Laurence Whistler

Who was Laurence Whistler?

Sir Alan Charles Laurence Whistler, CBE was a British poet and artist.

He devoted himself to glass engraving, on goblets and bowls blown to his own designs, and on large-scale panels and windows in churches and private houses. He also engraved on three-sided prisms, some of them designed to revolve on a small turntable so that the prism's internal reflections complete the image. The best-known of these was done as a memorial to his elder brother, Rex Whistler. His son, Simon Whistler, also became a glass engraver. In 1935 Laurence Whistler became the first recipient of the King's Gold Medal for Poetry. However, he largely turned away from verse to concentrate on glass engraving.

His early works include a casket for the Queen Mother, and a hinged glass triptych to hold her daily schedule. Other engravings of his can be found, for example, in Salisbury, where his family lived during part of his childhood, including a pair of memorial panels with quotations by T. S. Eliot, and the Rex Prism in the Morning Chapel, both in Salisbury Cathedral; at the Ashmolean Museum; at Balliol College, Oxford where he was an undergraduate, and St Hugh's College, Oxford, where he also designed the Swan Gates leading from the college grounds onto Canterbury Road; at Stowe House in Stowe, Buckinghamshire; at the village church of St Nicholas at Moreton, Dorset, where every single window was engraved by him over about 30 years; and in the Corning Museum of Glass.