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
11 The total cost of the window was to be around £250.
12 Letters betweeen the Central Council for the Care of Churches, the Vicar, and A.O. Belfour, November 1925.
13 ‘Obituary of A.J. Drury’, British Society of Master Glass Painters Journal, vol. viii, no 2, April 1940, p. 83. Travers, an architect, designer and Geddes’s exact contemporary, was commissioned to supply a painted and gilded reredos at Laleham in memory of Belfour in November 1926 (removed in 1972); that February he submitted a report criticising the radical 1910 remodelling of the ancient church, whose ‘unsightly disfigurement’ he considered would be removed by Geddes’s glass.
14 For this and further information, I am indebted to Mrs Margaret Rogers, whose husband was churchwarden at the time.
15 I am indebted to Professor Leslie Clarkson, Dr Jennifer FitzGerald and Mrs Maisie Sanctuary for information on A.O. Belfour.
16 Letter from A.O. Belfour to F.C. Eeles, 28 November 1925, Laleham papers, Guildhall Library, London.
17 I am grateful to the artist’s niece, Elizabeth Kerr, for this information.
18 F.S. Ellis (ed.), The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, vol. IV, London, 1900, p. 111.
19 Batsford had recently published an illustrated book, Michel Angelo - His Sculpture and Paintings, and Blake’s engraving was reproduced in, for example, Laurence Binyon, The Drawings and Engravings of William Blake, London, 1922.
20 His gigantic form, red tunic and dark beard also recall Lorenzo Lotto’s SS. Christopher, Roch and Sebastian (1535) in the Loreto Pinacoteca.
21 Geddes’s own description, Laleham papers, Guildhall Library, London.
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