Minstrel with clarinet

MORRIS AND COMPANY STAINED GLASS

Minstrel with clarinet.

Detail of a stained-glass window designed by William Morris (1834-1896) and made by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company, c1870.

This shows one of a pair of Morris windows - the other has a minstrel playing a lute - which were formerly at The Grange, the house in North End Road, Fulham, where Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones lived from November 1867 until the late 1890s. The Minstrels are from a series which Morris designed in the mid-1860s. Featured in ecclesiastical and domestic stained glass, tiles and painted decoration, the figures are used, with or without wings, as Minstrel Angels or simply medieval-style Minstrels. The windows from the Grange were purchased by the William Morris Gallery in 1997, with the aid of the V&A/MGC Purchase Grant Fund and the Gallery’s Friends.