30 BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON HISTORIC CHURCHES 32nd ANNUAL EDITION was a vision that enabled him to become the foremost British stained glass artist of the generation after Christopher Whall. By 1907 he had begun to get commissions outside his native Aberdeen. At Glasgow University’s Bute Hall, he completed windows representing saints, historical figures and allegorical depictions of perseverance, courage, inspiration and other desirable qualities in students. By 1909 he was appointed head of the craft section at Edinburgh College of Art and taught there briefly: he supervised the Applied Art department of the college, which included classes in stained glass. Alexander was hired as the technical instructor of stained glass and taught there for several years. They opened a shared studio together. In 1910 Douglas gave a lecture to the Edinburgh Architects Association in which he showed, said The Scotsman, that ‘art cannot exist without craft.’ The following year, the added stress of working on his own stained glass commissions while teaching and acting as department head led Strachan to resign his position. However, he kept up links with the college, sometimes getting his brother’s students to help with his projects. Like Whall, he approved of the idea that the artist should be able to execute all the work but recognised it was more efficient to have much of it carried out by workers under his close supervision. One of the major commissions that forced him to resign from the college was his magnificent set of windows for the Peace Palace, where he developed his skills in creating allegorical and symbolic images, as neither religious nor nationalistic imagery were allowed. The success of the Peace Palace windows, and a commission for Dunfermline Abbey from Andrew Carnegie (who had paid for the Peace Palace) saw him becoming increasingly important as his stained glass reputation grew. By the late ,20s he had moved to Lasswade outside Edinburgh where he carried on working with about seven assistants, often students and ex-students from the College sent by Alexander, who also helped with the work. The principal assistant was James Scullion who had accompanied him from Aberdeen and worked as his studio foreman his entire life. Before that move, there was sadly an increased demand for memorials to the thousands who died in the first world war. Like many of his fellow artists, he received a large number of commissions for stained glass memorials and carried out at least 32 himself, as well as the windows for the National Shrine in Edinburgh Castle in 1925. Willie Wilson described the ‘sheer glassy splendour’ of the windows in the shrine and recalled the enormous impact they had. As well as soldiers, tanks, aeroplanes and all the other paraphernalia of war for the shrine, he used complex symbolism, again needing to avoid religious imagery. However, he created many windows for churches using stories from the Old and New Testaments, combining emblematic figures of saints with angels, virtues and vices. Many of his war memorials used the image of Christ’s crucifixion to emphasise the theme of sacrifice. In between those two huge commissions in the Netherlands and Edinburgh, he made many smaller but Details from the lower section of Strachan’s 1920 Great East Window in St John’s Kirk, Perth; above showing The Last Supper and opposite, showing a phoenix rising from the flames (Both photos: Rona Moody) He returned to Aberdeen after 1897 where his first commission for stained glass, in 1899, was for the church of St Nicholas. The windows were set alongside an earlier three-light window by Christopher Whall which is characteristic of Whall’s approach, with rich colour offset by silvery tints of slab glass quarries. This window seems to have influenced both Strachan and his brother, Alexander (1878–1954), who was also to go on to a career in stained glass. Their work shares much of Whall’s style, approach and technique, though this is not always evident in Strachan’s early work, which was executed by James Garvie of Aberdeen. Also in 1899, Strachan travelled to France and Italy where he studied the art of medieval and Renaissance Italy and contemporary French painters. Although he was interested in futurism, cubism and vorticism that he discovered there, they are not reflected in his work. His daughter stated that Strachan had been ‘enthralled by the mediaeval windows of Chartres – inspired above all by their luminous monumentality rather than specific details of style and technique.’ Strachan’s European tour had a major impact on his future work as a stained glass artist. He appears in the 1901 census, aged 25, as a self-employed artist/ painter, registered at his parents’ house in Aberdeen. While he was still working on illustrations and murals, he and Alexander had started making a name for themselves in stained glass. Strachan admitted later in life that he had been slow to realise that stained glass would be the best outlet for his artistic vision. It
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