Though no Victorian house was home without its purple patches of colored glass in at least one window, the making of medieval-type church windows remained a lost art in the U. S. until about 1905. That year a New Yorker named William Willet, to whom the prevailing types of "opalescent" church glass and supersweet, naturalistic window scenes looked cheap, made and installed (in Pittsburgh's First Presbyterian Church) a large medallion window of real antique stained-glass. This first effort at archaism by famed Designer William Willet looked worse than cheap to the pastor of the new church, who immediately covered it up with canvas and set a mighty organ squarely in front of it. So it remained until one night several years ago a ripping noise aroused the sexton of the church, who summoned his beadles, switched on all the lights and discovered a red-haired young man cheerfully engaged in tearing down the canvas. He was William Willet's son, Henry Lee Willet, who has followed in Father William's footsteps to become one of the busiest artisans in stained glass in the U. S.
Since 1907, when Architect Ralph Adams Cram wrote The Gothic Quest and commissioned the elder Willet to do the chancel window in Pittsburgh's Calvary Church, the edifices of the Gothic revival in the U. S. have been illuminated more and more frequently, not by European stained-glass experts, but by U. S. craftsmen working as near as they could get to the processes and styles of the 12th and 13th Centuries. The beauty of this kind of work lies in its translucency, each window being built up in a mosaic of colors fused in the glass while it is still molten instead of being painted on after the glass has cooled. The one famed exception to this rule is "yellow stain," discovered in the 14th Century, which is expensively made by spreading silver nitrate on the surface of the glass and roasting it. The bits of blue, red and yellow glass are held together by lead strips called "calms," which also make the principal outlines of the figures. Since William Willet's death in 1921 the best-known stained-glass artists in the U. S. have been Philadelphia's fashionable Nicola d'Ascenzo, devout, red-bearded Lawrence Bradford Saint, and Boston's rapturous Charles J. Connick, long Architect Cram's favorite designer. Each maintains a large studio, does a business well over $100,000 a year. In a craft whose practitioners do not often achieve Medievalism without losing modernity, wiry, blue-eyed Henry Willet, 37, is notable for his grasp of both.