St. George's Chapel, Windsor

The Gothic Revival encouraged artists to revisit techniques and media, like stained glass, which had dwindled in popularity and importance since the Middle Ages. New design and manufacturing firms such as Morris & Co. and Clayton and Bell sprang up to satisfy a high demand for stained-glass windows fueled by a mid-nineteenth-century surge in church building and restoration projects. After Prince Albert’s death in 1861, Clayton and Bell received a commission to design and manufacture a stained-glass window in his memory in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, a historic royal place of worship built between 1475 and 1508 in the late English “Perpendicular Gothic” style. Pictured in this etching by Edward W. Sharland, the resulting east window replaced an eighteenth-century painted glass window which Victorian audiences reportedly considered an eyesore.