On Easter 2, we substituted the Road to Emmaus story for Doubting Thomas, which appears yearly in the lectionary.
Many people may not know that St. George’s Fredericksburg has a wonderful Tiffany stained glass window depicting the story. The window, the first of three Tiffanies at St. George’s, was donated by Mary Downman in honor of two deceased sons:
The window was dedicated at Easter, 2012.
This window is loaded with most of Tiffany’s techniques of glass and color. Christ faces toward us, but the men are turned inward, a compositional device that gives the illusion of depth. The robes are made of drapery glass which shows the folds in their garments. Glass while molten thrown onto an iron table and rolled into a disk. The glassmaker armed with tongs manipulated the mass and by taking hold of it from both ends like dough and pulling and twisting till it fell into folds. The faces of Christ and the two individuals were hand painted with enamel.
To the side of Christ is a landscape created with mottled glass which was a given a spotted touch with the addition of fluorine in the firing process of glass. Tiffany is best known the creator of opalescent glass, those skies that are milky and streaky in appearance and created through years of experimenting with alternating heating and cooling of the glass and with the addition of chemical additives to create the desired effect.
The window is dark in the morning representing the mystery of Christ’s identity and then becomes lighter during the day representing the travelers’ recognition of Jesus.
As we approached the 100th year of this windows, the inside was in generally good condition inside but the outside needed modernizing – a new protective covering and ventilation system as well as preservation of the wood. The Church received a grant from the Community Foundation for the Rappahannock for that purpose as part of their Duff Green grant program.
We rededicated the window on Sept. 30, 2012 with two members of the Downman family attending. In the weeks preceding, we located another relative living in Seattle as a lawyer and completed a family tree. For the rededication a new brochure was done that you can read here. It contains more information about the family and the window.