Sir John Ninian Comper II

     I was lucky to be in Ketton on Monday. It is an attractive limestone village just west of Stamford - worth a stroll about. The church (St Mary) is a cruciform structure was a supremely elegant central tower and spire. Unfortunately my attempts to photograph it failed.  However what I was able to photograph (marginally) more successfully was the series of stained glass windows by the Sir John Ninian Comper inside.

These two pictures taken in the nave show the position of the Comper windows, and dramatic, and precarious looking, access route to the bell ringers chamber in the tower.

     Comper's other glass, which I take to be later, fills the three lancet windows in the east wall of the (Victorian) chancel.  In this window Christ is show as young, blond and beardless.  Note also the lack of backgrounds. It became fashionable, I suppose, as a reaction to the sombre-saturated churches of the mid to late nineteenth century.  It wasn't uncommon in the mid twentieth century to rob Victorian windows of their dark backgrounds to let in more light.

Sir John Ninian Comper I

     These images are of the Comper glass in Oakham Church.  Sir John Ninian Comper, 1864 - 1960, is one of my favourite architects.  He comes from that great flowering of architectural talent that occurred in the latter years of the nineteenth century.  He was an ecclesiastical architect trained under George Frederick Bodley, that designer of suave, patrician Gothic churches.  And Comper could turn out some pretty suave stuff himself - stained glass, embroidery, woodwork, almost anything a High Anglican church could want. He did it beautifully.
     There are two things about this window I'd like to point out at this moment. Firstly it is more than likely that the glass was produced from scratch in Comper's own workshop - his 'studio' (he refused to call it an 'office').

     Secondly the mixing of Classical and Gothic - this he called 'Unity by Inclusion'.  In Comper, the nineteenth century 'Battle of Styles' - between Classical and Gothic - finds its synthesis.