Caroline Townshend

Caroline Townshend
Part of a stained glass window by Townshend at St. Chad's church in Bensham, Gateshead.
Nationality	English
Education	Slade School of Fine Art, Central School of Arts and Crafts, Christopher Whall.
Known for	Stained Glass

Caroline Charlotte Townshend (1878–1944) was a British stained glass artist of the Arts and Crafts Movement. She trained at Slade School of Fine Art and Central School of Arts and Crafts before becoming a pupil of Christopher Whall. She designed and made many stained glass windows, particularly for churches and cathedrals and set up the stained glass firm of Townshend and Howson in 1920 with her student and apprentice, Joan Howson. They used a dual signature for their completed works.

Like her mother, she was a suffragette and member of the Fabian Society.

Townshend was born in 1878 to Chambré (or "Cambrey") Corker Townshend and Emily Gibson. Her father had trained as an architect and was for a while an assistant to George Edmund Street. Emily Gibson had been the first applicant to the College for Women, (now Girton College) at Cambridge and was a student there from 1869–1872. She met her husband through Isabella Townshend, a fellow student at the College for Women.

Townshend died in 1944.

Townshend was educated at the Slade School of Fine Art. After a period as a student at the Slade she decided that she wanted to try stained glass and asked Christopher Whall to take her on as a pupil. She assisted in his studio and attended his classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts until 1903.

She set up her own studio at The Glass House in Fulham, West London in 1903. Many stained glass artists of the Arts and Crafts movement had their studios at The Glass House, including Mary Lowndes, Karl Parsons, Margaret Agnes Rope, M. E. Aldrich Rope, Theodora Salusbury, Arild Rosenkrantz, Wilhelmina Geddes, Clare Dawson, Rachel de Montmorency, Margaret Thompson, Lilian Josephine Pocock, Hugh Arnold and Edward Liddall Armitage.