William Wailes

Wailes was born and grew up in Newcastle on Tyne, England's centre of domestic glass and bottle manufacturing.

As his enterprise prospered, he employed more men until there were 76 employees, who included in their number several designers who were to go on to establish their own factories.

In 1860 Wailes bought the Saltwell Estate at Gateshead and set about improving it, building himself a decorative mansion and landscaping the grounds.

[4] Although William Wailes employed a number of designers, the products of his workshop are often identifiable by type of glass and the particular colour combinations that prevailed.

Although Wailes was seen as a Gothic Revival artist, and was able to fill windows with ornate foliate patterns that have the quality of brightly painted manuscripts rather than ancient glass, his figures were elegantly classicising and decidedly staid of demeanour.

Wailes' west window at Gloucester is a stupendous achievement, and not just because of the technicalities involved in glazing such a vast area.

The window rises in three stages, the first and the third being approximately half as tall as the middle one, the whole being surmounted by many smaller vertical tracery lights, which Wailes predictably filled with singing angels neatly arranged in robes of violet, bright red and arsenic green.

Wailes' design divides the window's main part into four rather than three stages, each containing three complex narrative scenes which are made successfully to span three lights.