Here we've brought together a collection of beautiful stained glass designs from a late nineteenth-century and early 20th-century design catalogues. As with all of our products, you can use anything in this collection in your own designs, as it is or to use as inspiration for your own work.
This download consists of two works, one from the National Ornamental Glass Manufacturers Association (NOGMA) of the United States and Canada and the other from Belcher Mosaic Glass. The NOGMA designs were made for both churches and the domestic home including many Art Nouveau designs, some reminiscent of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's style.
In the 1886 Belcher Mosaic Glass Catalogue, you can see the glorious work of stained glass artist Henry Belcher and his New York-based designers. The 'mosaic' refers to the unique process that Belcher developed, for which he filed over 20 patents. Instead of the traditional grouting approach, Belcher's method involved a kind of mould. He'd first lay the various pieces of glass out in a design (hence the 'mosaic' aspect), and then sandwich it between two layers of asbestos (picking up the design with a gummed first piece and then closing it with a second). Having earlier made sure there was a gap between each piece of the design, he'd then pour molten lead into the make-shift mould, thus binding the various fragments together. The innovative approach allowed him to create quite stunningly detailed designs.
The designs fell into several categories those with a floral theme, those for use in a transom with a house number, those with neoclassic elements popular in the late 19th century, and several pictorial scenes. Belcher designers included Ben Day, William H. Day, L.J. Lederle, Alfred Pilgrim and Fr Verheyden.
This download features 93 hi-res images, in jpeg format. The images are all 300dpi and range in size from 800 pixels wide/tall to 3872 pixels wide/tall.
The pictures are out of copyright and in the public domain, so you are free to use them in whatever way you’d like, including commercial use.
