Details

Name

Sadie McLellan

Brief Biography

1914 - 2007, Scottish

Occupation

Stained Glass Artist

Description

Sadie McLellan was born in Milngavie, Glasgow in 1914 and after attending Bearsden Academy, she became a pupil at the Glasgow School of Art, where, in 1933, in her third year, she entered the stained-glass workshop of Charles Baillie, designer of the famous Rogano restaurant in Glasgow.

She was awarded the John Keppie travelling scholarship, which she used to visit Scandinavia. Her academic year was spent at the Danish Royal Academy of Art, in Copenhagen. Whilst there, she produced designs for windows, including a three-light window for a crematorium, a design for the great west window of Glasgow Cathedral and her first domestic commission, for four panels illustrating the signs of the zodiac, for a house in Fredensborg.

In 1938 she contributed a mural, a stained-glass panel and an embossed panel to the Women's Pavilion at the Empire Exhibition. The stained glass was purchased which funded a tour of Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France, visiting Paris and Chartres.

She joined the staff of Glasgow School of Art and in 1940, married Walter Pritchard, a stained-glass artist and muralist who taught on the staff of Edinburgh College of Art and subsequently joined the staff of Glasgow School of Art.

In 1953, she was commissioned to execute a scheme of 10 windows for the Robin Chapel of the Thistle Foundation in Craigmillar, Edinburgh.

Inspired by a visit to France and seeing its revolutionary glass schemes, McLellan created at least six exceptional panels. Only two remain in Scotland: a coloured Pieta (now in the National Museum of Scotland), and a panel, The Lovers. But it was McLellan's pioneering of a new form of architectural stained glass and concrete known as 'dalles de verre', however, that propelled her in to the forefront of Scottish architectural design. In 1959 she made her first experimental window in this new medium, and, in 1960, completed her first installation, at Alloa Parish Church. In 1964 she followed this with a window for the restoration of the medieval Abbey of Pluscarden, near Elgin and, collaborating with Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan, they created, in 1965 , a Ronchamp-style scheme in dalles de verre for the Church of the Sacred Heart in Cumbernauld.

In 1990 she retired to Nova Scotia, where her daughter, Judith, is an architect. In 1996 the Glasgow School of Art awarded her a Fellowship.