Patience of an Angel
In June 2023, specialist conservators from Recclesia Stained Glass were called in to undertake the painstaking conservation and repair work required to John Hutton’s glass artwork. The West Screen is a very well-known piece of modern glass art amongst glass professionals, so caring for his work came with enormous responsibility, and the same sense of wonder as a paintings specialist might have for works by Monet or Matisse.
Following detailed assessment and careful packaging, the remains of the artwork were transported to Recclesia’s conservation studio in Manchester, where the body of the broken Angel in hundreds of smashed fragments was laid out as if a patient being prepared for surgery. Here lay the first major challenge for the conservation team in the form of an enormous glass jigsaw, an intricate procedure that took a team of three people over a month to complete - quite literally requiring the patience of an Angel!
Serendipity also lent a hand in this process, as the Cathedral archive was found to hold the original chalk drawing or “cartoon” of the Angel produced by John Hutton prior to the engraving process. A high-resolution scan of the cartoon was taken and reproduced at full scale, allowing the conservators to lay the fragments out over a backlit blueprint. Day by day, bit by tiny bit, the figure of the Angel began to remerge from the smithereens.
About 109 fragments of varying sizes, some several centimetres across, but many only a few millimetres wide, were successfully identified and located onto the cartoon. Whilst many sections of the glass art have been entirely lost and can never be replaced, the surviving remains will now be delicately pieced back together by edge bonding. This will result in a legible image which despite being incomplete and very honestly repaired, will still be a meaningful part of Hutton’s work with its own unique story to tell.
The conservation work to piece the sections back together is currently underway, and proposals are being drawn up concerning how and where to best display the repaired remains within the Cathedral building.
