Archives & Library

Archive Collections

The Centre holds and provides access to archive material relating to the study of British art and architectural history. The collections contain the research papers of art historians, museum directors and curators; dealers; art critics, collectors and other individuals working in the field of art history.

Michael Kerney

13 boxes; 14 notebooks; 6 index card boxes and 1 portfolio. This material has not been catalogued but a box list is available. (Ref MPK).

The archive comprises material created and collected by Kerney, in relation to his interest and research in English stained glass and church architecture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alongside correspondence with scholars and experts in the field, the most notable aspect of the collection are fourteen notebooks compiled by Kerney from 1992 to 2022 in which he recorded details of the stained glass he saw in visits to churches across the country. The archive also contains material related to the 2001 monograph that Kerney published, with RIBA and the Ecclesiological Society, on the Victorian architect and stained-glass artist, Frederick Preedy (1820–1898) and his various articles in the Journal of Stained Glass. The archive includes notebooks, correspondence, card indexes, research notes, trade lists, conservation reports, published material and photographs.

It also includes a database made up of 45 separate data tables containing a comprehensive record of references to stained glass windows contained within a variety of texts (including ecclesiastical and architectural periodicals, Diocesan calendars, newspapers etc.) published from the Victorian period up until the late twentieth century. It also includes thousands of colour photographic slides taken by Kerney during his survey visits to churches across England.

The Paul Mellon Centre also holds material from Kerney’s library.

Dr Michael Kerney (1934–2022) was an acknowledged authority on the history of English stained glass of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He devoted over thirty years to the detailed study of Victorian (and later) church architecture and decorative arts, with a focus on stained glass. He became an Honorary Fellow of the British Society of Master Glass Painters and in 2005 was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

Michael Kerney,