Window 8: The Woman at the Well.
Window 8: The Woman at the Well
The eighth window in the Creation and the New Creation series of windows at the church of
Saints Leonard and Fergus, Dundee.
Having looked at the Winter series, windows 1-7, we now turn a corner in the church to the Spring series, windows 8-14. Dad wanted these to be quite light and clear so as not to obscure too much their wonderful background of big sky and the Sidlaw Hills. His intention was to welcome and incorporate the wonder and beauty of Creation and the natural world into the overall design of the windows.
As the Winter series progressed, the cool blues and greys in the Celtic-style lattice background pattern started to give way to blue-greens and then to clearer greens as Spring approached. In the early Spring windows, fresh, clear greens predominate in the background latticework pattern and a profusion of flowers, foliage, birds and insects found in the Scottish countryside are found in each. The inclusion of these details is threefold. They are symbolic of the Spring season itself; they continue the Days of Creation theme that weaves its way through these windows, and they celebrate the flowering of the New Creation that started at Jesus’s Resurrection.
Women have a strong presence in the Spring series of windows, starting with this first one, Window 8: The Woman at the Well. The main focus here is an event in the life of Jesus, as told in John 4.4-42, when he spoke with a woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well. This biblical story features in the second main theme running through these windows, Events in Jesus’s Ministry (forthcoming).
In the story, Jesus and his disciples are travelling through Samaria on their way to Galilee. It is midday and Jesus, weary from the journey, stops at Jacob’s well in the city of Sychar for a rest while his disciples go into town to buy food. While sitting there, a Samaritan woman approaches the well to draw water and Jesus asks her for a drink. She responds suspiciously, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (John 4.9).
Dad chose to portray this moment figuratively and historically accurately, painting it mainly in brown on pale amber glass, suggestive of the dry dustiness of the location, contrasting with the verdant greens of the latticework background and multitude of flowers and other wildlife in the bottom of the window. While one can debate the content of the long conversation
Jesus meeting a woman of Samaria at Jacob's Well and asking her for a drink of water.
that ensues, and what it might mean theologically, Dad was most interested in capturing a very human and vulnerable moment between two strangers who unexpectedly crossed paths: the weariness of Jesus the man, worn out from his travels, and the surprise and suspicion of a woman who he asked for a drink.
The blue tit peering through a 'hole' in the glass.
Traditionally, this encounter would have been severely frowned upon as Jews did not associate with Samaritans. Also, the fact that the woman was drawing water alone, at midday, probably suggests she was a social outcast. Jesus sits on the wall of the well beneath the shade of a palm tree, the first of three trees to appear in these windows, linking this one to the third day of Creation in which dry land appeared and ‘plants yielding seed and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it’ (Genesis 1.11). Ordinary life appears in the background in the form of a market, to which the disciples have gone to buy food.
Giving a stranger a drink is a traditional act of hospitality that all communities are familiar with, even today. In his snapshot of this biblical tale, Dad portrays a moment of recognition of our common humanity: there is no outsider or enemy, we are all fellow human beings. This sentiment is echoed in the inclusion of a blue tit, perched amid an abundance of flowers in the lower part of the window, peering through a ‘hole’ in the glass. This motif has become a bit of an emblem in Dad’s work, which he has included in several of his windows over the years. The ‘hole’ is made by a stray golf ball, a bad shot from the golfer on the opposite side of the church in Window 20: The Sower (forthcoming). We have already seen the results of another couple of his bad shots in Window 7: The Scottish Window. The blue tit is on the outside peering into the church, but it is not peering through glass keeping it out, it’s peering through a hole through which it is welcomed.
A proliferation of flora and fauna in the lower part of this window.
In the flora and fauna at the bottom of the window are raspberry and strawberry plants in flower. They are included because Dundee is at the heart of the main berry growing areas of Perthshire and Angus. Owing to the climate and geography, these areas of Scotland have been famous for their soft fruit production for over 100 years. Most well-known is strawberry jam, which connects back to the three industries for which Dundee is famous, mentioned in Window 7: The Scottish Window: jute, jam and journalism. Plump ripe strawberries appear in one of the Summer windows, Window 17: Saints Leonard and Fergus (forthcoming), the patron saints of this church.
The raspberry and strawberry flowers, and some little white daisies and yellow cowslip in this window are lighter than their background, which is an indication they have been acid-etched and painted. Dad created all the flowers in the Spring series that involved acid-etching, but because there were so many flowers to paint, he enlisted the help of a fellow stained-glass artist, Noel Sinclair. Noel painted flowers with enamels of various colours, for example the bluebells in this window. She also painted the various insects that appear among the flowers. In this window is a beetle, and a few of Ester’s many honeybees.
Containing only hints of colour, the transom provides an unimpeded view of the open sky and the Sidlaw Hills beyond. There is just one tiny painted detail: a large queen honeybee in the top left corner of the window, out on a mating flight (mating is one of only two reasons why a queen bee leaves the hive), painted, of course, by Ester.
Queen honeybee in the transom.