Frederick Leach

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.

He 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 the Market Hill in Cambridge.

He emerges as a nationally known artist-craftsman in 1866, when he worked with Bodley and Kempe on the decoration of St John the Baptist's church at Tuebrook in Liverpool and with William Morris on the ceiling decorations of the chapel of Jesus College Cambridge. Subsequent collaborations with Bodley included the roof and organ loft of St Botolph's Church, Cambridge, the interior decoration of St. Salvator's Church, Dundee and the decoration of the dining hall in Queens' College, Cambridge. He was responsible for much of the decorations of the walls and ceilings of All Saints, Cambridge, one of Bodley's most significant works. He also carried out Morris's redesign for the roof of the Oxford Union in 1875

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