Chagall & the Tudeley windows
The story behind the Tudeley windows
Depuis ma naissance, je regardais tout le temps le ciel, les nuages par la fenêtre. Et c’est peut-être pour cela que j’étais attiré par les vitraux, parce que c’est de la fenêtre que les couleurs sont venues. Il me semble toujours que quelque chose de divin vient de la fenêtre. C’est pour ça que j’ai tant de fenêtres dans mes tableaux.[1]
Ever since I was born, I have looked out of the window at the sky and the clouds. And maybe that is why I was attracted to stained glass, because it is from the window that the colours came. It has always seemed to me that something divine comes from the window. That's why there are so many windows in my paintings.
[1] Marc Chagall, in: La lumière et la couleur selon Chagall, Documentary by France Culture, March 2020
How it all started
In the aftermath of the Second World War, France set about replacing the religious art that had been destroyed in the bombardments. The movement was spearheaded by both political and religious figures, such as André Malraux, the French Minister for Cultural Affairs from 1959 to 1969 and Marie-Alain Couturier, a Dominican priest who had nurtured close ties with modernist artists.
“On peut très bien imaginer aux murs de nos églises de grandes peintures abstraites, qui joueraient alors un rôle semblable à celui de la musique sacrée – par exemple de l’orgue – mais qui cependant ne prendraient pas plus la place des statues ou peintures objets de culte, que l’orgue ne remplace les paroles de mélodies grégoriennes ou le chant de l’Évangile.” [2]
“One can very well imagine on our church walls large abstract paintings that would play a role similar to that of sacred music — of the organ, for instance; yet they would not take the place of objects of worship like statues or paintings any more than the organ replaces the words of Gregorian chant or the singing of the Gospel. ”
[2] Marie-Alain Couturier, Art et catholicisme (Art and Catholicism), Montréal, 1945, p. 100.
In 1956, Robert Renard, the Chief Architect in charge of French heritage sites and historical monuments, suggested commissioning contemporary artists to restore the stained glass windows that had been damaged or destroyed by the bombings. Marc Chagall was one of the artists who responded favourably to this request, along with other renowned artists of the time, such as Jacques Villon, Henri Matisse, Le Corbusier and Georges Braque.
Chagall’s first church commission, to build a mosaic to decorate the baptistry at Notre Dame de la Nativité cathedral in Vence (France), was received with both excitement and doubts: could he, as a Jewish artist, deliver his art to Christian places of worship? Chagall was far from averse to the idea, as he considered Art to be an exaltation and veneration of one and the same God, whatever faith had inspired it. The dilemma nonetheless preoccupied him sufficiently for him to contact the State of Israël’s president, Chaïm Weizmann and ask for guidance[3].
By the 1950s, Chagall was looking for the right medium and support for a “monumental” creation, something that would include an architectural dimension. Chagall’s first large stained-glass windows were the majestic frescos created for Metz Cathedral in 1958. This led to further stained glass windows being commissioned in France, Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Israel and the United States, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s he worked in collaboration with master glassmakers Brigitte Simon and Charles Marq, and their workshop in Reims.
In England, between 1963 and 1978, Marc Chagall designed windows for two churches: a single window for Chichester Cathedral in 1978, and the twelve windows of All Saint’s Church in Tudeley in Kent.
[3] Sylvie Forestier et al., Les vitraux de Chagall, (Chagall’s Stained Glass Windows), Citadelles & Mazenod, 2016
A Chagall window in Metz CathedralThe Tudeley Windows
All Saints’ church in Tudeley is the only place of worship in the world to have all of its windows designed by Marc Chagall.
The original commission was however for one window only. It was commissioned by Lady Rosemary and Sir Henry d’Avigdor Goldsmid in memory of their daughter Sarah, who tragically died in a sailing accident in 1963 at the age of 21.
Sarah d’Avigdor Goldsmid loved modern art and particularly admired Marc Chagall’s works. During a trip to Paris in 1961 she had seen the twelve stained-glass windows designed for the Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem, then being exhibited at the Louvre[4], and had been deeply moved by them.
Lady Rosemary was a Christian and she attended services at All Saints’ church in Tudeley; Sir Henry d’Avigdor Goldsmid was Jewish. Together they decided to commission Chagall to redesign and build the East window of the church (at the time in plain glass[5]) as a memorial for their daughter.
Chagall initially refused the commission. He was at the peak of his fame and was busy with prestigious and monumental commissions such as the ceiling of the Garnier Opera House in Paris, painted between January and August 1963. He had no evident interest in designing a window for a setting as small as All Saints’ Church. But Lady Rosemary persisted until he finally agreed. The resulting window peacefully narrates Sarah d’Avigdor Goldsmid’s life and death.
It was only a few years later, in 1967, that Chagall actually visited the church. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of this little church and by the blend of colours offered by the then Victorian windows. He is said to have exclaimed: “C’est magnifique, je les ferai tous!” – “It is beautiful, I will make all of them!”. During the following years, and up until 1978, he designed the eleven remaining windows, and gifted them to the church. These eleven windows were inspired by Psalm 8 – glorifying God’s creation of the Cosmos.
The final window was installed in 1985, the year of his death.
[4] Chagall: vitraux pour Jérusalem (Chagall : Stained-Glass Windows for Jerusalem), Musée des arts décoratifs ,Palais du Louvre, 16th June – 30th September 1961. https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/23223