Henry Holiday
(b London, 17 June 1839; d London,
15 April 1927).
English stained-glass artist, painter and
illustrator. He studied painting in London at Leigh’s Art School
and the Royal Academy Schools, where he was influenced by
Pre-Raphaelitism. Contact with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s circle
and the architect William Burges introduced him to the applied
arts, and from 1863 he worked primarily as a stained-glass
artist, particularly in collaboration with the glass
manufacturers James Powell & Sons and Heaton, Butler & Bayne.
After visiting Italy in 1867 he abandoned his early
Pre-Raphaelite style for one inspired by Classical and
Renaissance art, aiming to create a ‘modern’ style of stained
glass no longer dependent on medievalism. His memorial window
(1868) to the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel in Westminster
Abbey and the complete glazing scheme (1869–75) of St Mary
Magdalene, Paddington, London, illustrate the expressive figure
drawing and feeling for monumental scale characteristic of all
his mature work. In 1891, dissatisfied with the working methods
of the commercial stained-glass firms, he established his own
workshop in Hampstead, London, and experimented successfully
with making pot-metal glass. Many of Holiday’s later commissions
were for American churches; his windows (1898–1925) in Holy
Trinity, Manhattan, New York, reveal the influence of the Arts
and Crafts Movement in their emphatic leading and use of richly
textured glass. As a painter Holiday is best known for his
Dante and Beatrice (1883; Liverpool, Walker A.G.); his most
important illustrations are those for Lewis Carroll’s The
Hunting of the Snark (1876). He also produced graphics in
support of such social and political causes as Dress Reform and
Irish Home Rule. In 1892 he became editor of Aglaia, the
journal of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, contributing
articles and illustrations.
