Jeannette Weiss Gruber
Stained-glass painter (1934 – 2026)
“I greatly admired the light my grandfather achieved with three superimposed layers of glass and engraving. Unlike him, being in love with stained glass, I sought light through my work in grisaille.”
“When I was 11, a 30 kg stone fell on my right hand… After twelve hours on a train, the hand was set back crooked on the wrist. So I am a para-artist.”
Jeannette Weiss Gruber
A window in a south transept chapel
1985 - Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais, Beauvais
View the work’s pageJeannette Weiss Gruber made her stained-glass windows in the family workshop from her own maquettes and colored cartoons, always painting the grisaille in daylight. Her creations were recorded by Jean Taralon:
A life in stained glass
Interview by her son (in French)
From 1958, Jeannette Weiss Gruber used combs and sponges, badger brushes and paintbrushes as each project required — a set of techniques she drew on notably for the two windows of the Chapel of Saint Joseph in the primatial Cathedral of Saint-Jean in Lyon, completed in 1978.
White and blue were her favorite colors in stained glass.
To anticipate the effect in situ, she looked at her work through binoculars turned the wrong way round, to imagine how it would read from a distance inside the building.
Médaille de la Restauration 2001 – Fondation de l’Académie d’Architecture
“Her aim is to set her creations into each building by steeping herself in the architectural setting and the light, seeking harmony and balance with the other windows where they exist, while avoiding pastiche.”
“From her first creations in 1955 to the present day, Jeannette Weiss Gruber has always, depending on the setting and her own sensibility, been by turns figurative, allusive or abstract, favoring her own reading of how a work fits into its context and its dialogue with the people who use the building.”
Her Path
1934
Born in Paris
1952
Began her career in the family workshop, Villa d’Alésia
1969
Moved to Quebec
1973
Returned to Paris
1980
Opened her workshop at 10 Villa d’Alésia
2003
Closed the workshop
2026
Died in Paris
Jeannette Weiss Gruber devoted her life to stained glass. She painted on glass in search of her own light, her own grisaille, in constant dialogue with old windows and with the architecture of the buildings.
This site grew out of a personal experience: the wish to be able to recognize, understand and identify my grandmother’s work. By bringing her works together, I wanted to learn to distinguish her style, the way she laid down grisaille, her singular gesture, so as to recognize them later in churches. I hope that visitors, as they browse this site, will in turn become familiar with this language and one day be able to say, standing before a window: “That is a stained-glass window by Jeannette Weiss Gruber.”
The digital form offers a particular quality of looking: through the very light of its pixels, the screen restores something of the transparency of stained glass that paper often freezes and dulls. Certain nuances and details of texture can be seen better, even though, of course, nothing replaces the experience of a window in its building. Some photographs are of uneven quality, but they have been kept to document the whole as fully as possible.
In France, the art of stained glass itself remains both present and little known. We are sometimes sensitive to it as a simple “beauty” of light in a church, but the craft of the master glassmaker and stained-glass painter remains largely unknown to the general public, rarely exhibited and poorly documented. The artists’ names are seldom known, and this art is still too rarely passed on through exhibition venues or accessible resources.
And yet there is something deeply mysterious about stained glass, beyond any religious faith: a light from outside which, passing through painted glass, seems to awaken something more than mere colors. A stained-glass window is an opening where the outside lights up differently, an elusive light that becomes a passage — a little like the gaze of someone who, without our knowing why, moves us and questions us.
This catalogue raisonné remains a partial, self-declared undertaking: the information comes from the archives and statements of Jeannette Weiss Gruber herself, taken as true. It may contain inaccuracies, omissions or approximations, and does not claim to cover her entire body of work.
This site also draws on the remarkable photographic work of Denis Krieger — available on his dedicated website — which helps make up for the lack of digital documentation on the art of stained glass in France.
Unless otherwise stated, the photographs are the property of J.E.C. Gruber Weiss. Any reproduction, distribution or use, even partial, is prohibited without prior permission.
The code of this site is open source under the CC0 license (public domain), co-developed with LLMs, and may be reused without asking for permission.
Her grandson. Contact: siweiss@proton.me