in Magdalene
College, and restored, in 1715, those in Queen's College, Oxford, the
work of Van Linge, which had been broken by the Puritans.[944] William
Price painted, in 1702, the scenes from the life of Christ, depicted on
the lower lights of Merton College Chapel. They are 'weak as regards
colour, enamel being used almost to the substitution of coloured
glass,'[945] and lose in beauty and effect by the glaring yellow in
which they are framed. He also painted the windows which were put up in
Westminster Abbey by order of Parliament in 1722,[946] and repaired with
considerable skill the Flemish windows of Rubens's time, which he
purchased and put up on the south side of New College Chapel.[947] It is
remarkable that the Prices appear to have been the last who possessed
the old secret of manufacturing the pure ruby glass.[948] After their
time, until its rediscovery some forty years ago in France, it was a
familiar instance of a 'lost art.'

When nearly fifty years had passed, some little attention began to be
once more turned, chiefly in colleges and cathedrals, to the adornment
of churches with coloured windows. The most memorable examples are in
New College Chapel. Pickett, of York, painted between 1765 and 1777 the
lower lights of the northern windows in the choir, with much brilliancy
of colour, but in a style very inferior to the work of the Flemings and
William Price on the other side.[949] The great window in the
antechapel, erected a few year later, certainly avoided that uniformity
of gaudiness[950] which Warton so greatly complained of in Pickett's
work. Its design employed for several years[951] the genius of Sir
Joshua Reynolds. The central picture of the Nativity, after Correggio's
'Notte' at Modena, was exceedingly fine as a sketch in colours.
Unfortunately, it was wholly unsuited to glass, and remains a standing
proof that oil and glass paintings cannot be rivals, their principles
being essentially different. A competent critic pronounces that had it
been executed in coloured glass, it would still have been
unsatisfactory.[952] As it is, the dull stains and enamels employed by
Jarvis give it what Horace Walpole called 'a washed-out' effect.
Reynolds has introduced into it likenesses both of himself and Jarvis,
as shepherds worshipping. Of the allegorical figures beneath, Hartley
Coleridge justly remarks that personifications which are nowhere found
in Scripture are not well adapted for a church window.