St Paul, with Scenes from his Life

Philip Webb

Date: 1862 

Materials: Pencil, black ink and watercolour

Founding partner

This important sketch-design underlines the credit due to Philip Webb for thearchitectural arrangements and overall appearance of stained glass produced by the Morris firm. Webb worked in the Oxford office of the architect G. E. Street, becoming his senior assistant before establishing an independent practice in 1856. In Street's office he met Morris, who invited him to design Red House in 1859 and then to become a founding partner in the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company.

Never executed

His biographer, W.R. Lethaby, affirmed that Webb "planned the general layout of the windows, prepared small coloured sketches, arranged the disposition of the irons [glazing bars], insisting on thick bars from the first . . . He also designed any animals required, and at first the more ornamental parts".

Unusually, this design, for a window in Brasenose College chapel, Oxford, was never executed. Clearly, Burne-Jones supplied the figure subjects, as he has approved the design by signing it.