Stained Glass Tours in France — Edition Insights

A Lawyer’s Eye for Detail

Sherrill repeatedly notes small, telling features that a purely art-historical account might skip. In the Sainte-Chapelle at Riom, he observes that the fifteenth-century canopy windows include “curtains suspended across backs of niches”—a detail that gives the artist another colour—and white winding scrolls that help admit light. He remarks on the donors at the bottom of the windows, calling them “always an attractive detail if only they are modest in size and placing.” This preference for restraint surfaces again when he notes that at Riom the donors are “more important but not yet intrusive, as seen later.” Such comments reveal a sensibility shaped by legal training: precise, comparative, and alert to gradations of propriety.

Light, Weather, and the Viewer’s Position

Sherrill is unusually frank about the conditions under which glass should be seen. At the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, he advises trying to view the windows “on a rainy or grey day” because the architect’s 1822 insertion of a new floor has brought the viewer up to the same level as the glass; on a sunny day one cannot step back far enough to adjust perspective. At Clermont-Ferrand, he describes the apse chapel windows as forming “a screen of gleaming sombre colour” that produces “that effect of glistening caverns” characteristic of thirteenth-century glass. These practical observations—about weather, architecture, and the body of the viewer—are woven into the touring advice, making the guide unusually grounded in the actual experience of looking.

Landscape as Prelude to Glass

Before discussing the cathedral’s windows at Clermont-Ferrand, Sherrill devotes a full paragraph to the view from the tower: “Hill is piled on hill and mountain on mountain, and all so near at hand as to make us feel that, with the naked eye, we can discern figures moving on the top of the Puy-de-Dôme.” He notes that such a sharp rise from a flat plain is rare in France. This attention to topography is not mere scene-setting; it establishes a contrast between the open, startling landscape and the enclosed, “glistening cavern” of the choir. The guide repeatedly uses such juxtapositions—between plain and mountain, sunny and dull day, medieval intention and later alteration—to sharpen the reader’s perception of the glass itself.

Sherrill’s book is best read as a companion on the road, not as an armchair survey. He assumes his reader will travel, will climb towers, will stand in chapels on grey afternoons. The notes are arranged for convenience, but the observations reward a slow, attentive reading. Look for the small details he singles out—the scrolls, the curtains, the donors—and consider how the conditions of viewing, then and now, shape what we see.

Flicking past the chapter on donor figures, I thought of my grandmother’s cathedral postcards—the way she’d trace the blue glass with a fingertip. That same sense of seeing something vast from a new altitude came back when I finally read The Face of the Earth as Seen from the Air A Study in the Application of Airplane Photography to Geography — Text and Context. Both books ask you to step back, patiently, until pattern appears.