Upper portion of the St. Cecilia window at Second Presbyterian Church, 1936 S. Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The window was designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones for Morris & Co., and over two dozen copies were produced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with each commission being customized in terms of color and decoration. Windows designed by Burne-Jones are known for their vivid colors and exquisitely painted details.
St. Cecilia is the patron saint of music and musicians, and is shown with a hand held pipe organ known as a portative organ or an organetto, a popular instrument in the 13th and 14th centuries.
This window, and its companion, St. Margaret, are located in the narthex of the church and are two of only nine documented windows by Burne-Jones installed in U.S. churches. There are four in New York, and three in Massachusetts, including two at H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church in Boston.
The history of the windows is uncertain, although they likely date to the early 1880s. The windows first appear in Chicago in 1902, when they were installed as part of the William Morris Room at the Tobey Furniture Company, located at the southeast corner of Wabash Avenue and Washington Street. The room had been assembled by Joseph Twyman (1842-1904), a disciple of Morris who had been hired to head Tobey’s interior decorating department in 1898. An article about the room in the February 1903 edition of The House Beautiful noted that the Morris items displayed were the personal property of Joseph Twyman. By the end of that year, the windows had been purchased by Franklin Darius Gray and installed at the church, quite possibly at the suggestion of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, who, following a devastating fire in March 1900, oversaw the rebuilding of the church interior in a style strongly influenced by the English Arts & Crafts movement.