Headline: Was Harry the modern 'JS Bach of stained glass'?

CHANCES are you probably won't have heard of Harry Harvey: not unless you're an expert on modern stained or painted glass, anyway. But you'll almost certainly have seen his work.

In his lifetime, Harvey designed and completed more than 220 windows, in a career that lasted decades.

And one of them - perhaps his best known - is the extraordinary window he made for York's medieval Guildhall.

The Guildhall had been badly damaged by bombs during the York Blitz. It re-opened in 1960 with a brand new window designed and painted by Harvey.

The five main panels in the window each focussed on a different aspect of York's history and heritage: architecture; military history; political and civic history; the history of trade and commerce; and religious history and teaching.

Harvey had actually come to York in 1947 at the invitation of another great figure from the world of modern stained glass - Harry Stammers, who designed the new window in St Martin's in Coney Street, which had also been badly damaged in the Blitz.

Harvey made his life here, living in Haxby and then Wigginton. He opened his own studio in York in 1956, and designed windows for churches, chapels and other buildings around York and across the country.

A keen cricketer, he coached and played for the Clifton Alliance Cricket Club, and helped during the refurbishment of its clubhouse - plantings bushes from seedlings taken from his own garden.

Mr Harvey died in 2011, aged 88. The Telegraph, in its obituary, described him as 'a leading figure in contemporary stained glass design'. The newspaper added: "Rich in detail, his windows feature figures that are never wooden or stuffy, and look fresh and surprisingly contemporary." An article in the magazine Church Buildings paid him perhaps the biggest complement, however. "Looking back at the work Harvey has left for posterity up and down the country, in cathedrals, parish churches and far-fling village chapels, one is tempted to say that, like the music of JS Bach, there is not one dud note in the entire output," it said. Quite a tribute.

Needless to say, The Press photographed Harry Harvey often from the 1960s to the 1980s.

We stumbled across a photograph of him recently while searching through our electronic archive of photographs, and liked it so much that we dug out a few more. Here they are, showing Harvey at work on a series of projects, growing gradually older through the years.

Thanks you for the windows, Mr Harvey...

Stephen Lewis