Angel Gilding

In Chicago, we have thousands of stained glass windows in our early 20th century Historic Chicago Bungalows. Many of them contain double-sided gold mirrored glass (two pieces of thin gold mirror in a single came). The gold is not gold leaf - it does not have leaf lines and it is backed with a layer of silver. Eventually I heard about Rick Glawson, a master sign painter in California. Rick had noticed that some antique signs had been made with seamless gold backed with silver. Early copies of Signs of the Times magazine led Rick to rediscover a 19th Century technique for chemical or solution gilding on glass.