A group of enthusiasts established the Margaret Rope Archive in 2020, having assembled (from a number of sources) around 500 drawings and ‘cartoons’ by Margaret, as well as other relevant documents and works by her.

Research carried out at the Archive since has thrown a great deal of light on how Marga, and, by inference, other stained glass artists of the time, worked on their productions. As you’ll now read, the process of making a window is long and arduous.
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The Archive gives us an insight into each of the main stages in Margaret’s creation process. However, we do not have examples of all the processes for any single window. So our examples are from across a number of her windows.

First stage is the ‘vidimus’ – i.e. the initial image, presented as a draft by the artist to the sponsor. A vidimus is a small, coloured-in but often generalised, sketchy picture, drawn up as an idea of the possible finished piece. It’s likely that Margaret often had a free hand in these designs, and probably argued strongly for her particular vision, but nevertheless, she would have had to listen to her client’s views.

Here are two versions for the St Therese of Lisieux window at Oxton, showing changes possibly brought about as a result of consultation with the client/sponsor.

Second stage. After the vidimus, with the concept approved, Margaret would do sketches from life of the important faces, figures and challenging details which would appear in the finished work. Below are some such images from the Archive: some are recognisably early versions of figures who would appear later in her works.

Third stage. The next stage would be to draw a full-scale ‘cartoon’ of the window. Often these cartoons don’t show lead lines.

Fourth stage: the ‘cut-line’. (The cut-line is a full-scale drawing, taken from the full-size cartoon, with the leading-lines clearly delineated, to guide the glass-cutting process).
Sadly, we have no cut-line pieces in the Archive as they are usually destroyed by the action of glass being laid and cut on top of them.

Simultaneously, Margaret would have been selecting the type and thickness of the raw glass. Glass available to artists of the early twentieth century was not just of one predictable type; for example, glass artists of the ‘Later Arts & Crafts Movement’ often used a costly type called ‘slab-glass’ – and that itself came in various versions. Choosing the type of glass was an important step, as getting the glass colours right & working well with each other was an essential aspect of the final impact of the window.
In the 2016 Margaret Rope Exhibition, we were able to display some raw ‘slab glass’ (see photo below).

Finally … Now, at last, the image is ready for the making process – the stages of glass-cutting, painting, firing and leading-up etc.
Marga herself could have easily overseen the glass-cutting and firing, as it was all done by the skilled artisans at the London Glass House workshops – where she also had a studio.
(An old taped interview with Mrs L. D. Rope, Marga’s sister-in-law, recounted how they sometimes got a specialist glass-cutter to come in to do the more challenging glass-cutting, of the thickest pieces of glass, but the rest would have been done at the Glass House).
Close collaboration with the artisans would have been crucial, as Marga did the glass-painting herself.

This process is lengthy: the first painting takes place – then there is firing, to fix the glass paint into the glass – often followed by further painting – and then another firing!
One has to try to predict what will happen during a firing, so the painting must be done with knowledge of the chemical reactions; it’s not technically easy.
Once all that is completed successfully, there must have been sighs of relief!
(Of course, there is still trepidation… will the glass fit exactly into the stone tracery of the particular church building it is going to? Will the security rods to hold it in place spoil the view of it? Will the congregation/sponsors like it? etc)

Last studio task

There is one more task at the studios though, before installation in the intended building.
The Archive contains a number of photos (all in black-and-white, as was usual in the pre-WW2 period) taken of completed windows before they were shipped off. These photos are partly simply meant for the artist’s files, but also as a record in case anything happened to the windows.
(It would have been harder to take such photos once the installation was complete, as taking photos of stained-glass with the light streaming through them would have been notoriously hard then, as it still is in fact, even today).
So, below, on the left, is the cartoon for the David (at Michaelhouse in South Africa), while on the right, is the studio-photo for the same piece.

And thus, at last, the piece would be ready for installation in a church.

Blind vision

Curiously, once Margaret became a nun (in 1923), and was living from then on in an ‘enclosed’ convent*, the studio-photos would have been the only sight she would have had of the appearance of the completed window. Thus, for almost all her works between 1923 and her death in 1953 – because her vows meant she could not leave the convent -, she never would have been able to go and see how her vision actually turned out in real life!
(The only ones she would have seen in situ were the ones she made for her own convent).
Strange to think that, after all that work, she would not have seen the glory of the final installation…

AR, with additions by MS
For more on the work of the Margaret Rope Archive, please click here
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Footnote
* the only way she could continue her career from the convent was by constant correspondence with the workshops in London, and by having the pieces she was working on continually shipped back & forth from them to the convent in East Anglia. An arduous process indeed.

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