an almost semi-circular stained glass panel executed by the artist in his studio near Stocklinch, Somerset, circa 1990, the coloured glass set with shaped lead calms depicting a woodland setting of the naked goddess and attendants watching as her hounds bring down Actaeon with a human body and stag's head, set in a purple painted wood frame with bracket feet, panel 51.5 x 81cm, frame 69 x 95.5cm

Provenance: bought directly from the artist in about 1990 by Anthony Brown (1938-1996); from whom inherited by the vendor.

‘In a career spanning 65 years, Patrick Reyntiens became one of the most influential and innovative figures in the world of stained glass, bringing a painterly fluency and wit to what is a time-consuming medium.’ (Obituary by Louis Jebb, The Art Newspaper, 26 November 2021) Although sometimes working collaboratively, most famously with John Piper on Coventry Cathedral and Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral, much of Reyntiens’ output encompassed the whole process, from drawing the cartoons to the finished glass panels. In a moving letter of condolence to Anthony Brown’s widow, Reyntiens wrote: ‘Tony was among the one or two clients who were prepared to believe in me as an artist in his own right, independent of the particular commissioned circumstances… So, apart from his personal characteristics, or more truly in addition to them, I was deeply grateful for his discerning patronage to me.’ Reyntiens continues the letter with a revealing insight into the artistic process of making stained glass: ‘I have just finished the Great West Window of Southwell Minster… While I was working on the cartoons, which took about four months to complete, I had a sort of eclairage, so to speak, on the relationship of the cartoon to the finished window. When you start a cartoon and put your whole heart and soul into it, there is nothing more precious and important. You love your work and improve it and adjust it and work far into the night. The whole window is virtually complete when the cartoon is finished – or so one thinks. But gradually, as the window itself is forged from this cartoon the transparent, glowing and light-filled simulacrum to the cartoon becomes filled with life and fire, fixed for ever, unalterable, beyond a fixed point. Nothing can be changed.’