The Birth of Tristram

Arthur Hughes

Date: 1861-62 

Materials: Red chalk, sepia, watercolour and bodycolour

Secular stained glass

'The Birth of Tristram' is the first in a series of thirteen panels of stained glass made in 1862 by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. for Harden Grange, near Bingley (now in Bradford City Art Gallery). The firm's first secular commission for glass, the Tristramwindows are a remarkable translation, into yet another medium, of the romantic Pre-Raphaelitism typified by the Oxford Union murals, the Moxon Tennyson and Rossetti's medievalist watercolours.

Hughes was nominated as a founder member of the firm, but resigned almost immediately; this is his only stained-glass cartoon.

Sorrowful birth

The glass panel bears this inscription, from Malory's Morte d'Arthur: "How the father of Sir Tristram de Lyonesse was slain in battle and how his mother fled into the wild woods: there was Sir Tristram born and there his mother died".

Before Queen Elizabeth of Lyonesse, the sister of King Mark, dies while on her way to join her already defeated husband King Meliodas, she asks for the baby to be christened Tristram, or 'sorrowful birth'.