure from a visit to Chapel , the east window having been retouched and restored with great fidelity and recovered and brought back to what it was when originally painted .’ Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted that Huntingford ’ s appearance inspecting glass in the diary-entry above was nearly three years after the east window had been
The glass : corroded in the middle , half-polished at the bottom , fully polished at the top . replaced . The explanation is that the school authorities were so pleased with that window that they commissioned the same treatment for the saints of the side windows : the south 1825-6 and the north 1827-8 .
It was only as time passed and critical expertise on medieval glass grew that Betton and Evans ’ s work began to be deprecated . In particular , the ‘ brilliancy ’ which Huntingford praised was far too bright . However , to indict the 19 th -century glass as ‘ vandalism ’, ‘ crude ’ and ‘ grotesque ’ seems hyperbolic . The glass was far gone ; the techniques adopted in the mid-20 th century to restore the best-surviving fragments was revolutionary . So unless we expect the school to have suffered nearopaque glass for over a century in the prophetic knowledge of the future technology that could restore it accurately , replacing much of the glass seems unavoidable . In any case , copyand-replace was accepted practice at the time , as was the sale of remnants to supplement the fee ; indeed , when New College replaced their Jesse Tree window in 1765 , Wykeham ’ s glass was forced on the glazier as part of the payment . And Betton and Evans ’ s draughtmanship , colours aside , was good . Charles Winston , the mid-19 th century harbinger of modern conservative restoration principles , calls it a ‘ very good copy of the old ’. Those reading this article in the monochrome magazine will appreciate this assessment more than those distracted by the full colours of the digital version . David Evans in particular deserves to be seen as a pioneer rather than a profiteering philistine : his work fostered the emerging taste for and knowledge of medieval art decades before Pugin and Ruskin . Without his mistakes , those who came later would not have been able to identify and correct those mistakes .
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