Design and Art Australia Online

James Urie, decorator and plumber, came to Victoria from Scotland c.April 1853. In partnership with James Ferguson , they set up a plumbing, slating and glazing business at Curzon Street, North Melbourne. By 1860, when Ferguson & Urie were listed in Sands & Kenny’s Commercial and General Melbourne Directory under 'Painters, Plumbers, Glaziers and Paperhangers’, they were manufacturing decorative lead light windows. They displayed specimens of their 'Ornamental Glazing in Lead’ at the 1861 Victorian Exhibition preceding the 1862 London International. At the same exhibition the British-trained stained-glass designer John Lamb Lyon , then living in Main Street, Maldon, exhibited 'Stained Glass’ of early English design and, as 'John L. Lyall’ (sic), a 'Drawing for Stained Glass’. By late 1861 Lyon had joined the firm as their stained glass artist, followed by the English artist David Relph Drape in 1863, and they became a commercial stained glass business.

Ferguson & Urie ran a display advertisement in Sands & McDougall’s Melbourne Directory for 1864 offering stained-glass windows for 'Churches, Public buildings, Hall Lights, and other purposes, executed at the Stained Glass Works, Curzon Street’. Their earliest extant stained glass window is located at St Margaret’s Church at Eltham dated circa Nov 1861. A Burning Bush window for St Enoch’s United Presbyterian Church, West Melbourne (destroyed), an entire cycle of windows for St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, West Melbourne (now in Box Hill Church) and a large four-light Prince Albert Memorial window in Holy Trinity, Kew (extant).

At the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition Ferguson, Urie & Lyon (who were exhibiting stained-glass window designs for the Public Works Department, the Post Office and the Melbourne Public Offices) won a medal for 'Establishing a Manufacture of Stained Glass, creditably executed’. In 1867 the firm advertised: “Stained Glass Windows for Churches, Public Halls and Hall Lights and other purposes, executed at the Stained Glass Works, Curzon Street. Designs in any style made and submitted with estimate of cost. Lead lights in Cathedral, Crown Sheet and Ornamental Glass, and Pattern.” Towards the end of the year they painted transparencies on glass to decorate the windows of many Melbourne business premises as part of the city’s decorations in honour of the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit (November 1867-January 1868). John Lamb Lyon left the firm in 1873 to join his friend Daniel Cottier as “Lyon & Cottier” until his death at Balmain, NSW, on the 14th June 1916.

By 1864 Ferguson & Urie were exporting glass to Adelaide, South Australia, and to rural areas; their stained-glass window at the entrance to John Dixon Wyselaskie’s country seat Narrapumelap, near Hamilton, Victoria, is dated 1873. According to Zimmer, the pinnacle of their stained-glass career came in 1875 when they had a central Collins Street shop specialising in 'Memorial, Heraldic, and Grisaille Illuminated Commandments and Wall Decorations’ and they won a first-class certificate for their glass at the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. By then the firm had lost the advantages of colonial monopoly, especially as their styles and techniques never seem to have been at all innovative. Throughout the thirty-odd years of the firm’s existence, the design and colouring of their stained-glass windows continued to have an archaic, early Victorian medieval character. Examples of their brightly coloured, rather simple, pictorial stained glass can be found in Christ Church, Geelong ( Christ Enthroned with the Four Evangelists ), St John’s, Clifton Hill, St Cuthbert’s Presbyterian Church, Brighton (c.1888), and in the Caulfield house of Judge Billing, now called Labassa (National Trust).

Ferguson & Urie survived beyond Urie’s death in 1890 and Ferguson’s death in 1894, but with decreasing success. In 1894 their sole warehouse was in Franklin Street. In late 1899 the surviving sons of the founders, James Ferguson Jnr and William Urie, sold the entire stock in trade and closed the business.

Writers:

Staff Writer
rayjbrown

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2016