Stained glass bay windows

Edgar Miller
1929

The stained glass bay windows towards the south end of the room were all completed in 1929, part of the first stage of stained glass installation to be completed in the Garden of Paradise Room. The window set here has suffered the most deterioration over the decades, with several individual panes having been rehabbed incompletely without Miller’s original painting. In this bay window nook, Miller continues his naturalistic themes from the main window on the south wall, with the majority of the frames depicting animals in all types of groupings without any specific pattern or theme.

Whereas the main windows exult the human family at the center of the piece, the bay window's human figures seem to portray archetypes, myths, and fairy tales. Amongst the various forest animals that look on at a visiting admirer, a woman is depicted in repose, another washing her hair by a forest stream, while a male form wrestles with a lion. These images hearken back to more traditional images of roles the sexes played in Greco-Roman art.