An Early Important Transom on Seaton

When I first saw the window, it had been behind cardboard for at least ten years. A ball had smashed into it, probably in the 1970s by the corrosion. Three pieces were entirely missing and two others cracked, including one of the green background panels, which was the worst of the damage.

The materials were characteristic of the Dominion Company in the 1880s, with gracile crimp-edged leads. The red is a flash glass, or rather several such batches of glass, as the colour is very uneven. Both blues are full of fine bubbles, with some radical surface folding that can sometimes look like cracks. The dark green is less textured. The spun yellow roundels are unusually thin and flimsy .

1887 is an interesting year at the Dominion Stained Glass Company. It was the first year their idea for domestic glass really took off, and they started off understaffed. This means there are unusually few candidates to be the painter of this bird. Based on the quality, the persistance of this hand into later years, and the year, I attribute this to George Cominsky. As is the trend in these pieces, the early ones are better, and this one is flawless. Five colours are used. Cleverly and unusually, the blue enamel was applied early and is largely caged in other colours, which has preserved it.

The yellow edge, I suspect, is an evocation of a bevel. It reads like a bevel from the street. This was clever, because bevels were the next big thing but cannot be painted, because they do not survive re-firing except by luck. This whimsical effect hints at the presence of William Potts, but the drawing does not resemble others that seem more likely to be his.

Compared with later examples, the glass is of high quality, neither as yellow nor as bubble-pocked as those from the 1890s.

The Grid Method was invented as a response to the Company fracturing, leaving a workshop without a designer. In response, somebody (John Harrison, John Hurst, or William Potts) invented the Grid Method, where a glass-cutter could make a nice window without any advance plan. This clever method cut out many stages, simplifying the work just as much as skipping painting did.

The main trick was to pave as much of the surface as could be passed off with 2 3/4” squares. By using standard straight-sided pieces, shunning painting, skipping design itself, and not talking to the client (who was a builder, and didn’t care anyway so long as it got done), our heroes ended up with a high-speed cheap product that could be used to wedge the market open.

Among our candidates, John Harrison is the candidate of opportunity, having been Cutting Manager on the day the company fell apart. He was indeed a cutter without designs, which is what the Method addresses. But John Hurst is a better candidate, because his career led him from design onto the shop floor, where (I suspect) he ran off hundreds of these in the next three years. William Potts is also a candidate, but based on his longer career I find these early ones too serious, and too carefully measured, to be his style.

Now fully restored, the window is an important document of the beginnings of the domestic stained-glass market in Toronto. Restoring it to prominence on Seaton is a great pleasure for me.

This is the first window I have fixed which required a Permit, as the house is within the Southwest Cabbagetown Preservation District. I thank Jennifer Guerin at the City for helping me through the process.