Stained glass has been taught at Swansea College of Art since the 1930s.

The stained glass course developed in the 1950s and 60s under the guidance of the artist Howard Martin, attracting students from the local area who went on to become successful artists. One of these students, Tim Lewis, transformed the course into one that attracted students from across the country and overseas. The innovative programme of master-classes in the 1970s and 80s brought some of the leading German artists, including Ludwig Schaffrath and Johannes Schreiter, to Wales, and many innovative stained glass artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century were trained in Swansea.

The work of some of these artists can be found on the Stained Glass in Wales catalogue, and this new site was initially developed to provide a partial catalogue of the archive that is held at Swansea College of Art, now part of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

This internationally important archive comprises drawings, designs, cartoons and stained glass panels made by students, staff and visiting artists since the 1950s, as well as a small number of designs by distinguished stained glass artists from the first half of the twentieth century.

The site was launched in 2024 with a small selection of the framed stained glass panels that are held in the archive, catalogued in pilot work by Martin Crampin and Christian Ryan. The addition of many more panels has been generously funded by the Colwinston Trust.

The Colwinston Trust also funded the listing of the cartoons of Glantawe Studios, which was set up by Tim Lewis in about 1982. This studio, based in Morriston (Swansea), made dozens of stained glass windows up until the 2010s.

We hope to add further details of works on paper in the archive at Swansea College of Art, making use of the unpublished lists prepared by Marilyn Foulkes-Griffiths as part of her 2014 MPhil thesis, and we are grateful to her for assistance and ongoing support. We are also grateful to Nigel Callaghan for his technical work developing this new site, and encouragement from past and present staff and alumni of the college.

Relatively few panels in the collection at Swansea School of Art can be easily dated or attributed, and additional information from former staff and students about work on this site would be gratefully received. We welcome comments, corrections and any further details, which can be submitted on the pages of the individual artworks.

More Swansea stained glass archives can be found at West Glamorgan Archive Service and at the National Library of Wales, where archives from Celtic Studios can be searched on their online catalogues.



Martin Crampin
University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies

Christian Ryan
Swansea College of Art

February 2025