Stained glass panel, 'The Joiners', Stephen Adam, 1878

This stained glass panel is one of twenty depicting different trades created by Stephen Adam (1848-1910) for the Burgh Halls in Maryhill a western suburb of Glasgow.  Adam was one of Scotland’s most prolific and renowned nineteenth-century stained glass designers.  His Maryhill panels celebrate the artisan labour that defined the industries of Glasgow and Maryhill’s local trades. This panel depicts a typical joiner’s workshop. One man wears a traditional Scotch bonnet and carries a basket of tools that include a handsaw and piece of rope, while the other planes a piece of timber on a workbench. The tools and equipment seen here would have been familiar to most woodworker’s workshops in the 1870s.  The Maryhill Burgh panels have been noted for their contemporary realism in contrast to Renaissance-style depictions of figures that were favoured for most late nineteenth-century ecclesiastical stained glass. Other Glasgow trades featured in Adam’s panels include zinc spelters, iron moulders and chemical workers.

Adam’s own workshops at St Vincent Street, Glasgow, feature in an 1891 published account titled Glasgow and its Environs.  The description gives a sense of the hierarchy of tasks and division of labour involved in making architectural stained glass, describing workshops for lead working, drawing and designing cartoons, for glass painting and staining, plus kilns for firing and supplementary departments for packing and for housing stocks of materials. At the height of his success in the 1890s Adam employed several assistants and apprentices.

Stephen Adam was born in Edinburgh and received his training at the Trustee’s Academy in Edinburgh.  He was apprenticed in 1861 to Edinburgh glass painter James Ballantine who authored A Treatise on Painted Glass in 1845. The Maryhill Burgh Halls panels were commissioned while Adam was in partnership with David Small, a former house-painter who retained his business as an ‘embosser and fancy decorator’ after his partnership with Adam ended in 1885. Adam’s other commissions include memorial windows for Paisley Abbey and contracts for public institutions, hotels, restaurants and banks.  A report on his address to the Edinburgh Architectural Society in 1896 described his public work as ‘for the comfort and education of the masses in church and home, palace and hall’ (The Scotsman, December 3,1896). 

Stained glass was an art form traditionally associated with ecclesiastical buildings but a resurgence of interest in the second half of the nineteenth century led to commissions for decorative glass for public and domestic architecture.  Increasing demand supported a number of workshops and designers. Adam was a key figure in Glasgow glass, as were other influential figures such as Oscar Paterson and John and William Guthrie.  John Guthrie was a founder member of The Scottish Society of Art Workers, and the Guthries were an example of an established general glaziers and interior decorators that branched out into the lucrative fashion for painted and stained glass in the 1880s. They employed freelance designers from the Glasgow School of Art and produced glass for Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s interiors. 

Stephen Adam’s work was exhibited at Arts and Crafts exhibitions in London and Scotland, and he also published two books on his craft: Stained Glass its History and Development (1877), and The Truth in Decorative Art: Stained Glass, Medieval and Modern (ca.1896).