Glass manufacturer producing tableware as well as stained glass windows. From 1919 the firm traded as Powell & Sons (Whitefriars) Ltd., London.
Stained glass by James Powell & Sons of the 1850s was in a fairly routine Gothic Revival style, prior to their use of designers including Augustus Bouvier, J.R. Clayton and Edward Burne-Jones in the late 1850s. Their relationships with designers such as Henry Holiday, H.E. Wooldridge and J.W. Brown were longer lasting and a Pre-Raphaelite strain of figure drawing persisted in their windows into the 1920s. Nonetheless, by working with a variety of designers, a degree of variety continued to be found in their stained glass.
Powell & Sons successfully modernised their style in the mid-twentieth century under the direction of artists such as E. Liddell Armitage and James Hogan. James Hogan died in 1948 and W.J. Wilson became managing director, with Carl Edwards as chief designer, although he resigned in 1950 to establish his own studio with Hugh Powell, a great-great-grandson of the founder of the firm. In the 1960s the firm became known for its work in dalle de verre (windows in slab glass and concrete), mainly designed by Pierre Fourmaintraux. Their stained glass studio closed in 1973 following the resignation of Alfred Fisher, and the rest of the firm closed down in 1980.
The firm's considerable archive is housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum Archive of Art & Design. This has allowed the identification and dating of most of their windows, as well as the attribution of the designs to individual artists who worked for the firm. A list of these works by Dennis Hadley was made available by NADFAS. Often windows incorporated designs, or parts of designs, by several designers, as designs and cartoons were reused over time. The contribution of these individual artists, usually noted in this catalogue as 'designer' should be treated with some caution.
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G. P. Hutchinson, ''Powells' the Whitefriars Studio' Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, vol. xiii, no. 1 (1959–60), 321–5.
William Waters, Angels & Icons: Pre-Raphaelite Stained Glass 1850–1870 (Abbots Morton: Serapim Press, 2012), pp. 248–67 and further references.
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