Visitors to Quidenham Monastery in Norfolk will be pleased to know that the nuns there have now produced a thirty-page guide illustrating and explaining the stained-glass windows in their chapel. As a bonus, there are also illustrations & commentaries within the booklet on the five windows by Margaret Rope which lie within the private areas of the monastery.  (Marga lived here as a nun in the last years of her life).

Understanding

The explanations in the guide are teasingly brief – one wants so much more! -, but even so they are essential to an understanding of the windows’ what and why. 
For example, it’s clear very quickly that most of the windows relate in some way to the long history of the Carmelite Order of Nuns and even to its recent history in East Anglia; and the explanations in this booklet are incredibly helpful to understanding that.

The photos – of each and every window – are admirable in showing very close detail, which allows one to reference the symbols in the images.  John Salmon, who took the photographs, needs congratulations.  
(The downside however of photos that concentrate on the images’ details is that luminosity is lost.  The perennial problem of photographing stained glass is to show detail and luminosity at the same time – incredibly difficult.)

Three artists

The chapel windows are the work of three artists: Clare Dawson, and Margaret Aldrich Rope (Marga’s cousin, better known as ‘Tor’) in a form of collaboration with Marga herself. 
Clare and Margaret Aldrich knew each other well; Clare was Tor’s pupil for a while, and they lived together in the 1950s.

The chapel windows are relatively small but numerous, twenty-three altogether, and were completed in 1956-7, a few years after Marga’s death.  The suggestion is that Clare Dawson’s work (the seven roundels) was independent, while Tor’s work was based on sketches & cartoons made by Marga. 
It’s fairly clear however that Tor only used Marga’s sketches lightly. The sharp design, block-colouring, harsh reds and the deliberate ‘flat’ and inexpressive quality of the images mark them out as ‘modernistic’ post-war work in approach, very unlike the more subtle pre-war approach that Marga would have espoused. Although the nuns of the time probably insisted that Tor use Marga’s original themes and sketches, I personally would just have the windows down as Tor’s work and leave it at that.

Within the confines

One is very fortunate in having this booklet as it also has photos of the five works by Marga that are within the monastery, and which are thus inaccessible to the public.  As the author of the booklet says, they are “extraordinarily beautiful”.  I would add that they are surprising, even radical, in design, and very personal.
Made in the 1930s, after Marga had taken her vows as a nun, and when she was in a high phase of creativity, they are full of the strange symbolism you can spot in her work if you look.

Although you are best using this guide/booklet whilst looking round the chapel, the nuns at Quidenham do make it available on mail-order for those who can’t get to Norfolk. Click here for details.

Follow up…

For those who want even fuller commentaries, the good news is that a revised edition of Margaret Rope of Shrewsbury by Arthur Rope is in the pipeline. This will also feature John Salmon’s photographs, and will also have a discussion on the timeline/dates.
It’s also worth looking at Roger Hall’s exhaustive analyses of selected of Marga’s windows.  Much of the meaning of Marga’s windows is difficult to grasp, even to a sophisticated viewer, and Roger’s expositions are revelatory. Roger’s articles are online – click here to see them – and more are uploaded regularly.

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