On the day that the artist David Hockney died I was in Westminster Abbey pointing out, as I always do, the stained glass window that was commissioned from him to commemorate the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
In the same way that the Elizabeth Tower is nearly always called ‘Big Ben’, so the artwork, officially named the Queen Elizabeth II Window is more commonly referred to as the Hockney stained glass.
And stained glass it is. No glass paint is used (apart from the artist’s signature in the bottom right), only coloured glass with lead between the various sections. This glass was produced by Glashutte Lamberts of Germany, all of it ‘mouth blown’ rather than sheet glass. The firm had to match Hockney’s striking colour palette, those strong yellows, reds, blues, oranges and greens, even developing the special deep pink that the artist put into his work.
It was the first stained glass window that Hockney had designed (although he has done at least one other subsequently), and created it on his iPad, as he did with a lot of his later works. This is appropriate for stained glass, as the iPad sketch is backlit, in a sort of analogous way to the window.
The initial design was done quickly; the day after Jonathan Hall, the Dean of Westminster commissioned him, Hockney sent over his first draft. Hall’s brief was for something symbolic or representational rather than heraldic, and the design, depicting a country scene with a vivid blue sky and a flowering of hawthorn blossom is said to be a celebration of Elizabeth’s love of the countryside. The style is similar to the large landscapes that featured in the Royal Academy’s ‘A Bigger Picture’ exhibition, Hockney taking inspiration from the fields and lanes of East Yorkshire.
The window itself was translated from Hockney’s design by Barley Studio, a stained glass firm based, appropriately enough, in Yorkshire, and was dedicated at a special service in October 2018.
And it is huge. 8.5m high by 3.5m wide (28 x 11.5 feet in old money), with 22 panels in the main window, seven in the tracery at the top, and six eyelets.
It’s fair to say that the window divides opinion among guests, some feeling it is a jarringly modern invader among the venerable old pieces in the rest of the building (even though a great deal of the Abbey’s stained glass is Victorian or even newer), and contrasts with the gothic interiors and exteriors of the church.
But the exuberance and ‘Hockneyness’ of the thing is its strength, an explosion of vivid hues that – when the sun is in the right place – scatters pools of colour across the Abbey floor; if you’re not uplifted by this then your feelings are irretrievably dulled.
And just like the modern artworks in St Paul’s, Hockney’s window fulfils another purpose. It reminds visitors that this is a living, working space, not a tourist museum.
Artists tend to be commemorated in St Paul’s (visit the crypt there and you can stand on the graves of Turner, Millais, Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West and others, and see plaques to Blake, Sargent and Constable), but it will be interesting to see if the Abbey breaks with precedence and honours one of the British artistic greats.
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