An Important Aestheticist Transom on Massey

This beautiful transom of 1885 is on Massey in Toronto. It’s an early masterpiece of its style. This is the Aesthetic Movement in its purest form, dignifying the working class (this is a modest house) with palatial ornaments.

This one has the quilt-like simplicity of the earliest examples. The blue around the central diamond is an early and unusual blue. The bullseyes are really good, and uniform in colour, which does not always happen.

The joy of this window is its painted bird, a kingfisher. This was my first time cleaning a painted bird. I was nervous.

The window had some issues that required attention. Most plainly, it had a cracked pane—but only one. That was an issue, because Victorian colours can be hard to match. The good news is that this was an impact, not a pressure fracture. This was important, because the piece was heavily compressed.

The other issue visible from inside was the condition of the lead, which was worrying. In ideal conditions, lead does not go powdery. This kind of powdering is usually on the insides, and I think it was caused by old-time cleaning products. As a lead carbonate, it is both soluble and inhalable. The quantities here are minute, and will not hurt you unless you lick it—but it has to go.

The other main issue was that the window was distorted out of flat.

Once a window is 100 years old, it has problems. The lead has gone weak, and swollen a bit. The cement has softened, and swollen a bit. The wooden frame has swollen a bit. Everything gets bigger except the glass, which stays the same.

So they buckle. Wise windows, like this one, are designed to absorb that buckle at the inner edge of the frame. That’s what happened here. Without this, the pressure might have cracked the inner panels, or even the painted bird.

My other concern was the condition of the bird itself. It seemed OK, if dirty. It had been overcleaned over time, as most of them have been, such that its blue enamel was almost lost. The remaining enamel was solid, though.

The other worry, and a surprise, was how poor the underlying glass was. The base glass was greenish, soft, and full of bubbles. One of them, behind the bird, was almost a crack. It had always been there, and the painter would have seen it. Why on earth did they use this cheap, defective piece of glass? In the meantime, everything I did with that bird had to be triple-careful, because of the chance that the proto-crack would move.

Given the weakness of the bird, I was unwilling to stress it in any way. Normally before this, I would begin by levering the panel out of frame, plucking out the putty and the tacks until I could free the whole thing. That was, I thought, too much for this piece. So I decided to cut it apart instead, with a steel knife. Old lead is soft and cuts easily. But where to begin?

I decided to use the distortion as my guide. By cutting along the most distorted seam, I could get access to one clear edge of the inner pieces. From there I could wiggle all the pieces out, jigsaw-style, and never stress the bird at all.

Once a hole is made, the rest can be dealt with. I was very glad to be doing this outside, with a mask, because the dust was nasty.

My method did work, and all the glass came out neatly. When I got to the painted bird, I was able to slip it out.

Yes, in a whole world of specialized tools, I do about half my work with a Swiss Army knife.

Freed of the old metal, the glass reveals both its beauty and how dirty it is. They’re all as bad as this. There are three main kinds of dirt.

Paint and putty from past renovations of the house are a major factor. There seems to come a point when people don’t clean these things. So the edges gunk up with paint and splatters and putty, and it stays there. As this has been happening for a century, that stuff can be anything.

The second issue is a century of leaded gasoline, gas stoves, and cigarettes. The glass itself is always grimy with these things. Textured glass can be caked with them.

The third issue is the cement, which attempted to etch the glass as it deteriorated. All of the pieces are outlined by frosty shadows because of this chemical attack.

The painted bird itself required very delicate cleaning, with cotton balls and de-ionized water. It took a long time, and I learned a lot.

The bird did come clearer with cleaning, especially around the eye. The smudgy background is real, and was done with oxides by the painter. I was surprised by this. It seems the painter never wanted a clear background. This may be a clue as to why the underlying glass is greenish.

This photo shows the large bubbles in the glass. By my fingers at the bottom, the pale streaks on the surface are (I think) chemical damage from some lost event.

The brown smudge in the middle of the northeast side is a print from the edge of the painter’s thumb.

Matching the colour for the broken piece went pretty well. I found this piece in Aldershot. It’s not an exact match, but it’s very close, and the eye does tend to correct for things like this. It’s close enough.

Here, the old glass is on the left, and the new glass is on the right.

After all the forensics and the archaeology, putting them pack together is the easy part. There are always some issues, because the people who did it the first time had issues. In this case, the turquoise core didn’t fit very well, with last-minute nibbles all over the edges. It took a few tries to make that sit correctly.

The other heartstopper was soldering near the bird, especially on the bubble side. Heat is dangerous to glass, and often fatal to cracked glass. Fortunately, the solder points were an inch away from the proto-crack, and I got away with it.

After 138 years in a house, locked in by plaster and wood and such, this window gets a glorious sunlit day—carwash day. On carwash day, just for a bit, it gets to be made of just metal and glass, and to be washed with a hose.

Now strong, spotless, and flat, this window is good for another century, no problem. The new version, unlike the old one, has a proper outer frame of zinc. It is stronger than it originally was.

Restoring a window as fine and important as this is an honour.

I later worked on another window from the same house.

Please see more Restorations.