Gibson House, "Hamlet and Tempest Stained Glass Windows (Shakespeare Windows)"

Reputedly one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia, Henry C. Gibson, a distiller and wine importer, was a philanthropist who supported the city’s cultural institutions. He amassed a large art collection, which he bequeathed to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he had served on the board for twenty years. In 1881, Gibson, who owned a luxurious townhouse at 1612 Walnut Street, hired Philadelphia architects G.W. & W. D. Hewitt to build his country seat on the Main Line in Wynnewood. Maybrook, named for his daughter Mary “May” Gibson, was designed in the style of a Scottish baronial castle with a seventy-two-foot tower overlooking sixty-seven landscaped acres.

When May inherited the mansion, she added a vaulted ballroom with spiral columns and leaded glass windows. In 1901, she commissioned Violet Oakley to design two large vertical stained glass panels for the entrance to the ballroom illustrating Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies.

Oakley designed pictorial windows featuring a dramatic scene from a play and a lower register with a pair of seated Elizabethan minstrels. To represent Comedy, Oakley depicted the scene in The Tempest (act 1, scene 2) when Ferdinand stands transfixed on the shoreline, listening to the song of the spirit Ariel as seagulls circle overhead. On the right, Prospero and his daughter Miranda watch him from behind while the stormy sky begins to clear. To represent Tragedy, she depicted a famous scene from Hamlet (act 3, scene 2). She adopted the innovative composition devised by Edwin Austin Abbey in his award-winning 1897 painting, in which the audience of the play-within-the-play is represented rather than the actors on the stage. In Oakley’s version, a stunned Ophelia grips the arms of her chair, her eyes riveted on the stage, while Hamlet, crouching at her feet, turns his back to the stage to see the expression of his mother, Queen Gertrude. Polonius, standing behind his daughter Ophelia’s chair, raises his hands in shock and glares at Claudius as he and Gertrude make a hasty exit. Each window is divided into horizontal bands inscribed with verses from the play and bordered with small Elizabethan figures playing musical instruments. Oakley developed the compositions of the Shakespeare windows in numerous charcoal sketches and a full-scale cartoon painted in oil on canvas that is now in the Delaware Art Museum. Manufactured with saturated reds, yellows, blues, and greens by the Church Glass and Decorating Company in New York, with whom Oakley had worked since 1899, the Shakespeare windows were praised in the Architectural Record in 1908 for their rich color.