DRAWINGS by one of Jersey’s pre-eminent artists which were used to design stained-glass windows will be on display next week at St Mary’s Church for Islanders to view – next to the final artwork.
Jersey-born artist Henry Thomas Bosdet is best-known for creating stained-glass windows which adorn many churches in Jersey, Britain and as far afield as St Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.
Bosdet’s vast pencil drawings, the basis of some iconic local stained-glass windows, were hidden away and rolled up in archives for over a century.
But an initiative from the Glass Rainbow Trust – a charity set up to preserve Bosdet’s works – and funded by the Jersey Community Foundation has allowed some of them to be restored.
Conservator Lisa Oxenden-Wray spent months lifting dirt, relaxing paper and repairing tears in the paper drawings prior to the first exhibition in the series at St Martin’s Church, in December 2023. Now it is the turn of St Mary’s Church – which holds three Bosdet windows – to host an exhibition of the cartoons.
Glass Rainbow Trust chair Frederick Benest said: “We are delighted that funding for their preservation has been made available and that we have such a skilled conservator in Lisa Oxenden-Wray to preserve Bosdet’s exceptional works. Once again we are hoping that Islanders will take another opportunity to see these original beautiful drawings and their final manifestations as windows commissioned by a St Mary family.”
