Antique Art Glass Comes to Providence
The window once decorated the main chapel at Providence Seattle Medical Center
By BILL KETTLER
July 7, 2005

An 80-year-old art-glass window found a new home Wednesday at Providence Medford Medical Center.

A depiction of Christ healing the sick, the window was installed in the lobby of the hospital’s new emergency department, which is scheduled to open in late summer or early fall.

The window is one of six that formerly decorated the main chapel at Providence Seattle Medical Center. They were removed from the building in 2002, after it was sold, and offered to other units of the Providence Health System.

Providence Medford requested two windows to beautify the hospital here. The Sisters of Providence gave the Medford hospital the window depicting Christ healing the sick, and another picturing Christ’s ascension into heaven.

"That image of Jesus reaching out to touch a sick child really gets across the whole mission of the Sisters of Providence — reaching out to people who are hurting," said the Rev. Jim Clifford, Providence Medford’s director of mission, ethics and spiritual care.

Construction workers stopped briefly to admire the window while two art-glass specialists from Seattle installed it.

"I wonder how they did that," painter Stacey Simpson of Medford said as she studied the painted faces and elaborate flower patterns on the colored glass.

Jack Young of Seattle Stained Glass explained that the details were painted on colored glass, which was then fired at high heat to fuse the paint to the glass.

"It’s very permanent," Young said. "It doesn’t come off."

The window was made in 1925, but the same process has been used for centuries to add complex detail to colored glass.

"The paint melts onto the glass like glaze on pottery," said Jim Nelsen, owner of the glass company, in a telephone interview. "It could take two or three firings to get all the colors in."

Nelsen’s workers restored the windows after they were removed from the Seattle chapel. The glass survived eight decades of Seattle winters admirably, but the lead channels that hold the glass together had begun to deteriorate. They removed all the old channels (also known as caming), bent new caming to fit each piece of glass, and then soldered them all back together.

"We probably had it on the (work) table for more than a week to reassemble it," Young said.

Young said most of the glass was produced in Indiana at the Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co., which still makes colored glass.

"I love seeing this old stuff. There’s nothing like it anymore," he said, noting that colors on the old glass were often produced with toxic chemicals that are rarely used today.

Nelsen said placing a value on the window is difficult because of its age. Duplicating it would cost about $100 for each square foot of unpainted glass, and $600 or more per square foot for the painted areas.

In its original setting the window stood 12 feet high and seven feet wide, and included eight decorative panels around the central scene. Three lower panels had to be omitted to fit the window into the wall of the new emergency department.

Those panels will be used in other parts of the hospital, along with the window that depicts Christ’s ascension into heaven.

Protective glass will be installed on both sides of the art glass.

"In an interior setting like that they’ll probably last indefinitely," Nelsen said.

Reach reporter Bill Kettlerat 776-4492, or e-mail bkettler@mailtribune.com.