The UK's 19th-century industrial boom leaves a smashing legacy in glass artistry

Two Temple Place, London is an intensely made building. It was commissioned in 1892 by the wealthy American William Waldorf Astor, who hired one of the leading neo-Gothic architects of the day, John Loughborough Pearson, to design a home with an unlimited budget. Among its many highlights are two large stained-glass windows by the Victorian firm Clayton and Bell, which provide sublime morning and evening light to the Great Hall. Dating from 1895, and thought to be depictions of Switzerland and Italy, the windows are the only landscape scenes that Clayton and Bell ever created.

The landmark building is now a venue hosting public exhibitions, the latest of which is The Glass Heart: Art, Industry and Collaboration, an exhibition in partnership with National Glass Centre Sunderland, The Stained Glass Museum, Ely and Stourbridge Glass Museum. Clayton and Bell’s windows are ‘why I wanted to do the show here’, explains curator Antonia Harrison. ‘I wanted them to be artworks in the space.’

The windows, in their ambition and accomplishment, epitomise the heyday of Victorian glass making. On the ground floor, the miraculous technical achievements of Joseph Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace are showcased – 293,655 panes of clear glass weighing 400 tons blown by hand (heart and mouth) over 39 weeks at Chance Brothers on Spon Lane, Smethwick. There are virtuosic experiments in decorative three-dimensional glass, too. From coloured, copper wheel engraved, acid-etched, cut, and frosted examples from Stourbridge in the middle of the 19th century to the late Victorian flowering of stained glass in the hands of master designers such as Christopher Whall and Edward Burne-Jones. What you understand from these is the stimulating interconnection between the technical skills being refined and elaborated in artisan workshops and the artworks being conjured by major artists.

Two world wars and the financial shocks of the first half of the 20th century threatened the benign triad of patronage, high craftsmanship and creative ambition. But as further examples in this room testify, the expansion of art schools and technical colleges, and the revival of the British economy postwar inspired a revival. Geoffrey Clarke, John Piper and, later, Brian Clarke, made stained glass to reflect 20th-century sensibilities. Laurence Whistler transformed engraving into an elusive, poetic medium.

Sam Herman and Peter Layton, among others, led the studio glass movement in the UK from the 1960s, exploring the medium’s capacity for creative, painterly and sculptural expression. They have been the inspiration for other star figures in the show. Monster Chetwynd’s otherworldly, radiant, lustred-glass scenario, St. Bede Enters the Monastery (2022), was made in collaboration with hot glass specialist James Maskrey, senior technician at the University of Sunderland, an artist represented here in his own right. Anne Vibeke Mou’s haunting pair of glass cornucopias, part of the project Wild Things Inwards (2022), made from vintage lead crystal tableware, melted, reworked, and then decorated with diamond point engraving, was inspired by Whistler. Meanwhile Ayako Tani offers a homage, with her own exquisite Albatross Island (2018), to the glass ships in bottles produced in 1980s Sunderland, made, with great skill, using the technique of lamp worked borosilicate glass once essential to science.

But what chance is there for future generations of artists to encounter the potential of this beautiful and ancient material? Many courses have been cut. The environmental and energy costs of glassmaking are currently prohibitive. North Lands Creative Glass studio in Caithness, Scotland, which enabled professional glass specialists and artists new to the medium to develop new work, ceased trading in summer 2023. The National Glass Centre in Sunderland is currently closed, owing to structural damage to the building.

Yet there seems little let up in creative talent. On display are single works by such contemporary luminaries as Elliot Walker (based in Stourbridge), Anthony Amoak-Attah, who did his PhD at Sunderland, and Chris Day, whose latest installation, Judge and Jury, demonstrates how glass can express profound historical and social tensions. Maybe the explanation lies in one of the very opening pieces of the show, Emma Woffenden’s beautiful 1994-5 work, Breath. As Harrison underlines, glass has a direct affinity with life, with light, with breath: ‘From the molten state of its formation to the reflective and light emitting qualities of its final form, glass retains an amorphic heart.’

The Glass Heart: Art, Industry and Collaboration is at Two Temple Place, London until 21 April 2024.