St Matthew: Design for a stained glass window

Shields was a Manchester painter, watercolourist and decorator whose artistic career was determined when he saw the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. He later became a close friend of both Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. His two most substantial commissions were windows and mural decorations for the chapel at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, seat of the Duke of Westminster, and the Chapel of the Ascension, Bayswater Road, London. This design for stained glass depicts St Matthew, writer of the first gospel, whose attribute is an angel and who was previously a tax collector (shown by the coins depicting Caesar’s head in the lower right corner). Stylistically, in its use of grey wash and the device of the figure bursting from the artist's framing lines, it seems to relate to the designs for the windows of Eaton Hall Chapel, of which other examples are in the British Museum. These designs are remarkable in their originality and departure from traditional stained glass design. In discussing them in 1884, Cosmo Monkhouse wrote, 'There is, indeed, a well-spring of life and sincerity in Mr. Shields' imagination, and it is to be feared that glass, even though painted with his own hand, can never do complete justice to the beauty and originality of the designs, or the vigorous thought and poetical feeling which has been literally lavished on them. With the exception of Burne- Jones, there is no instance in which the personal influence of Dante Rossetti has been at once so powerful and so wholesome.' (Magazine of Art, February 1884).