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
Despite such critical acclaim, a visit to London in 1922 confirmed Geddes’s desire to live there. Undeterred by Purser’s persuasive blandishments to make her stay, even to take over An Túr Gloine, she abandoned the unsure future of the workshop and the traumatic ravages of Civil War-torn Dublin to move back to the family house in Belfast.5 She made trips down to the studio only to complete her last window with the workshop, a blazing, intricate and utterly original two-light representation of saints Patrick and Columba, ‘fierce and unrelenting in their campaigns against the pagan’, for Larne, Co. Antrim. This and her sinewy, perturbed portrayal of St Brendan, the window she designed as one of 12 for the Basilica of the Palace of Art at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (which eventually had to be made up by two of her colleagues at An Túr), are the direct antecedents of her Laleham window.6 Perceptively, the Irish Times critic noted:
There is nothing gentle or appealing in her figures; there is in them virile, almost alarming, strength… In Miss Geddes’s drawing there is great emotion. One can feel the tragedy in some of her figures… It is a fine, bold drawing, afraid of nothing, even brutal at times… Her glass is quite unlike that of most other stained glass workers; the religion which it reflects is the religion of power and fighting, not the religion of peace and restfulness.7
Over the next couple of years, Geddes made a series of deeply gouged linocuts and woodcuts, depicting dramatically lit, intensely concentrating figures reading, thinking, listening, reaching up, some grimacing, as though reflecting her current engagement with the Northern Drama League. They were among the 35 prints, drawings and embroideries featured in the ‘remarkably interesting’ exhibition she shared in Belfast with her Ulster mentor, the sculptor Rosamond Praeger, in 1924.8
However, fears about her increasingly neurotic mental and physical health led Geddes to seek psychotherapy locally, until she was referred to the Maudsley Hospital in south London with a nervous breakdown. Recorded by them as ‘a highly intelligent, educated woman…and a successful stained glass window artist of some reputation’, there she remained from 26 May until 17 November 1925 under medication and analysis as doctors helped her to discuss and resolve the emotional conflicts that had beset her since childhood.9
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