AT THE beginning of the 20th century, two stained-glass artists lived and worked within two miles of each other by the Thames, in west London. While Christopher Whall, who became a Roman Catholic, has a blue plaque on his studio at Ravenscourt Park, and his works feature in stained-glass exhibitions, his Chiswick neighbour Henry Bosdet is less celebrated. But the Glass Rainbow Trust, an organisation from Bosdet’s home island of Jersey, is determined to raise the artist’s profile, and gain recognition for his windows, which grace churches from St Helier to St Helena in the South Atlantic.
Judy Smith, patron of the Glass Rainbow Trust, explains: “As a small island, we are aware of being on the sidelines of the cultural and artistic world of the UK and France, and therefore eminently proud of any of islanders who have made a particular contribution to that wider stage. Perhaps because stained-glass windows receive little attention, since his death Bosdet has been largely ignored in his native island.
“My husband [Aidan Smith, author of The Glass Rainbow, a guide to Bosdet’s work] was immediately drawn to the windows before he knew they had been created by a Jerseyman. The beauty of Bosdet’s Pre-Raphaelite style, the rich colours of the sumptuous garments, the superbly drawn figures and faces, and their profound spirituality convinced him that Bosdet was a master of his art. The fact that he was a Jerseyman and largely forgotten fuelled his enthusiasm. Those of us who have since been involved in promoting this artist agree with him.”
Bosdet was born in St Helier, the son of a Jersey sea captain and a Guernsey mother. His mother died on a return voyage from Honduras to Liverpool, and his father married his late wife’s sister, settling the family in London in 1861. Aged 16, Bosdet enrolled as a probationer at the Royal Academy in 1872, and, a decade later, he undertook his first stained-glass commission for Ste Marie du Castel, Guernsey, drawing on connections from his mother’s family. The Crucifixion (1882) was not an unqualified success, as a section had to be returned to the workshop to have an opening mechanism added, to ventilate the damp church.
Through the 1880s, Bosdet worked at two teaching jobs: one at the Barnsbury School of Art, with its emphasis on design skills, and a second as Curator of Drawing at the Royal Academy, which placed drawing the human figure at the heart of artistic practice. Bosdet’s incredible work ethic, combined with the centrality of craft and figure techniques to his teaching, came to creative fruition as the new century approached.
IN HIS early forties, Bosdet presented a large painting, Christ Crowned with Thorns (1897), to his parish church, St Saviour’s, Sunbury. The painting, approximately six feet high, was rediscovered by the documentary-maker Maya Hammarshal, in St Saviours’s attic in 2009, and the church followed her advice to present the artwork to the Jersey Heritage Trust.
Mrs Smith explains: “Our present chairman, Frederick Benest, went to England in his Volvo and popped the painting into his car and brought it back, and we had it conserved, because it had been mouse-eaten. It was in a terrible state, but we raised money, and it’s superb now. Every Easter, different churches opt to have it as part of their services. It’s really lovely.”
She adds: “This was in a loft, and in a very poor state; so we were delighted, because the quality was really magnificent.”
When Bosdet died, in 1934, his second wife, Mary Brereton, donated his sketches, watercolours, and cartoons (life-size drawings acting as templates for transfer of design into materials) to La Société Jersiaise. Continuing in the footsteps of the research and writing of Mrs Smith’s late husband, Aidan, who died in 2004, the Glass Rainbow Trust has undertaken an ongoing process of conserving Bosdet’s cartoons, and displaying them next to the appropriate window in churches in Jersey.
The Trust believes that the artist created about 100 windows, some with double lancets or more; so the volume of supporting drawings and watercolours is sizeable. The process of conserving and framing the cartoons is continuing. Conservation can include removing surface dirt with a specialist eraser, repairing tears with plant starch adhesive and tissue, and treating foxing (brown spots) caused by the hydroscopic qualities of paper, meaning that it is able to absorb moisture from the air.
Also continuing is the compilation of a complete catalogue of churches that Bosdet worked on, a journey of discovery kicked off in the early 2000s by a letter to the Church Times from Mr Smith. “We’ve just discovered he did a church in St Helena, and we’re trying to get photos of that to find out more,” Mrs Smith says.
“He was a man of his time,” undertaking commissions in the British Empire, she says. “In 1903, he created a window for the Legislative Buildings in Bridgetown, Barbados, of Queen Victoria.” For long-distance commissions, it is unknown whether they were personally supervised, or whether Bosdet sent a team of employees from his glassmaking firm.
THE conservator Lisa Oxenden-Wray is at work on cartoons of the Marriage of Cana, to be framed and displayed at St Aubin on the Hill in September. The scene is presented over a series of panels of windows, and was believed by Mr Smith, who had spent two years at Saint-Sulpice Seminary, in Paris, before training to be a teacher, to be the finest large Bosdet window on Jersey:
“A very rich composition in the Pre-Raphaelite manner, which gave Bosdet an opportunity to show off his talents as a draughtsman. It is notable for the balance of the design and the sumptuousness of the dress and the feast. The figures are superbly drawn, in particular the Virgin Mary, full of solicitude for her host and his guests. The garments and wings of the angels in the smaller windows are particularly vibrant. Their faces are exquisitely painted, and the image of an angel seated on a rainbow in the top window is particularly striking. Arguably, this is the finest of Bosdet’s larger windows in Jersey.”
Glass Rainbow TrustDetail from The Resurrection in St John’s
Mrs Smith says that one of the highlights of her husband’s research was meeting somebody who had encountered the artist. “A woman in a care home said Bosdet looked as an artist would. . . And he often uses himself as a model in his stained-glass windows. I’ve noticed several times his likeness as Joseph, or another subject, with the slightly pointed beard and the eyebrow.”
In May 2024, about 500 people visited St Mary’s, Jersey, to see framed cartoons for Bosdet’s windows The Presentation in the Temple (1904), and the Adoration of the Magi and The Angels Appear to the Shepherds (both date unknown). Speaking to BBC Jersey, the Revd Kirsty Allen said that the exhibition demonstrated the “marrying together of faith and art”. She was moved by the “beauty of it and the creative soul of Bosdet”.
Of the future, Mrs Smith says, “We are hoping to continue promoting Bosdet’s stained-glass work here in the island, introducing him to the attention of more local schools and art students. If more grant money is available, we would seek to continue the conservation work started on the cartoons, in the hope that a permanent place to exhibit them might one day be possible. We would love to locate more of his work, both in the UK and elsewhere. We will continue to offer the Bosdet prize to promising art students in our college of further education [Highlands].”
Bosdet’s largest commission was towards the end of his career. Hexham Abbey’s Northumbrian Saints and Their Histories (1917), for the abbey’s great west window, joined five earlier works by the artist, including St Andrew’s Call, History of Christianity, an image of F. W. Farrar, Dean of Canterbury (and the author of Eric, or Little by Little), and Baptism of King Ethelbert.
Hexham’s earlier windows were all produced in Bosdet’s Chiswick studio, between 1905 and 1908. Londoners can appreciate a window from the same period at St George’s, Kensington, believed to be St Peter Cutting Malchus’ Ear, from 1905. The artist’s use of arresting, vivid colour, and understanding of the ability of glass to create animation through changing light and shade, is demonstrated through the composition: the heads of St Peter, Jesus, and Malchus each point a different way, as the drama of hands — on sword, in blessing, and in pain — unfolds.
Although Bosdet’s style deliberately looked back to the Pre-Raphaelites and his fellow Jersey artist John Everett Millais, of Ophelia (1851-52) fame, his distinctive and colourful work still engages and surprises today.
If your church has uncatalogued work by Bosdet, the Glass Rainbow Trust would be grateful to hear from you. glassrainbowtrust.org.je