St Mungo’s Museum is a splendid building, designed like a castle and filling the site of the former Glasgow Castle, next to the cathedral. Back in the 1990s, two of our trustees, SB and LC, worked extensively to prepare the stained glass for display, and so they were able to share a lot of background information while they led a guided tour of the windows.

The collection includes medieval gems which arrived here as part of Burrell’s collection, and Victorian windows which came from redundant Glasgow churches. Almost life size figures of saints and prophets from Woodlands Parish Church were designed by Edward Burne Jones in 1874 and made by the William Morris Company. One of Burne Jones androgenous faces, St Enoch, is shown below, alongside the more earthy face of Martha, created by Meikle’s Company in 1904.

Unusually, at St Mungo’s one can stand so close to the windows that the texture of the glass is easily observed, and one can see that Martha’s face has a raised texture. It was created by the cameo technique, unlike the great majority of stained glass, where the detail is created by the application of painted and kiln-fired pigments.