Frederick Leach, William Morris

Place: Cambridge

Born: 1837

Death: 1904

Biography:

Frederick Richard Leach (1837–1904) was an English master decorator, mural and stained glass painter based in Cambridge. He worked with the architects George Frederick Bodley and George Gilbert Scott Junior, the designer William Morris and the church craftsman Charles Eamer Kempe on many Victorian Gothic revival churches, Cambridge college interiors and church restorations. Leach was born in Cambridge, where his father, Richard Hopkins Leach was an artist and craftsman. It is uncertain how he was educated, although he clearly was highly literate and erudite, with a good knowledge of art and literature. At 17 he resolved to use his talents for God. A sincere member of the Church of England, his personal beliefs tended towards low church Anglicanism. His preferred place of worship was Christ Church, Cambridge, an early Victorian structure, where he made the east window, but he worked on many high church (or Anglo-Catholic) commissions, thinking that this was for the glory of God, employing the maxim 'to work is to pray'. In 1862 he bought a premises in City Road, Cambridge, which became both his home and the headquarters of his business as an artist-craftsman. As his trade expanded he established a showroom in St Mary's Passage, on the west side of Market Hill in Cambridge.