Washington National Cathedral

After such an introduction, more words are an imposition. I think that it’s being such a glorious party, that we should just all go home!

But I’m really quite overwhelmed by this great host of people. I thought that perhaps 60 friends and family members, possibly even 75 would turn out and go to all the trouble of coming here, and I’m quite bowled over by the multitude that are met here in this heavenly place.

I don’t want to be overly egocentric at all, but I must give you a little bit of background to describe properly my relation to this building. As Don told you, I was born in Baltimore in 1925. Four years later came the Depression, and my family always had food on the table, but money was very scarce. Nevertheless it was a family that cared very much for music. My mother was a constant, quiet gardener, a very loving and gentle person. My father was temperamentally a fireball, but immensely energetic. I had actually the good fortune to be the second of two only children. Because my parents had a son in 1913 who was nearly 12 years older than I. Consequently, I grew up in a household with a loving mother and a harried and often impatient, but certainly loving, father. But a heavenly, younger father, younger than my real father, my brother. His name was Stewart LeCompte, and to my delight, his children and grandchildren are here today. And if the spirits ride the air, he surely would be too. Oh, the sun has just come through the Western Rose, and really it does make me believe in the efficacy of prayer. If you will turn around for just a moment and look back there—Oh there it goes!—well, these are marvelous times we live in. Who can tell what will happen next?

Anyway, my family was a quiet family, and I had a wonderful childhood teacher and friend in my brother, much older than I. And by the time I was walking about and beginning to learn words, he was already either in high school or in college. But many a time did he take walks with me in Druid Hill Park with me in Baltimore to describe the phases of the moon, or the growth of plants, the formation of cells, and the kinds of rocks there are. And I tried to remember all the types of stone, and I thought this is territory I better not venture into. As proper nouns are getting very difficult. I still can remember names and some things, but other things are beginning to be absent when I reach into the pigeonhole for the right word.

Anyhow, I grew up in the awe of an uncle who was a very good architect, and also an excellent painter. He lived in New York, but the tales of him I heard when little made me very much interested in architecture and also in painting. And the family was aware of these things and interested in them too. My brother was, in addition to a scientist, at least a scientist in his early years in training, a good musician. And he had a splendid voice, which resulted from many years at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. So I grew up with lots of music about, and it was good music too. Schubert, lots of Schubert and Brahms. And the house was often filled with live music being made.

In any case, I had reached the age of 13 with an increasing passion for architecture and certainly a close attention to painting. I didn’t know whether I’d like to be a designer of buildings or a painter of canvas. But it happened that one of my mother’s sisters visiting from Canada proposed a trip to Washington during a visit of hers during the summer of 1939. She offered to bring me over, and we would see all of Washington that we could see. Since it was semi-unknown to me, that was going to be a great excursion. And over we came on the train, on a crisp morning, the first of July in 1939, an African American taxi driver at Union Station offered to show us all the sights. So we got into his taxi and the fee was going to be $5.00 for the entire morning. And in the blinding morning sunlight we went up to the white gleaming steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which was then only 17 years old, and it didn’t look like the melting sugar cube it begins to resemble now because the air was cleaner then and the sky was bluer. But in one of our turns through Northwest Washington, we chanced to turn a bend, and I don’t know where this could have been, but it was perhaps down Massachusetts Avenue. And I saw something from the cab window that was not on our schedule, but that I recognized instantly as resembling a marvelous photograph in a 1922 copy of the National Geographic that I had poured over during long days in sick bed as a child. It was a white building covered with spires. I’d never seen a Cathedral in my life, but I thought this must be the Washington Cathedral. And I remember Margaret turning to me and saying, “Would you like to see that, dear?” And I definitely did want to see it, so we came.

In those days one entered on the South Transept steps which were made of concrete, and you walked up to a great piece of unbuilt structure which was covered with tar paper and came to a big tin door in a tin wall which was covered with scaffolding. The door opened, and we came into a space that from the outside seemed to be black, but once in the door I could see we were in a magic twilight, a heavenly place. I had never seen such a thing! A great, soaring, mysterious space and it was filled, to my delight, with music. The organ, which had just been installed, was being used for practice. And the great Handel Largo from “Ombra mai fu”, was one. It was known in those days as Handel’s Largo. But in any case, the organist was playing an organ transcription of it. And the awe of the interior, the dim light, the magic of the North Rose shining there in the gloom,…it wasn’t gloom; it was mystery. It was anything but gloom. It was a magic place. And filled with a degree of awesomeness and beauty and spirit. How else can I say it, that I had never seen in my life before, or experienced. And I was simply struck, if not dumb, I was certainly bowled over.

We were taken on a tour by one of the ladies in purple gowns. There was not much Cathedral then. All the crypt was complete, but only the Choir and North Transept and Crossing were here. There was very little stained glass. The North Rose was there, but there were no clerestory windows in the Choir at all. And the windows there were filled with the most beautiful temporary glass I have ever seen. Indeed, it was, well so good that it’s one of those instances where often the temporary glass is more beautiful than what follows it. But the windows were leaded diamond panes that had an overall coppery hue. They were a mixture of browns and lavenders, and even some faint, faint pale green. They were painted down to be dim. But the coppery beauty of these things, this mixture of brown and blue, was absolutely delicious. The North Rose was beautiful. Brighter then, of course, than it is now because it’s been gathering dust all these years. And imagine, it was installed in 1934, imagine what your kitchen windows would be like if they hadn’t been washed since 1934!

And indeed, speaking of which, the windows in St. Mary’s Chapel by Lawrence Saint, and it’s the Choir Aisle Chapel off in that direction, have just been restored by my greatly admired friend, Dieter Goldkuhle. He, of course, in the restoration has cleaned them. And the effect, when I last walked into that Chapel, was something I really had not seen in my memory before. The windows are so much more beautiful, and they let in so much more light, and they’re brighter and clean and the colors have a lovely harmony that they certainly didn’t possess before.

In any case, this is my July 1^st, 1939 life-changing experience. It really was that. And if I hadn’t happened to have been brought here, I don’t know what would have happened. But it certainly would have been all different.

In any case, I was obsessed by this building as in nothing in my life before.

And came back again with a school friend whose parents had a car, in August, and came again with my ancient aunt who lived with my family, another aunt, not the Canadian one, in October of 1939. And that day I gathered a tiny spring of boxwood, one inch in length, from the Bishop’s Garden, as a souvenir, and I chanced to really look at the first stained glass windows that I had really ever paid attention to. And it happened to be the Moses window by Lawrence Saint in the North Transept. And suddenly, I saw stained glass for the first time.

Well, the next day back in Baltimore, I was at the Enoch Pratt Library seeing what there might be on stained glass. And of course there was a lot. And over the weeks I read as much as I could. And in late October 1939, actually presumed to make a little watercolor study for a stained glass window. It’s of course a laughable little trifle, but I can’t help being touched when I see it because it suggested that I was already enchanted. That really is true.

I must condense so we’re not here all night. But also I must not go on before the sun sets, or after the sun sets. But I was bewitched by stained glass, bewitched by cathedrals, aware of cathedral architecture for the first time, reading as much as I could, learning as much as I could. I even acquired eventually some scraps from a company in Baltimore that made colored glass transoms. And with a wonderful book by Christopher Wall written in London in 1905 as my guide, I tried to teach myself the craft. And of course there were many things I did not learn by myself, but I nevertheless, was able to start assembling little panels, usually less than a square foot for my own satisfaction and instruction. And then these things began to be commissioned by high school teachers or family friends. For $5 you could get a neat little panel about 5” square with a head derived from one of the 13^th century windows at Chartres.

But in any case, I learned and delighted in it, and made a wholesuccession of small pieces, leaded and finished, but without any firing. I painted on the glass with India ink, and protected the layer of India ink with a layer of clear varnish, having no kiln and no knowledge of the qualities and nature of real glass painting. But one learns from such things.

In due course as the years passed, I finally built up experience of some 40 of these little stained glass sections, many of them with figural subjects. And I didn’t know much about figure drawing at that point, but was willing to learn. I wrote to Lawrence Saint in the summer of 1940, the summer that France fell, to ask if I could be his apprentice. And he very kindly wrote back that he was doing no more stained glass. He was painting murals in churches. So then I wrote to the most famous stained glass artist of that time in this country, who was Charles J. Connick, who lived in Boston and whose studio was there. He was imminent, both as a stained glass artist and as a writer, and a friend of writers. He had done, among other things, the great Rose Window in the West End of St. John the Divine in New York. Anyway, I wrote to Mr. Connick to ask if I could be his apprentice. And he wrote back immediately that this was an interesting proposition, but he would need to see a piece of my work. So I made a little panel, about a foot tall and eight inches wide with a figure of St. Paul in it. Now I had only the scraps from this transom shop to work with, and there was one kind of red, and one particularly poisonous green, but there were two different blues, all of this was the cheap commercial rolled glass called mistakenly “cathedral glass”—it’s what you would never put into a cathedral. In any case, I completed this thing and sent it off to Mr. Connick, and he returned it with a letter of the most stinging criticism. He could not have given me a greater gift—because it wasn’t crushing. But he told me what he thought, and what he thought of the drawing was not unprintable, but almost. And he also criticized my glass selection, but in that I felt perhaps a little justified by the fact that I didn’t have any other source of supply. In any case, I decided to work very much on drawing and did that.

After another year, I was commissioned by Goucher College, which the Clerk of the Works just referred to in his talk who wanted me to do for them a small panel demonstrating the nature of stained glass. It could be any size, any subject. So I did, for the Fine Arts Department, or prepared to do, a smallish panel of about a square foot and a half.

But meanwhile, I had a curious another life-changing adventure. There was in Baltimore a church called the Pro-Cathedral of the Incarnation, which was really to be the Synod Hall of a great Cathedral that was supposedly going to be built in Baltimore. An original Cathedral for Baltimore had originally been designed by Bertram Goodhue, a great architect, and alas, by the way, the budget for that was five million dollars. And it was to be as what? As big as Salisbury. As big as York. But in any case, then came the crash. So that idea was cancelled. But Mr. Frohman was appointed architect to build a small church, a parish size church, in Baltimore that would serve as the Synod Hall of the coming Cathedral. Well, I heard about it, so I went to see it. And fell in love with the beautiful building, although not to the degree of passion and love I felt for this one. But one day, it was near one of the bus stops that I would take coming home from high school, and one day on one of those stops I went into the church which, like many churches was open all the time in those days, and there were two men speaking over in the empty church against one wall. One was the kindly Canon of the Cathedral, Canon Arrow Smith, who I recognized and who recognized me as somebody who haunted his church to whom he’d been kind. And he waved me over. So I went and he said, “Rowan, I want you to meet—I missed the name!—I could not understand whom I was about to meet. But he explained to his friend that this was a young man who had stopped in many times and who was interested in stained glass. And the other man who was a small wiry man, who I would judge in his early fifties, was cordial, but I didn’t know who it was I was speaking to. It turned out it was the architect of this building — Philip Hubert Frohman! And when I realized that, I was so overcome with feeling that I was really inclined to fling myself to the floor on my knees! And I was so glad I didn’t because Mr. Frohman would have been offended. He was a devout man, and he would have taken this as I don’t know what kind of insanity! But anyway, I did manage to stammer out when I understood who he was that I would like, if it would be possible, to speak with him someday about stained glass. And he very kindly said, “you are welcome to visit me at any time in my office. I’d be glad to talk with you about stained glass”. He was very simple and approachable and kindly.

Well, I lost no time in making an appointment. His office in those days was up here in a little temporary building. It looked temporary and it certainly has proved to be temporary because it was over on what is now a fine space of lawn with nice trees. But it was the Depression time, very little work was proceeding here or anywhere. And he had an office set up in a little framed Cathedral office building with its tar paper roof.

Upon my arriving there, we just sat and spent the afternoon talking. I had a thousand questions for him. And he was so generous in giving me his time and sharing his feelings about windows and his experience of various artists that I was in great awe of, such as E. E. Sanborn and Lawrence Saint. He had not met Wright Goodhue, but he did know everybody else. And knew a great deal about medieval glass as well as medieval buildings. He said, that his criteria for beautiful stained glass involved at least three points. Of course, strength of design was important, but more important to him were qualities of transparency, or clarity. He said he didn’t like it that windows were so frequently smudged over with a vitrofiable black paint which was then fired in to be permanent, in imitation of the patina on medieval glass. He liked windows to be much more transparent so that they, windows in churches, just like windows in houses, would admit light. Well, this was an absolutely novel concept to me. But of course it means the antithesis of the tiffany or opalescent picture window which is made of cloudy glass like the glass of a cold cream jar.

In any case, he liked windows to have clarity, richness, and sparkle. Well, doesn’t that sound good? It certainly sounded good to me. And as I thought about it, I decided to make this little panel for Goucher in such a way as to carry out, in so far as I could, these goals of clarity, richness and sparkle.

And it was done.

And I told him about this, and he said he would like to see it.

So on January 3^rd, 1942, I being then sixteen, I came over from Baltimore on the train. And it must have been a Saturday because otherwise, well I was in my senior year of high school, and I don’t think I would have lightly taken off a weekday. Anyway, he was in his office over here on the Cathedral grounds, and received me kindly, as always. It was a brilliant, cold, winter day with the sun blazing down from the South. In his office there was a series of windows facing South. And I unwrapped my panel, and he put it up in one of his office windows. And then, with thumb tacks, with pushpins, surrounded it with brown paper, so as to cut out the adjacent daylight coming in. And when that was done, he stood back and he and I looked at it. And I must say I was very impressed myself because, well, because I had not seen it before with all the light cut out. But really, the color expands and leaps out as soon as the surrounding daylight is subdued. Also, the morning winter sun was shining fully on it, and the floor of his office and his desk were covered with rainbows.

Well, he said things about that glass that I had never had any intimation of. I had never been spoken to even by adoring female relatives in such terms, even as a pink infant. And my little head spun around. I felt literally giddy. And yet, there was nothing sentimental. He was just very enthusiastic. But to be enthusiastic about this was something I wasn’t at all prepared for!

And, then he said something equally curious to me, and that was that this is the kind of window I’ve always wanted to see in St. Dunstan’s Chapel. Well, I was reasonably well acquainted with the Cathedral, and I knew of no St. Dunstan’s Chapel. And I said, “Where is St. Dunstan’s Chapel?” And he said, “If you would kindly put on your coat—he was formal. He was formal in his speech. He betrayed rather little emotion. Sometimes he would often smile, and sometimes he’d laugh in a haw-haw-haw kind of way. But he was a most amiable, approachable gentleman. But he called me always “Mr. LeCompte.” Even pronounced it in French.

In any case, he brought me over here, or into this unfinished pile that the Cathedral was, and we went into the crypt, with his master key he unlocked door after door. And presently we found ourselves in a cold, dark, little room with steps going down into the unknown. We were in St. Dunstan’s Chapel. It was a Chapel he had designed with some unallocated space when he had designed the steps going up to the South Transept. There was to be either solid masonry below them, or a void, which could be supported by big arches. St. Dunstan was one of his favorite people. So he named this place St. Dunstan’s Chapel, and said that one day it was his prayer— he was a very devout man and a Roman Catholic—it was his prayer that one day it should be a Chapel dedicated to the memory of St. Dunstan and to the worship of our Lord.

Well, I was awe struck again because here we were in this refrigerator of a little vaulted room with a small window open with no glass in it in the East end, and an even smaller window open without glass on the West end, so it was perfectly obvious from the look of the floor that it was the favorite haunt of pigeons, and that they would fly in the entrance and go out the exit.

But up in the East End was a little lancet window 8” wide and about 42” tall. And he said, “That’s the kind of glass you have showed me just now”, said he, “the kind of glass I would like to see in that window. And I’m so glad that this Chapel has never been finished, and that there has been no stained glass installed in it. And he seemed to be reasonably serious about this, and of course, I was in a dream—just like now! But he said, “I will see if there is any possibility that we might find some funds for such a project.”

Well, I went back to Baltimore walking well above the ground. I was just dizzy with the unexpected. And then he sent me a three-page, single-spaced letter about St. Dunstan. He knew an enormous lot about St. Dunstan who was an Anglo-Saxon churchman in England in the tenth century, who began as a monk. He began as a youngster as a monk in the Abbey of Glastonbury, and progressed because of his zeal and learning and ability, eventually to become not only Bishop of London and Bishop of Worchester, but finally Archbishop of Canterbury. He also became a great friend of the King, and was sometimes entrusted with royal powers when the King would be out of the country or perhaps out fishing. But in any case, Dunstan was formidable. He was a statesman. He was an artist. He drew beautifully in the style of his day. He was a worker in metals. He did black smithing. He cast bells. He built organs. He was an engineer and understood architecture. He was a Renaissance man.

Mr. Frohman was a Renaissance man, and I sometimes wondered if he didn’t, without saying anything about it, wonder if perhaps St. Dunstan was again walking the earth and had actually become architect of Washington Cathedral. But Mr. Frohman was an altogether admirable man, and I had nothing but reverence for him, and great gratitude for the kindness he showed me.

To put it in quick order, he eventually wrote back and said, “There were unfortunately no funds available for stained glass in St. Dunstan’s Chapel. But,” said he, the letter said, and I have it to this day, “if you would be willing to design and make this window, or rather design this window and make it, if the Building Committee were to approve your designs, as an example of your work, and install it, and remove it if it were found to be unsatisfactory, all without charge to the Cathedral, I would be delighted to put your designs before the Building Committee.”

Well, you may smile and say of course it’s a no lose situation, and it was. But — look what I was being offered! A chance to do something for this divine place which I worshipped.

It was done. The day came when I had completed a color drawing and full sized drawing. And I came over for the Building Committee meeting. I had showed him some preliminary studies which he was pleased with. But the day came, and I was in his office, and he looked at the black and white drawing which was a roll of paper four or so feet long and narrow, and a color study, and he then prepared to take them into the Building Committee which met at 4 p.m. And just before he turned away with the drawings he looked at me and he said, “By the way, Mr. LeCompte, how old are you?” And I said, “I’m 16, Mr. Frohman.” And he just said, “Good God! I thought you were older.” And then he disappeared, and let me sit in his office and read his architectural books. And after an hour or so, because there was so little building that the Building Committee didn’t have long meetings then, really, really! No, seriously, the Building Committee would consider things like memorial inscriptions, and they’d haggle over this word or that word, and maybe the type of lettering or the location. But there was no construction going on at all. So the Building Committee meetings I suppose were reasonably brief and unlabored.

Anyway, back he came after a while. And he said, very formally, “Mr. LeCompte, I’m happy to inform you that the Building Committee has, with enthusiasm, accepted your drawings for the proposed window in St. Dunstan’s Chapel, and that the Honorable Mr. Castle, a member of the Committee, has graciously offered $100 to cover your expenses.” I was ecstatic! Ecstatic!

And after a while, my parents cleared the furniture out of the living room of our home so that I could work there. There was an Eastern window, and as I cut the glass, which I had bought a better quality of, I stuck it up in the eastern light to see its effect. And then went to Philadelphia by the kindness of one of the Philadelphia window people to have the glass fired. It was leaded there, and then brought back. The Bishop of Maryland consented to come to the house to look at it, Bishop Powell, who had been Dean of this Cathedral. And he was absolutely a delightful man.

But in due course, the window was installed by me and my friend Philip Henry Lebovitz, a school chum, now alas deceased, on a cold Saturday, Saturday, the 28^th of March, 1942. Towards the evening it began to sleet, and then it turned to snow. Mr. Frohman took us frozen kids down to Union Station and bought us a bowl of oyster stew and then put us on the train to go home. I came back. It snowed that night eleven inches! So, prepare for something on March 28^th!

In any case, that was an epoch in my life, and I needn’t say any more about it. That summer Mr. Frohman offered me a job as a draftsman in his office, and I’m sure I produced nothing of any use to him, but it was an education and a delight to be near him many days.

That summer I made, after going through the usual channels of design, I made and gave to the Cathedral the little window at the other end of St. Dunstan’s which is still in place. And that one I made entirely by myself. My mother had discovered that glass could be fired in the family oil furnace! And that’s what happened. Between then and a year later when I went off into World War II, I produced eight small windows, one for Trinity College Chapel in Hartford, five for the Baltimore Pro-Cathedral which now is the Baltimore Cathedral, and one for the home and studio of a sculptor friend in Baltimore.

Going on three years in World War II, the crowning moment of which I suppose was the few hours I spent in Paris during the Liberation with a couple of friends with our rifles over our shoulders and our iron hats, going into Notre Dame. We courteously reversed the rifles so that they pointed at the floor, but you had to stay armed. And it was so touching when some small children brought me a little bunch of plastic flowers which we still have, much broken and faded. But they’ve witnessed the most astonishing joy I’ve ever seen in my life on a citywide scale.

After getting out of the Army, at the beginning of 1946, and I’m a little ahead of my story because in the last months in it, a fellow soldier and I became friends, and were due to be discharged at the same time. His name was Charles Matz, and he lived in New Jersey, and had already attended Rutgers University for a year. We were slated to come back to the United States on an American battleship that had been pressed into service as a troop ship because there was such an enormous mass of American troops in Europe that there wasn’t enough shipping to get them home. And, of course, my outfit which was engineers had been expecting to go to Japan anyway, and we came home in December of 1945, and found ourselves going into a freak of nature, a winter North Atlantic hurricane. And for the five-day trip, took ten days. The ship was badly damaged. The lower decks were flooded by water that poured down the ventilators on top. I was one of the few people who got hurt on that trip, but got sewed up. And became very great friends with Charles Matz. He and I both had our bunks flooded out because we were way below decks, and there were seven or eight inches of water in this rolling tub. So we would spend all day on the Admiral’s Promenade, which was a tiny deck about a fifth of the size of this little platform looking out at the raging sea. And it really was raging, but the air was very warm and sea was steaming. But there were days when we made no headway at all because the ship was going full speed to stay in one spot. In any case, Charles told me of his sister who was in the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York.

And in the fullness of time, she and I were married. She was an architect, a bright, humorous, ironical young woman, very attractive, and very interesting. And later she and I worked together for the twenty years that she survived. She eventually died in 1970 of a long illness that was very painful.

In January of 1946 an old school friend who was a really gifted artist and who had become interested in stained glass too, decided to do it together because it was too much for one person. The technique is endless. The technique is as overwhelming as that of bronze sculpture. It goes on and on and on. And if more than one pair of hands can do it, it’s much more agreeable. So this man, whose name was George Robert Lewis, and a most gifted artist, and I worked together for three and a half years making stained glass—sometimes designed by one of us and sometimes by the other, but always executed collaboratively, or almost always.

I’m happy to tell you that Bob Lewis did one window in this building, which is in the Mellon Bay, a small chapel on the right side of the Nave near the Crossing. It is surely his least work because his great work which was not done here—he had always a kind of antagonism with clerical donors or patrons. It is not a representative piece of his work. After his death, which was four years ago to my grief and great loss, I was interested to see that he had designed and made in stained glass, eight indisputable masterpieces. One, a small window in Baltimore, was demolished by some kids who were breaking into the church to steal the communion wine and the poor box. Another masterpiece which is in the middle of the Mall in Washington, was about 12’ tall and a most impressive stained glass sculpture. It is original as his best work always was to an astonishing degree. There is nothing like it anywhere else. He invented this thing. He made it with enormous labor, and when you see it you really don’t know what you’re looking at, but it’s a phenomenal tower of light and beautiful color and astonishing shapes. It’s complicated. It’s indescribable. It is enchanting, and it’s immovable. It was made and located in the Hall of Glass that was part of the American History and Technology Museum on the Mall. There was a fire in that room later on, and the room was redone by an architect who wanted some other arrangement for the room, and the sculpture was in the wrong place. But it couldn’t be moved, so he walled it up. And you can stand right next to it and not know it’s there. It’s in a big square column in the middle of the room. And I’m so sorry because it’s a piece of American art of such originality and of such beauty that I wish very much it could be enjoyed. But it is invisible from all four sides. Maybe one day that will change, or when the building is demolished from old age, the bulldozer man is going to have a great surprise!

We ended our partnership, Bob and I, because we found that increasingly we were stepping on each other’s toes. We both wanted to do the same thing, which was determine the design and the color. And Bob was happier, really, doing his work his way and we decided to part as co-workers, but we certainly did remain friends. He moved to New York, and later I moved to New Jersey and married Charles’ sister who was an architect, in 1950. We, for the twenty years that remained to her, worked together, often one or the other of us designing, both of us fabricating. For the first ten years we worked very much independently together, but then began to receive commissions of such a size that we needed help. And the angels sent Melville Greenland in New York to telephone and tell me how much he admired some windows I had done years before in Maryland. It turned out that Mel was working for his father-in-law and hoped one day to be on his own.

Other artists were interested in the same things. So the day came when Mel opened the Greenland Studio. Irene and I had working space there. Ephraim Weitzman also, a wonderful artist. And Sam Wiener, yet another stained glass artist, all worked in Mel’s studio, and Mel worked with all of us collaboratively.

It was a hilarious time because laughter from young people sharing a kind of common space and a common goal is infectious. One of the odd things came the day the Danish Embassy called, and it just happened I answered the phone. And a very heavily accented voice said, “We want to know about the Greenland Studio.” And I said, “Well yes, but Mr. Greenland is not here just now.” “Oh, oh, oh.” And I said, “Who are you?” And she said, “We’re the Danish Embassy and you know we own Greenland!”

In New York, I met for the first time, Robert Pinart who is here today and whom I consider a very great artist in stained glass. He’s the author of the windows that you are looking at, made of white glass here on both sides. Also, of this window in the Lincoln Bay and that one in the Washington Bay. Robert does work in figurative, as well as abstract modes. He’s a colorist and a painter, a glass painter of the greatest accomplishment.

There are so many people I’d like to remember, with my love and admiration. Several of them I had the opportunity to recommend to the Cathedral, Robert having been one. Ervine Bossanyi, Irene and I recommended to Dean Sayre, and he was subsequently commissioned for the windows in the Wilson Bay there, and in the NCA Bay over on the left side. A marvelous artist of Hungarian birth. A beautiful draftsman who wore his heart on his sleeve. His windows are full of emotion. He was not embarrassed by his emotions.

In the execution of the things I have done in this building, I also want to give thanks and recognition to Richard Avadon, not the famous photographer of the same name, but a very wonderful artist in stained glass who also has worked collaboratively with Mel Greenland, with Mary Clarken Higgins, who at one time was a young worker in Mel’s studio and became foreperson. Now has her own studio, and is a most admiralble craftsperson and restorer of medieval glass, as is Mel himself. Charles Lawrence of Philadelphia has done a most exquisitely tactful window over here in the Healing Arts space. It’s between a window of mine and the much brighter window by Robert Pinart. And Charles has hit exactly the tactful median. His window is perfectly in place, and makes the others comfortable also. He did the same thing in the Choir, and in the South Transept, where he installed two clerestory windows that are so perfect with their neighbors that they make the marriage of opposites absolutely agreeable. Mr. Bossanyi work I can’t praise enough, nor that of Hans Kaiser, another artist that Dieter Goldkuhle told me of and showed me slides of the work of, and that I then was able to recommend with great urgency to Dean Sayre. And he did the fabulous windows out in the lower part of this Northwest Tower. But they’re in an obscure place. You really have to make an effort to see them. And his similar, but I think even slightly less dramatic, very last work, which is over here in the Frohman Bay. There are three windows in the first bay on the North side of the Nave at the ground level. And they, like his best work, is a cloud of jewels. Marvelous artist. He was a distinguished painter, portraitist, and non-objective painter besides.

I want to tell you how very much I love this place, how I have wanted over the years to see the very best of furnishings placed in it. I think the architecture is very nearly faultless. I think it’s a pity, though, that the Choir has so much less glass than the Nave, because the enormous fenestration in the Nave makes the Nave automatically, inevitably, lighter. Whereas the Choir is very much darker by nature.

There was a great friend of the Cathedral named James Sheldon, a wealthy New Yorker lover of stained glass, of color, of music, and of dancing. He loved joy, and although personally he seemed austere, he had a warm heart. And it was he that persuaded the Cathedral Chapter, or the Building Committee, or the authorities, in the late twenties, to abandon the style of relatively quietly-colored English medieval glass that Lawrence Saint had used in his Choir chapels, and to swing into a mode of full color that James Sheldon felt could be seen at Chartres and above all at the Spanish Cathedral at Lyons.

Irene and I were invited by him to come to a meeting in the beginning of 1951 in the Cathedral where he was to discuss something that he thought we’d be interested in with Mr. Frohman and several of the Cathedral Canons. Poor Mr. Frohman was under attack because he had inherited the Choir. The apse was already built when he became architect, after the designs of Bodley originally, and then the second architect, Henry Vaughan, who was born in England but who practiced in Boston. Well, James Sheldon attacked the Choir saying that the Choir is gloomy and does not fulfill its role because there’s so little glass in it. There’s no affect of glory when you look to the East and of light. As, he said, the Choir of Litchfield Cathedral in England has. It has great luminosity and brightness. And sure enough, it does. I’ve been there, and I’m sure people here have who will remember the flood of light as you stood in the Nave and looked toward the altar. The altar was surrounded by great windows that come all the way down to it. They’re filled with 16^th century Finnish glass, and it’s not great glass, but it is not so bad. And in any case, it’s bright. And here, the windows in the apse are small. Well, Sheldon attacked poor Frohman, and said, “Don’t you agree that those windows should be larger, and that they should come all the way down to the top of the reredos, which would more than double their size?” In my opinion, they indeed should do that. Sheldon had very good ideas, although sometimes he could put them with shocking bluntness.

But anyway, he attacked the Canons. And they mumbled, and shuffled their feet. But eventually he rather pushed Mr. Frohman into a corner, and poor Mr. Frohman had to admit that, yes, it would be better if the Apse windows came all the way down to the reredos, and made a crown of light for you as you looked forward. Well, Sheldon was ready to pay for it right then. His checkbook was in his pocket. And the Cathedral people, of course, wanted him to leave all his money which he had promised to do, I gather, they in any case were expecting great results from his will. But they wanted to spend the money the way they wanted to spend the money, and it was not on doing over pieces that had been built long before. So they resisted. And Mr. Frohman advanced arguments against changing the Cathedral. And finally, Sheldon flew into a passion and cried out, and this was memorable, “When you make a mistake, don’t perpetuate it; correct it!” And nobody could say a word.

I think that shows you James Sheldon. I have great respect for him. His ashes are in this place, and I must say he was a great, great friend to it. When he died, and when his sister died, the bequest from the Sheldon’s built the Central Tower, completed the South Transept, and did all kinds of other things too.

I must say, he adored George Washington. He loved color, music, dancing, George Washington, America, and horses. And his favorite horse of all time was Man of War, which you all may remember some vestige of, those that are old enough. Man of War was a prodigious horse, and Sheldon wanted a statue of George Washington riding Man of War. And it was done, you got it. It was made in Belgium, and it was sent over with gold leaf on it. And it stood at the bottom of the Pilgrim Steps looking like a plastic souvenir of Washington, D.C. But eventually, the gold leaf was removed, and a relatively tame statue was revealed. It is not the fire-eater that Mr. Sheldon would have wanted. But he’s left his mark on this place in many ways, as have so many people.

I hope that the future will love it as we have loved it. I hope that a greater sense of mystery can be achieved as the science of lighting is perfected so that we see not the lighting fixture, but only the architecture that is illuminated.

I hope the place will be filled with music, as some French churches are all the time, even when there’s no one there because they have some marvelous sound system playing Gregorian or other music constantly. Because music in a building like this, transforms it. It becomes transfigured. Especially Bach, of course, because it’s just Gothic architecture turned into sound. But it has a structural quality that is sublime.

I thank you so much for your patience. I’ve gone overtime, as usual, but my enthusiasm for this subject and for this place could go on interminably. You are spared.

Thank you so much.