Traditional Leadlights
By Dermot Kelly, Clare Glass
Leadlights feature in many villas and bungalows throughout New Zealand. The more affluent property owner at the time of construction featured elaborate leadlights throughout the house, while the workers cottages were generally glazed in coloured glass.
Villas usually had brightly coloured leadlight using either geometric patterns or Art Nouveau style organic shapes using stylised flowers and curves.
Bungalow leadlights on the other hand generally were made from many different clear textures and bevel edges and had no colour at all. Straight line were all the go, using Art Deco patterns of chevrons, stripes, circles and zigzags. Heavy influence, during the 1920s, from the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture resulted in many simple patterns of diamond lattice and elongated diamonds. Transitional leadlights were a mixture of both styles.
Restoration of window and door glass in New Zealand has been greatly improved since the mid 1980s by the introduction for coloured and clear glass textures, if not identical, then very similar to the original patters. Before this period the glass textures available were rarely cohesive when matching up for restoration and at times were totally discordant. The glass available today mainly comes form USA, Germany, France and England as it did a century ago. New Zealand stopped making sheet glass in the 1980s when the Whangarei Glassworks closed down.
Most of the glass used in restoration today of public building, churches, villas, bungalows etc is made by rolling or pressing molten glass on plates to give a particular texture. Some of the original plates used a century ago are still being used today. English Muffle , a glass very popular from the 1890s to the 1920s has recently been rediscovered by an Australian who tracked down the original plates in England. He then took them to the US where he convinced the Wissmach Glass CO who had been operating since the 1880s to manufacture the glass in the same colours which they had first been distributed in. A large percentage of New Zealand villas had English Muffle glass either glazed as whole pieces of incorporated in leadlights as features in front doors, surrounds and fanlights.
The original glass used in the early part of this century came with creases, bubbles, variations in thickness and colour and all manner of characteristic faults. Regrettably technology has taken out these lovely little foibles. Besides early glass being rolled or pressed on plates, some glass was blown. The ruby red and cobalt blue seen in hallway doors is often blown glass as is many feature leadlights in churches.
Most leadlights are made today much the same way as they were in the fourteenth century. Some modern methods of construction use one sheet of glass, and adhere lead or simulated lead and colour to the surface of the glass. These methods are not recommended for traditional leadlight work, for the many textures present in period stained glass cannot be achieved in one piece of glass.
Courtesy of Dermot Kelly, Clare Glass
Clare Glass Studios is a speciality glass studio that covers glasswork ranging from stained glass and leadlights to architectural glass, glass basins and fonts, etched glass, glass tiles and curved glass.
