of coloured glass,’[945] and lose in beauty and effect by the glaring yellow in which they are framed.  He also painted the windows which were put up in Westminster Abbey by order of Parliament in 1722,[946] and repaired with considerable skill the Flemish windows of Rubens’s time, which he purchased and put up on the south side of New College Chapel.[947] It is remarkable that the Prices appear to have been the last who possessed the old secret of manufacturing the pure ruby glass.[948] After their time, until its rediscovery some forty years ago in France, it was a familiar instance of a ‘lost art.’

When nearly fifty years had passed, some little attention began to be once more turned, chiefly in colleges and cathedrals, to the adornment of churches with coloured windows.  The most memorable examples are in New College Chapel.  Pickett, of York, painted between 1765 and 1777 the lower lights of the northern windows in the choir, with much brilliancy of colour, but in a style very inferior to the work of the Flemings and William Price on the other side.[949] The great window in the antechapel, erected a few year later, certainly avoided that uniformity of gaudiness[950] which Warton so greatly complained of in Pickett’s work.  Its design employed for several years[951] the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds.  The central picture of the Nativity, after Correggio’s ‘Notte’ at Modena, was exceedingly fine as a sketch in colours.  Unfortunately, it was wholly unsuited to glass, and remains a standing proof that oil and glass paintings cannot be rivals, their principles being essentially different.  A competent critic pronounces that had it been executed in coloured glass, it would still have been unsatisfactory.[952] As it is, the dull stains and enamels employed by Jarvis give it what Horace Walpole called ‘a washed-out’ effect.  Reynolds has introduced into it likenesses both of himself and Jarvis, as shepherds worshipping.  Of the allegorical figures beneath, Hartley Coleridge justly remarks that personifications which are nowhere found in Scripture are not well adapted for a church window.[953]

Another glass painting of something the same character, and showing the same futile attempt at impossible effects of light and shade,[954] was a picture of the Resurrection, executed by Edgington, from a design by Sir Joshua Reynolds, for the Lady Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral.  Mention should also be made of the great eastern window in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, by Jarvis and Forrest, and designed by West.  The three last examples quoted by Dallaway are Pearson’s windows in Brasenose Chapel, his scenes from St. Paul’s life, at St. Paul’s, Birmingham, and his ‘Christ bearing the Cross,’ at Wanstead, Essex.[955] All these were produced towards the close of the century.  They have merit, but they show also how much had to be learnt before the slowly reviving art of glass painting could recover anything of its ancient splendour.