It’s nearly 20 years since Sarah Fadden Pritchard died in Canada at the age of 92. She had retired there to her daughter Judith’s home after sixty years of working in the arts in Scotland. Most people know her better as Sadie McLellan.

Born in Milngavie in 1914, her career began under the strong influence of her father, an idealistic socialist. (The Herald published a deeply moving account of his return from the Great War which is well worth reading).

Her teacher at Bearsden Academy, the artist Willie Armour, persuaded her to go to the Glasgow School of Art, where, in 1933, in her third year, she entered the stained glass workshop of Charles Baillie, designer of the famous but currently shuttered Rogano restaurant in Glasgow. He was also a prolific artist in stained glass. McLellan was impressed by the possibilities and challenge of the medium. She was already a confident artist and her diploma design – a depiction of Mary Queen of Scots – though influenced by Baillie, showed remarkable assurance.

It is common for Scottish stained glass fans to play “spot the influences” – you can see Daniel Cottier’s influence in Stephen Adam. You can see Douglas Strachan’s influence in Alf Webster, and Alf Webster’s influence in Gordon Webster. You can see Herbert Hendrie’s influence in Willie Wilson and Willie Wilson’s influence in Carrick Whalen. With McLellan, it’s not so easy. It has been said that her work went through three phases and it’s fun to trace them, seeing her move away from those early influences. Her two choir windows in Glasgow Cathedral show her early style at its best.

She was awarded the John Keppie scholarship and travelled to Scandinavia, spending her academic year at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, under Professor Einar Utzon-Frank, a noted sculptor. She experimented with sculpture but was drawn back to glass, though also trying glass blowing and engraving. While in Copenhagen she produced designs for windows, including a three-light window for a crematorium and a speculative design for the great west window of Glasgow Cathedral. She also executed her first domestic commission, four panels illustrating the signs of the zodiac, for a house in Fredensborg. When her completed cartoons were exhibited at the school of art, they were greeted with enthusiastic approval.

In 1938 she contributed a mural, a stained glass panel and an embossed panel to the Women’s Pavilion at the Empire Exhibition. The stained glass was purchased by Lady Maufe, the artistic director of Heal’s of London; with the proceeds, McLellan funded a tour of Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France, visiting Paris and Chartres as all stained glass artists must!

In 1940, she met and married Walter Pritchard, of Dundee, a stained glass artist and muralist who taught on the staff of Edinburgh College of Art. Walter subsequently joined the staff of Glasgow School of Art.

For a time, she joined the staff of Glasgow School of Art and, as a contemporary noted, “the school changed when she arrived, she brought her creative energy with her like an aura”. She was passionate in her defence of stained glass. In Sarah Alford’s essay on Sadie McLellan (The Journal of Stained Glass Vol XXX) she recalls McLellan telling her “Don’t call it a craft, my dear, call it an art. You can separate art and fine art, but never craft and art”.

A real stand out of her early work are the ten windows in the Robin Chapel for the Thistle Foundation at Craigmillar, Edinburgh. She received the commission in 1951 to design windows to commemorate Robin, only son of Sir Francis and Lady Tudsbery, who was killed in the war. The principal theme was “The Pilgrim’s Progress”. Eight of her Robin Chapel windows depict incidents from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and are vigorous, imaginative images and unlike anything else in twentieth-century Scottish stained glass. The colour palette is remarkable and so different from what was being commonly used in Scotland at that time. McLellan’s influence as a colourist was strong and abiding on anyone who came into contact with her work.

She appears to have been given free rein in her interpretation of the Robin Chapel windows – and as much time as she needed, since she preferred to work alone. Perhaps this is responsible for what has been called her “clarity of conception… and its fearless and trenchant independence of thought and action.” It was this that drew poet Hugh MacDiarmid to her work: he recognised in her a kindred spirit who would not indulge popular taste or sentiment but insist on her pursuit of her own artistic vision. His poem The Terrible Crystal was dedicated to her in deep admiration.

McLellan was described as small in stature, with “a bird-like combination of strength and elegance”. She was always deeply critical of her own work and that of her contemporaries but also generous where praise is warranted – I have a letter from her full of praise for a scheme by William Wilson. A perfectionist by temperament, working always in solitary conditions, her output was significantly smaller than contemporaries such as Wilson or Gordon Webster, yet it contains some of the most powerful and imaginative glass in twentieth century Scotland; she enjoyed experimenting in new approaches.

On a visit to France in 1958 she discovered the revolutionary glass schemes just completed at Ronchamp by Le Corbusier and at Audincourt by Leger and was inspired to experiment in a new stained glass technique called dalles de verre, where slabs (dalle literally means paving slab) of glass are set into a matrix of concrete or resin.

Determined that Scotland should be part of this new development, she began a period of intense experimentation that resulted in the creation of at least six exceptional panels. Only two remain in Scotland, a beautiful Pieta (now in the National Museum of Scotland), and a panel, The Lovers (now in a private collection). Examples of her windows in dalles can be seen in several places, from the earliest in Alloa RC Parish Church (1960), and including her five windows in Cardonald Parish Church and a scheme for St Cadoc’s Church, in Cambuslang. Her pioneering of this new form of architectural stained glass and concrete propelled her into the forefront of Scottish architectural design.

She continued to work in both lead and concrete though most of her contemporaries did not find concrete a sympathetic medium. In 1963, poet and art critic Sydney Goodsir Smith – friend of both McLellan and MacDiarmid – expressed the views of many: “Is concrete aesthetically suitable for framing glass? Glass and concrete seem to be unhappy bedfellows. In this exhibition you can test it occasionally where there is a piece of leaded glass hanging beside or opposite some concreted glass. Notice the richness that the black leading imparts to the colour it inholds. Concrete, on the other hand, separates and gets a spotty disseminated disjunctive effect. “

Undeterred, McLellan carried on working in concrete. Most of the dalles windows you find in Scotland now that are not hers are by Frenchmen Pierre Fourmaintraux or Gabriel Loire.

She went on to design a huge window for the restoration of the Abbey of Pluscarden, near Elgin; its chief feature was a huge oculus depicting the Woman of Revelation and the Red Dragon.

Nothing this big in stained glass had been attempted in Scotland and when McLellan exhibited half of this window at an Arts Council exhibition, the talk of the contrast between the tiny artist and the scale of the glass was as much as of its powerful design.

She had begun developing ideas for a Ronchamp-style scheme in dalles de verre in which the glass and its subject, Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion, would assume a central role in the design of the building. In 1965 she collaborated with the rising stars of Scottish architecture, Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan, in the creation of the absolutely stunning Church of the Sacred Heart in Cumbernauld. Perhaps one day the Scottish Stained Glass Symposium will be able to arrange a meeting there.

She also returned sometimes to her training in sculpture, such as her piece “A seed in time”. This is a rather mysterious piece – signed 1973 despite the Scotsman featuring her with it as a piece she was “currently” working on in 1979, it is on a revolving plinth which may not have been there originally, and its current owners, Stirling University, believe it was made for Bell’s whisky though the actual commission on record that she received for their garden was a mosaic. It is rather lovely anyhow, reflecting her recurring interest in the portrayal of the sun.

Sydney Goodsir Smith wrote a long and fascinating review of an exhibition in Edinburgh of leaded, concreted and sandblasted glass to which very many Scottish artists contributed. He finished:

“However, the glories of the exhibition, to this eye, are the works of Sadie McLellan and William Wilson. Miss McLellan has some of the loveliest windows in the show; her “The Lover,” ” Persephone,” ” The Birds and the Bees,” ” Pieta” (particularly “The Lover”) are quite simply exquisite. She manages to combine elegance, grandeur and passion, design, colour and “story” into a perfect composite marriage.

William Wilson’s work, whether it reminds you of Breughel or of Rouault, always satisfies in its quite outer-seeming completeness. He is a medievalist bang in the middle of the twentieth century. His windows could be in cathedrals even when they describe an “Irish Jig.” Miss McLellan’s, for all their sometimes Christian subject matter, are essentially pagan. One longs to possess them; that is their function, simply to be possessed.”

We’re not able to offer any of her work for you to possess but we would like you to join us at the Scottish Stained Glass Symposium in March when we visit the Robin Chapel to see her Pilgrim’s Progress windows. Full details will be posted on our website and will be sent out to everyone on the mailing list which you can sign up to below.

— Rona Moody

secretary@ssgt.org.uk