Charles Jay Connick was a prominent American artist in stained glass best known for his work in stained glass in the Gothic Revival style. He created the magnificent rose window in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City, New York, United States.
Background
Charles Jay Connick was born on September 27, 1875 in Springboro, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of George Herbert and Mina Mirilla (Trainer) Connick, both natives of Pennsylvania. He was one of eleven children, but only he, two sisters, and a brother survived early childhood. When Charles was seven his father became advertising manager of a farm journal and moved his family to Pittsburgh.
Education
Charles had to leave high school to go to work. Connick studied life drawing in night classes in Pittsburgh from 1895 to 1900, when he moved permanently to Boston. He continued his studies from 1900 to 1909 at the Boston Art Club and the Copley Society. Princeton gave him an honorary degree in 1932, and Boston University in 1938.
Career
A teacher in the Methodist Sunday school he attended interested him in music and art, and at eighteen he became an apprentice-illustrator on the Pittsburgh Press. While covering a sports event he met J. Horace Rudy, a stained glass artist, who asked him back to his studio. As gas jets were lighted, the jumble of glass on the artist's workbench created a fleeting glory of broken prismatic color that changed the course of Connick's life.
In 1894 he became an apprentice in the shop of Rudy Brothers and began (as he later recalled) "to learn the processes whereby the dusky jewels of my first night's fairyland were changed to become quite ordinary affairs that satisfied customers and produced daily bread. " The heavy opalescent glass of the time, arranged to simulate static pictures, completely lacked "the vibration of color in a constantly changing light" that had enthralled Connick in the unset pieces of glass lying on Rudy's bench. His rebellion against the accepted style of the 1890's led him to study N. H. J. Westlake's History of Design in Painted Glass and to experiment in the revival of medieval techniques. Horace Rudy, at heart an artist rather than a businessman, encouraged Connick's investigations and got him opportunities to work in other shops in Pittsburgh, New York, and Boston. In 1902 Connick's design for a rose window in the baptistry of St. James Church, Roxbury, Massachussets, gained him the friendship of the architect Ralph Adams Cram and marked the beginning of a close collaboration that continued for forty years. Two other events of this period contributed to the evolution of his craft. In 1909 five clerestory windows arrived for the Church of the Advent in Boston, made in England by Christopher W. Whall. When uncrated they seemed unimpressive, "all slopped over with paint, " yet when they were installed, Connick saw in them "a lovely low-toned vibration" that recalled his initial vision fifteen years before in Pittsburgh. Having learned from this experience "how tiny spots of light through these areas of dirty paint had, in distance, illuminated entire windows, " he became a convert to Whall, whose Stained Glass Work: A Textbook for Students and Workers in Glass (1905) he studied with care.
Even more significant was his first visit to England and France in 1910, when he fell under the spell of the windows of Chartres. Connick set up a studio of his own in Boston in 1913. Here he created innumerable windows for the churches of Cram and Ferguson, Maginnis and Walsh, and other ecclesiastical architects. Affecting national taste as much as any single artist can be said to have done so, Connick substituted for opaque and opalescent glass the medieval practice in which color is transparent, and in which, through painting insignificant in itself, that transparent color is focused to create, with changes of light, a vibrating pattern of a peculiar and vivid beauty.
Although his technique was inspired by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, his designs and subjects were by no means completely medieval or ecclesiastical. He was quite as happy to portray Emily Dickinson or Abigail Adams as an early Christian martyr. His windows were installed throughout the United States. They are to be seen in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and the church of St. Vincent Ferrer in New York City; in Cram's Princeton University Chapel (where they interpreted the works of Malory, Dante, Milton, and Bunyan); in the Fourth Presbyterian Church and St. Chrysostom's Church in Chicago; in several churches in Minneapolis and St. Paul; and in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Of his work in and around Boston, St. John's, Beverly Farms, Massachussets, is a fine example of his treatment of a small parish church in a consistent design. Probably his happiest "playground for the sun" was the Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh. There, in the city where he had his first vision of color in light, he was able to develop a great symphonic series of windows to control the vibrant light and color of a lofty interior, largely enclosed in glass. The fruits of their travels are combined, with reflections on his craft, in a remarkable folio, Adventures in Light and Color: An Introduction to the Stained Glass Craft (1937). Connick's learning, whimsicality, and wit shine brilliantly through this compendious work, which is dedicated to Ralph Adams Cram. Like Cram he lived with his art; he preached stained glass and fought for it, for he loved color in light with a Franciscan simplicity and intensity.
Connick died of cancer in Boston at the age of seventy. After services in the Swedenborgian church which he had attended, he was buried in the Newton (Massachussets) Cemetery.
He had often said that his windows should be signed by many names, for the men and women who worked with him were like an extension of his spirit, as well as of his hands and brain.
He was an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, president of the Stained Glass Association of America, 1931-39, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Connections
Connick married Mabel Rebecca Coombs of Colrain, Massachussets, on July 20, 1920; there were no children. He and his wife made numerous trips to England and France to study stained glass.