A window with punch
The outstanding brilliance and dynamism of the stained glass designed by the Irish Arts and Crafts artist Wilhelmina Geddes after her move to England in 1925 is embodied in her window for All Saints church at Laleham in Surrey. Yet this masterpiece provoked bitter controversy, as Nicola Gordon Bowe explains.
Nicola Gordon Bowe, Monday, 25th August 2008
On 25 May 1925 – her 38th birthday –the Ulster artist Wilhelmina Geddes moved to London, never to return to her native Ireland. Armed with a commission to design and make a three-light memorial window for Laleham in Surrey, she was determined to survive on her own, rather than continue working as a valued, if erratic, member of the small but acclaimed cooperative stained-glass workshop An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass) in Dublin.1
In 1910, while Geddes was at the Belfast School of Art, one of her strikingly graphic, glowingly coloured book illustrations at the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland’s fourth exhibition caught the eye of the renowned Irish painter Sarah Purser. Purser invited Geddes to join An Túr Gloine, which she had started up in 1903, closely following the teaching philosophy of the Arts and Crafts master artist/craftsman Christopher Whall. Purser hoped to counter the quantities of competitively priced foreign stained glass being imported into Ireland by training a handful of selected young native painters to find contemporary expression in an art form of which Ireland had little history before the 18th century.
Geddes used a travelling scholarship to study medieval glass in York and the treasures of the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Gallery in London. On her return, she moved to Dublin to join An Túr. Classes in stained glass at the Dublin School of Art with Whall’s former assistant (and An Túr’s manager) Alfred E. Child led to her first remarkably original work in the medium, a small expressionist triptych of brooding solemnity depicting scenes from the life of St Colman MacDuagh (1911; Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane) in thick, flickering black lines and smouldering tones. More or less abandoning her initial intention to become a graphic designer and book illustrator, she soon became not only technically proficient but also increasingly inventive in the succession of windows that Purser entrusted to her.
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