Chapter 1 focuses on the classification and status of stained glass, revealing the ways in which international exhibitions contributed to debates over its artistic status, display and arrangement within the exhibition environments. It begins by examining the theoretical problems and potentialities of displaying an architectural art such as stained glass in a temporary exhibition setting, putting it into a museological context. It also explores how official exhibition classification schemes propagated interpretations of stained glass as a manufactured product rather than a decorative art. Finally, it addresses issues of artistic education, practice and labour in relation to nineteenth-century stained glass, interrogating the role of the artist in an age of industrialisation, and argues that in this era, stained glass was intrinsically hybrid, a product of collaborative labour.