Dorcas Stained Glass Window

This memorial window honors the church’s most generous benefactor of the twentieth century, Anna J. Magee, who died in December 1923. The Magee family had been active in, and generous to, St. Stephen’s since at least 1830.

Her best-known bequest funded today’s Magee Rehabilitation Hospital. As St. Stephen’s approached its Centennial (1923), the year she died, Anna Magee gave increasing sums of money to improve the building, both decoratively and practically. With that extraordinary service in mind, the vestry reserved the last available window in her honor in 1920. The window was not completed until years later by D’Ascenzo Studios.

Subject Matter

Associating Anna Magee—community-minded modern American woman—with the biblical Dorcas is high tribute. Dorcas (the Greek version of her name in Aramaic, Tabitha) appears in the Acts of the Apostles (9:36-42) as a disciple in Joppa (Jaffa), a respected matron whose care for needy widows earned her the high respect of her community.

Dorcas grew in prestige in late Antiquity, sometimes as a protagonist in accounts of St. Peter’s achievements, but especially as one of early Christianity’s models. She became venerated as a woman disciple of strong and open Christian faith, favored by a top apostle (Peter). She was especially revered for her social engagement. Byzantine icons frequently show her, haloed and labeled a saint, providing for the needy. Nineteenth-century English stained-glass windows rendered her in earthly form, as a woman disciple who personally engaged with the unfortunate. Her example of direct contact triggered many women’s channels that became extraordinarily effective in the nineteenth century. One such women’s venue, named in her honor (Dorcas Societies), proliferated throughout Europe and America, including in Philadelphia. St. Stephen’s participated in two: one, apparently citywide in 1839, and another, centered at the church, established in 1852.

It shows Dorcas in characteristic charitable action though not in the everyday world. A cherub in the foreground, signaling divine blessing with its sheer presence, directs our attention to the central scene: Within an open Gothic tabernacle, the dignified, veiled matron gazes at and supports a gaunt, kneeling, bare-headed woman (ostensibly a needy widow) as they hold a rich fabric, likely Dorcas’ gift. The architecture stands within a decorative field with no signs of time or place. Scrolls identify Dorcas and her exemplary virtue, generosity. At the base is the inscription honoring Anna Magee for her many gifts to St. Stephen’s—broadly inspiring her association with Dorcas.

The women in the window are extraordinarily long and slender. Dorcas is smooth, elegant, and utterly human (no halo); her companion is haggard and disheveled, though well dressed, likely thanks to Dorcas. The light-toned tabernacle frames them both, their deep-hued garments offset from the glowing red of the patterned background within the tabernacle. That domain is additionally separated from the world outside the tabernacle through differences in the color and patterns.

The D‘Ascenzo Studios Magee window suggests deep art-historical roots that honor the antiquity of Dorcas’ veneration and the power of an image to convey and inspire religious feeling. The strong color, elongated figures, and angular drapes in the window recall Byzantine icons of Dorcas-Tabitha. The Gothic tabernacle and decorative backdrop provide a rich devotional setting. The flickering light, active figures, and compositional energy (as well as the elongated figures) suggest religious paintings of the Mannerist Late Renaissance (late 16th-early 17th centuries). Consider the late works of El Greco, with their long, turned figures in densely-packed space with eerily smoky night light, the whole alive as in a miracle or mystic vision, as in his Annunciation of 1600.