The chief centres of the art in Europe are at Birmingham, England; Edinburgh, Scot land; Paris and Sevres, France, and Munich, Metz and Nuremberg in Germany.
Not until comparatively late in the 19th cen tury did the art of glass staining obtain a place. in the United States. Only a few years ago, Americans were seemingly content with im ported windows, or with poor imitations made here. In both cases the windows were but copies of mediawal work, seldom equaling the originals, and never showing an advance, either in artistic qualities or improvement of method over the windows of the Middle Ages. Several artists and some makers of church furniture began making fine windows, and to-day largely through their efforts American colored glass windows have become celebrated for their color values and their color relations. John La Farge, Louis C. Tiffany and other American artists in glass painting and glass staining took up the art where the mediaevalists stopped, in the study of the inherent properties of the glass, both in their color and texture, in order to ob tain in the glass itself light and shade, through depth and irregularity of color, in union with inequalkty of surface. In this way they sought
to avoid the dullness, opacity and thinness which invariably accompany the use of paint, and are marked characteristics of European glass work. It was an American idea to make glass in lumps and chip it into flakes, to corru gate it, to blow it into shapes, or to pull molten glass out of shape. By such means the artist has succeeded in obtaining effects in this ob stinate material which were deemed impossible. There was introduced a few years since the use of opalescent glass, the plating of glass over glass and developing the mosaic system, substituting it for glass painting. Churches, houses, hotels and theatres are now decorated by the mosaic stained glass which is largely a product of New York studios. Upward of $5,000,000 are invested in the stained glass in dustry in the United States.