Charles Eamer Kempe (1837-1907) established his London Studio in 1868, specialising in the production of ecclesiastical furnishings, most notably stained glass, designed and made under his direction. Charles Eamer Kempe came from a wealthy Susses family and was educated at Rugby and then Pembroke College, Oxford, in the 1850s. His earliest artistic works were the painted walls, ceilings and woodwork in churches during the 1860s, mostly in association with the architect G.F. Bodley. Kempe employed a series of senior designers, Wyndham Hope Hughes, John Carter, and John Lisle, under whom his style developed, and his stained glass was made at his own glassworks under the direction of Alfred Tombleson. The Studio's designers also worked on other church furnishings, such as reredoses and screens, which were often executed by the Sussex firm of Norman & Burt, as well as embroidery for altar frontals and vestments. Kempe left the firm to his cousin (three times removed) Walter Tower, and the firm was reconstituted as C.E. Kempe & Co. Ltd, after which the emblem used by Kempe, the wheatsheaf, had a tower added to it. The retention of Kempe's designer John Lisle until his death in 1927, and of Tombleson until the closure of the firm in 1934, ensured that the style of the firm's founder remained largely unchanged.
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Adrian Barlow, Espying Heaven: The Stained Glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Artists (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2019).
Margaret Stavridi, 'John William Lisle (1870–1927)' Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters, vol. xvi, no. 3 (1979–80), 54–60.
Adrian Barlow, Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2018).
Margaret Stavridi, Master of Glass: Charles Eamer Kempe 1837-1907 (Hatfield: John Taylor Books, 1988).
Philip Collins, The Corpus of Kempe Stained Glass in the UK and Ireland (Kempe Trust, 2000).
Martin Harrison, Victorian Stained Glass (London: 1980), pp. 46–7, 71–3 and further references.
Martin Harrison, 'Wyndham Hughes, C. E. Kempe and the Late Gothic Revival' The Journal of Stained Glass, vol. xviii, no. 3 (1988), 273–4.
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