How Notre-Dame Commissioned Its New Stained Glass

The six stained-glass windows being made for Notre-Dame’s southern aisle began as an open call: more than one hundred artists applied, eight were shortlisted, and a jury in Paris chose the French painter Claire Tabouret. Her full-scale designs were exhibited at the Grand Palais through March 15, 2026, per The Guardian (February 6, 2026).

The brief is an unusual one. The fire of April 2019 spared the glass in question: seven-metre monochrome windows installed during the cathedral’s nineteenth-century renovation, whose value experts describe as “more historic than aesthetic.” Tabouret’s theme is Pentecost; asked for six designs, she made some sixty sketches. She submitted her application, she told the paper, fifteen minutes before the deadline.

Fabrication is underway at Atelier Simon-Marq in Reims, a workshop nearly four hundred years old whose past collaborations include Chagall and Miró. Each window runs to about fifty pieces of glass; the estimated cost of the program is four million euros, and installation at the cathedral is expected later in 2026.

The project has divided French heritage opinion. A culture-ministry committee opposed replacing the old glass, as did the Académie des Beaux-Arts; activists took the matter to court and lost. President Emmanuel Macron — who promised a “contemporary gesture” after the fire — and the Archbishop of Paris back the commission. Tabouret, asked about the resistance, answered: “It’s not very French to change stuff, so I thought that interesting as well as brave and fresh.” She said church authorities granted her “complete artistic freedom” with a single request — not to disturb the cathedral’s interior “white light.”

As a case study in how a church commissions now, the sequence is worth noting: state-organized competition rather than patron’s whim, a jury over a single taste, fabrication delegated to an independent atelier, and the designs shown to the public before a single pane is leaded in.