The church we see today with a 16^th century tower was rebuilt in 1897, by Alfred Tepe (1840-1920) the Netherlands’ second-most important neo-Gothic architect after Cuypers. Declared a Basilica Minor, in 2000, by Pope John Paul II, it was an independent parish in 1576. All the windows were destroyed, in 1654, when 45,000 kilograms of gun powder exploded. From 1954 through 1961, Joep Nicolas made 25 windows then, in 1972, died suddenly, days after accepting a commission for 10 windows. Four Generations Foundation created in 1972 underwrote the commission’s completion by Joep’s daughter Sylvia Nicolas, the fourth generation, in 1972-73, 1975 and 1996. Today, Sylvia hopes her family’s windows, a biblia pauperum or visual scripture for the poor, will stimulate interest in the church’s religious heritage, its stories of salvation and Christianity’s sacred symbols.

The Nicolas family’s legacy began in Roermond, about 1850, when Sylvia Nicolas’ great-grandfather and Joep’s grandfather Frans Nicolas (1826-1894) opened his studio, now occupied by Galerie Mariska Dirkx. Architect Joseph Cuypers (1861-1949) known for liturgical arts influenced by Viollet-le-Duc, asked Frans to work with him. A late 19^th century renaissance in stained glass swayed by Burne-Jones reversed a European decline begun in the late medieval era due to religio-political, material and aesthetic reasons. In 1640, a scarcity of colored glass and newly available white glass let light into dank Gothic churches. Demanding simplicity, the French Revolution, Protestants and the Counter Reformation smashed or sold colored glass, ultimately, too costly to replace. Mid 19^th century, lost stained glass techniques were rediscovered through 12^th century monk Theophilus’ book. Frans’ innovation was ample use of white glass breathing space into compositions and light into churches.

Behind the altar, his three vivid windows share a classical schema (nr 1 and 2): New Testament above (Birth of Christ) equates Old Testament below (Moses in his basket); Last Supper/Exodus from Egypt and The Resurrection/Jonah and the whale. Large color areas pull viewer’s attention upward.

Second generation, Frans’ two sons continued the family business: François Nicolas Jr. (1855-1928) drummed up business while Charles Nicolas (1859-1933) father of Joep hired craftsmen to produce his windows: the two saints windows  – St. Ludovicus/St. Catherine and Bonaventura/Santa Clara – flat, boldly colorful Gothic figuration with heraldic borders lacks Frans’ fluidity and depth.

 
Third generation, Charles’ son Joep Nicolas (1897-1972) considered himself an involuntary anachronism studying art at his father’s request, in addition to law, to help the family business in decline from a war economy (WWI). Ultimately, his work set the family’s standard. Introduced in Fribourg, Switzerland, to avant-garde movements, in 1916, as a philosophy and art history student he rejected Pre-Raphaelite, symbolist and social realist ideas. After studying sculpture in Roermond, his first commission was shared with Suzanne Nys, a Belgian sculptor; they married in 1924. The modern St. Martin’s window was awarded a Grand Prix des Arts et Métiers (Paris, 1925). Working from large cartoons, he painted and grisailled glass in his father’s studio and removed layers of shadow to ‘let light through’. Painting from dark to light, the opposite of normal painting, had a sculptural effect. Joep wrote briefly for avant-garde Catholic magazine De Gemeenschap (The Community). In 1931, he exhibited painting and large panels with Vermurail, his resistant glass mural technique for decorative arts from churches to a 1938 luxury liner. One combined, he said ‘late Byzantine and Louis Seize’ with ‘pagan luxury and Christian sobriety’. Increasingly baroque compositions in white glass with silver stain are in Tilburg’s palace and his Last Judgment in Hulst. He made abstract church windows in Tilburg, Maastricht and Nijmegen; woodcuts for the Venice Biennale and his painting of the Descent from the Cross won a Vigelius Prize. Working rapidly provided a better living and Joep’s innovations: improvising without a cartoon by drawing directly on glass resulted in more expression. In Breda’s city hall, when Joep freed lead lines from his drawing’s contour to work against the image, in counterpoint, it provoked movement. Antique glass made with wooden rollers leaves irregularities and refractions: altogether, this formed the Nicolas family’s sculptural, expressive aesthetic.

‘War brings world’s first stained glass painter to America’ the Telegram declared: in 1939, Joep moved his family to New York city after he refused Goering’s invitation to exhibit predicted violence and recalled how war devastated his father’s business. With Holland’s invasion, his first U.S. commission fell through for Holland House lobby in Rockefeller Plaza. Murals and ballet costumes sufficed until Rambusch Studios commissioned 36 windows for Ohio’s Fairmount Presbyterian, published in LIFE. In 1954, Rambusch declared his St. Cecilia’s Cathedral murals ‘work of a madman’ and had it painted over. Shocked, Joep worked elsewhere until ‘the father of modern stained glass’ as he was known in the U.S. in the 40’s and 50’s returned to the Netherlands to paint Roermond cathedral’s war damaged windows. Joep’s direct, spontaneous and sensual glass akin to expressionist painters contrasted Roermond’s formality. The next five years, he worked at Geutjes’ Venlo studio or in New York then, in 1959, Joep and Suzanne moved to Tegelen, after successful commissions: St. Odiliënberg where he is buried and his commission of a lifetime, in Delft’s Oude Kerk.
 
The standard Diego and Sylvia measure themselves by is Joep’s most innovative work: the 8 Apocalypse windows made in 1954 for Saint Pancratius were inspired by Dürer’s woodcuts. The Son of Man/The Descent of the Beasts: Order reigns above beasts plummet into turbulence below, fractured by lead lines into a cacophony of shards. White glass circulates elevating our vision to Christ riding a white horse, eyes ablaze with blue sword in his mouth in spiritual judgment. One of the best things he ever did Sylvia declared, adding that she would welcome the challenge of making her own Apocalypse windows. Diego continues to discover new things in Joep’s Apocalypse and admires how Sylvia’s lines of drapery and bodies flow.

 
In 1954, fourth generation Sylvia Nicolas (1928) entered stained glass after her son Diego was born, when her father was making the Apocalypse windows. Sylvia worked 13 years for her father including his last commission. In 1967, she married and settled in New Hampshire where her U.S. commissions include St Anselm’s Abbey Church, New Hampshire and recently, 44 windows and a sculpture for Saint Dominic’s in Rhode Island. A self-described ‘storyteller’ she ‘communicates with people, not wooden saints’. After studying costume history for stage and screen at Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques she designed costume and scenery in Paris. A painter and sculptor who studied with Tamayo, mosaics began to free her from the glass studio. Art is liberation, she says: by drawing on glass from a 1/10 sized sketch ‘The line is more fluid if you allow yourself to improvise a bit’. Dance and music likened to her lead lines ‘a counterpoint, like a fugue, . . .are to the painted line what musical chords are to the melody . . .from a distance, lines cohere with the painted glass in a flowing movement balanced like a fugue while clear glass provides oxygen’. Sylvia applies a thin layer of gum arabic and water on the glass blending it into a transparent brown. Then, she traces the figures in black, in a mixture of pigment, gum arabic and water. The second matte layer, a powdered color, is a thick black matte mixed with 99% alcohol that dries immediately and does not dissolve the matter underneath. Over the painted figure, after the darker alcohol-based matte has been applied, she scratches and dusts away the highlights with a stiff brush or stippler. Of her technique’s effect, Sylvia declares “When the light has to fight the matte it renders the colors more powerful and alive. . . Colors seem to rise up, not lay flat”. At Saint Pancratius, Sylvia’s Baptism of Christ by John the Baptist flows in a mosaic of colors with such dimension it is a living entity devoid of all that is Gothic.

The fifth generation, Sylvia’s son Diego Semprun (Paris, 1954) studied fine and commercial art in New York and graphics in Paris (1972-74). In 1990, he began painting on glass with his mother in St James church in New York. In 1995, when a new priest at Saint Pancratius Pastoor van der Sman asked Sylvia if there was a fifth generation, she replied yes and Diego began sketching a tree of Jesse, in the U.SA year later, Diego began to realize how much ‘Nicolas’ meant in the Dutch glass world, in 1996, as Sylvia was finishing her last windows at Saint Pancratius and he began his first big window: above the entrance Diego’s Good Shepard in a vine, is a theme suggested by the priest. Six months later, asked to establish a studio near the church, during the planning of Glasrijk Tubbergen Diego agreed and was commissioned to do five more windows, he says: “Four in the north chapel based on the quadrivium concept of gothic cathedrals –the twelve virtues and St. Cecilia with angels playing instruments along the top and above the northern door St. Pancratius as a Phrygian youth with a dog to symbolize loyalty. Most of the window is taken up with symbolic representation of the Kroezeboom –a 700 year-old oak tree in Tubbergen with a cross– where mass was held when Catholicism was repressed”. A Nicolas aesthetic of sculptural color and mosaic form that refuses to stay put combines with Diego’s very contemporary graphic, all-over composition that breathes as Saint Pancratius and the oak remain steadfast. The commission was finished in 2000 ‘full of references to local architecture, people and other things to place it firmly in the community where it stands’. Currently, Diego is one of the few devoted to only painting on glass. Since opening Atelier Semprun Nicolas, in 1998, his windows are found the Netherlands and private collections in America, Germany and France.
Fjoezzz 2007