Józef Mehoffer

In 1895 the Swiss city of Fribourg held an international competition to fill the windows of its medieval cathedral of St Nicholas with new stained glass. The jury's top choice came from a then almost unknown 25-year-old painter from Kraków, Józef Mehoffer. He would go on working on that cathedral for the next 40 years.

Mehoffer belonged to Young Poland, the turn-of-the-century movement that pulled Polish art into the world of Art Nouveau and Symbolism. He had trained in Kraków, Vienna and Paris, and for him stained glass was above all a way of drawing in light. The dark lead strips that hold the pieces together, usually just a structural nuisance, he turned into bold graphic outlines around flat fields of colour, close to the enamel technique called cloisonné.

The Fribourg cycle grew to thirteen compositions, some of the panels rising as high as 12 metres in the tall Gothic openings, and was finished only in 1936. One of them, The Martyrs, won a gold medal at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris while most of the cathedral's glass was still years from being made.