Click or tap any of the images for the eight ‘rooms’ of the Glass gallery.
All of Jonah Jones’s glasswork was made during a short period of less than 10 years during the 1960s. That he turned his hand to this specialized craft was only due to his being given the commission for all the artwork in Ratcliffe College’s new chapel, including stained glass and dalle de verre. Typically he treated this as a challenge: “If the work is there, you must have a go,” he observed laconically. He spent some time with Keith New, who had made a number of the windows at Coventry Cathedral, and then acquired a special kiln for firing stained glass.
Jonah reckoned that making stained glass involved 14 separate stages. He conceived his designs “as a kind of mosaic”. From a rough basic outline he would work “directly to the real thing” – contrary to the approach of many other artists, who create from detailed cartoons. He also ventured into the sphere of dalle de verre (slabs of coloured glass set in a matrix of concrete, later using the new technology of epoxy resin). All the glass he made for St Patrick’s Church, Newport, was dalle de verre.
Jonah’s glasswork was profoundly influenced by his Catholic faith at the time. For Ampleforth College he made two sets of windows, one stained glass and the other dalle de verre, for the small end-chapels.
Almost all of Jonah’s glass was made for Catholic churches around Wales and the North and Midlands of England. It included dalle de verre windows for the new church of St John Fisher in West Heath, south Birmingham.
Jonah’s glass work represents some of his most vivid and beautiful imagery anywhere, which deserves to be better known among his oeuvre. The four huge dalle de verre windows he made for the apex of the new Church of the English Martyrs at Hillmorton, on the edge of Rugby (now sadly destroyed). were spectacular.
In 1965–66 Jonah created a body of work for Loyola Hall, the Jesuit retreat centre in Rainhill, just east of Liverpool, including two mirror-image ‘Immortal Diamond’ stained-glass windows. The windows are still a proud feature in what is now the Rainhill Hall hotel and spa.
Around 1967–68 he made a set a 12 abstract dalle de verre windows to stand almost floor to ceiling all around a new church in Morfa Nefyn on the Llŷn peninsula. The church shut in 2016 and has since been demolished. The windows were restored and relocated in 2023 to St David’s Church, Mold.
He also made a stained-glass window for the chapel at Llandudno General Hospital depicting Florence Nightingale.
Photographs: Stephen Brayne (Ratcliffe College – composite of 2 photographs, Ampleforth College, West Heath – composite of 4 photographs, Rugby, Rainhill Hall, Mold – composite of 4 photographs, Llandudno); Robert Greetham (Newport).