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
Synthesising her superb anatomical drawing skills with her admiration for Classical Greek, romanesque and gothic sculpture, Geddes instinctively understood the need to orchestrate the passage of light by painting on the surfaces of the rich and earthy coloured pieces of glass that she painstakingly selected and rhythmically juxtaposed with the leadlines that hold and orchestrate the overall design. She soon learned that the thick black leadlines necessary for the construction of a window, and the strong, fiery colours that she recognised as the beauty of the material, make pictorial realism impossible in stained glass. She read and absorbed key texts on stained glass,2 and visited the great gothic cathedrals in Rouen, Paris and Chartres, whose ‘archaic figures (of the thirteenth century)’ she considered ‘not only more impressive but more modern than anything that has been done since in the same medium’.3
Geddes was fortunate in being able to use the best English pot-metal ‘antique’, ‘Norman’ slab and other flashed and specially made glass imported by Purser and Child from Hetley’s, in Soho, London. Equally, it was fortuitous that she was introduced to stained glass at a time when a number of women sought independent artistic expression in a craft traditionally dominated by men, especially in Ireland, where the nationalist-inspired Arts and Crafts movement was closely related to the revival of the ecclesiastical decorative arts. Furthermore, her strict Methodist upbringing meant that she knew the Bible inside out, and she was also blessed with a strong visual memory, mostly fed on images from the books and magazines that she had always devoured.
In 1917, Geddes began a hugely demanding three-light window commissioned by HRH the Duke of Connaught, former Governor General of Canada, to commemorate officers of his Canadian household killed in the war. Exhibited in Dublin and London before being installed in Ottawa in 1919, it firmly established her reputation. That year, a future director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas McGreevy, described Geddes as ‘producing the finest, the most sincerely, passionately religious stained glass of our time’, but feared that Ireland would not be able to keep artists of the calibre of Jack Yeats and Wilhelmina Geddes, whose art is ‘the most profound expression of the spirit’.4
LATEST NEWS & COMMMENT
Manhattan transfer
The Lower East Side, once home to immigrants and aspiring artists, is no receiving the uptown treatment.
Shakespeare in stone
The National Trust's plans to acquire Seaton Delaval Hall are a tribute to a genius who has inspired writers and artists for centuries.
In pursuit of collectors
The Fitzwilliam Museum is celebrating the centenary of the directorship of Sydney Carlyle Cockerell with an exhibition that makes clear that he was in many ways the first modern museum director.
Comments
Post a comment