John Hutton (artist)

New Zealand glass engraver and painter

John Hutton (Clyde, New Zealand 8 August 1906 – 1978) was a New Zealand prominent glass engraving artist, who spent most of his career in the United Kingdom. He is best known for the Great West Screen he created for Coventry Cathedral following WWII.

Born in Clyde on the South Island of New Zealand in 1906, Hutton married fellow artist Helen (Nell) Blair in 1934 and they made England their permanent home in 1936. They lived for a while in an artists' commune at Assington Hall in Suffolk. John worked on several mural commissions until the war broke out in 1939. During the war he joined a camouflage unit where he met and worked with the architect Basil Spence a relationship which was to prove invaluable later on. In 1947 he designed his first large scale glass engravings a series of four panels depicting the seasons for the restaurant area on the Cunard ship Caronia. By 1953 he had developed a unique method of engraving using a grinding wheel attached to a flexible drive. John and Helen had three children: Warwick Hutton, an artist, Macaillan Hutton, an architect, and Peter Hutton, a teacher. John had used an artist's model, Marigold Dodson, to pose for many of the figures in his artwork. His first marriage ended during this period and he married Dodson in 1963, though he still did work with his former wife subsequently on joint art projects. Hutton and Dodson had one daughter, Katie Hutton. In 1975 he became first Vice President of the newly founded British Guild of Glass Engravers (Laurence Whistler was first President and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was its first Patron). Hutton worked on until 1978 when he died of cancer. His ashes were buried beneath a stone at the foot of his finest work the screen at Coventry Cathedral.

Hutton is most famous for his glass engravings on the Great West Screen of Coventry Cathedral, England, known as the Screen of Saints and Angels, 66 larger than life figures which took ten years to create, including the angel of annunciation, the angel of the resurrection and the angel of the measuring rod). They received instant acclaim when unveiled in 1962. A pane of the window, depicting The Angel with the Eternal Gospel, was smashed during a burglary, in January 2020.

He designed and engraved six larger than life Angels for the West doors of Guildford Cathedral (Surrey England) also designed three angels over the south transept doors. In January 2024 one of these was smashed in an act of apparent vandalism.

He designed glass engravings at the Shakespeare Centre at Stratford upon Avon including Ophelia, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.

Hutton created glass engravings of the National Library and Archives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 37 panels over three floors with a principal theme of world literature including larger than life figures of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Molière and Tolstoy. Also Apollo and the Nine Muses.

Hutton produced the glass pane at the Dunkirk Memorial (1957). At the Civic Centre of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, he created a glass screen representing some of the great inventions of the city, and also figures from local mythology with his son, Warwick Hutton.

He also created a glass screen of four mermaids at Plymouth Civic Centre and designed three glass panel designs for the entrance hall balcony at Mercury House, London.

In 1975 Hutton designed 'The Spirit of Thanksgiving' for Thanks Giving Square in Dallas, Texas, his first large project in the United States. Above the entryway to the non denominational Chapel of Thanksgiving a large engraved window features a deeply cut, three dimensional dove surrounded by circular surface effects. Representing the divine in some religions, Hutton said that "the dove is a symbol used throughout history to depict beauty, peace, hope and thanksgiving."

In 1960, John Hutton created 24 panels to commemorate the discovery of the ruins of the Temple of Mithras on the site of the now demolished Bucklersbury House. In 2015 the panels were relocated to the new entrance to Bank station, beneath the Bloomberg building.

Some of his pieces of art are also exhibited at the Corning Museum of Glass, USA.