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
At the foot of the window, the diminutive frame of Percy Belfour is seen from the back (Fig. 8), dressed in amber oilskins, reaching the water’s edge (the Thames or Lethe?), rod in hand, raising his hand in a last farewell beside the inscription. The elaborate script appears to be based on the more cursive portion of an 11th-century Charter of Cnut in the British Library, illustrated in Edward Johnston’s seminal handbook Writing & Illuminating & Lettering (1906), appropriately for this 800 year-old church and a king associated with the water’s edge.
Belfour’s small figure is flanked by two similarly scaled ‘daughters of musick…brought low’ from Ecclesiastes 12:4, whose graceful, androgynous forms, diaphanously clothed in the Greek himation and chiton, proceed pensively but purposefully along the willow-banked, swiftly flowing Thames. Before painting this, Geddes ‘spent some time in Laleham getting the “feel” of the river’.22 The flute-playing shade below St Eustace, framed by her billowing gold-pink cloak, is lit by the mask-like features of the meditative moon,23 while her companion beneath St Cecilia holds a mouth-organ in tightly folded arms, watched by the red-hot leonine facemask of the sun (Ecclesiastes 12: 2 – ‘While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain’).24
St Cecilia’s pale features and dark-haired, cropped head (Fig. 6) echo those of the Christ child, as she turns compassionately towards Christopher and Belfour, while playing her medieval organ with sinewy, well-worked arms. The Golden Legend describes ‘the whiteness of her purity’, ‘her unwearying contemplation’, ‘her diligent labour’, for people ‘saw in her the sun, the moon, and the stars, namely the keenness of her wisdom’. Under her glowing ultramarine blue tunic, signifying her nobility, she wears the ‘gown of cloth of gold’ that covered the hairshirt she wore for her wedding day ‘when the organs rang out’, while beside her amber halo stands the small figure of her chaste Roman husband, Valerian, and several bridges, referring to the Roman town Ad Pontes, established in ad 1 beside the original Thames river crossing at nearby Staines. Her graceful, seated contrapposto recalls Isaiah’s pose on Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling.
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