Windows: A Book About Stained & Painted Glass is both a manual of connoisseurship and a history of a luminous art. Day treats the window not merely as an aperture but as architecture transfigured by colour, tracing medieval precedent, Renaissance departures, and modern practice with the discriminating eye of a designer. His prose is lucid, practical, and polemical, attentive to lead-lines, glass texture, figure drawing, ornament, and the proper subordination of pictorial ambition to architectural effect. In the context of late Victorian design reform, the book argues for integrity of material and disciplined craftsmanship. Lewis F. Day (1845–1910) was a British decorative artist, industrial designer, teacher, and critic closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. His long engagement with pattern, textiles, wallpapers, ceramics, and interior decoration gave him a comprehensive understanding of applied art. Writing amid anxieties about mechanized production and declining standards, he sought to educate makers and patrons alike in principles grounded in historical knowledge and practical experience. This volume is recommended to readers interested in stained glass, architectural history, ecclesiastical art, and Arts and Crafts aesthetics. It rewards both the practicing designer and the scholar, offering a rigorous, humane defence of beauty as something inseparable from structure, technique, and use.
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