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
St Eustace, originally Placidus, a military commander under the Emperor Trajan, kneels in his vibrant ruby and blue huntsman’s clothes, hat and sling, overcome by a trance, having beheld the image of Christ in a miraculous apparition between the antlers of a stag he was chasing. His hands are joined and his eyes are unseeing because wrapt in prayer (Fig. 4). He kneels beside the torrent that he crossed while fleeing with his sons, his slashed coat and glowing ruby hose echoing those of St Eustace and St George in Dürer’s Munich Paumgärtner Altarpiece, and his partial backview that of the same artist’s St Eustace engraving (both of 1500). The small roundel tracery lights (Figs 9 and 10) illustrate Belfour’s favourite occupations: fishermen returning with their catch and ‘carollers approaching a window from which the master of the house looks out’,25 while the colourful shooting stars and comets reflect Geddes’s own fears about the end of the world.26
Unfortunately, what should have been jubilation at the completion of a superbly composed, conceived and crafted achievement, uniquely sensitive to its architectural setting, its subject and to its location, was thwarted by the arrival of a new vicar in October 1927. Expressing reservations about ‘the unsuitability of the subject’, ‘its very harsh treatment’, St Christopher’s ‘hideous’, ‘repulsive’, ‘villainous face’ and ‘the Mongolian Christ child’, over the next six months he dragooned objections to the prominent position of the window, which was generally agreed to be too ‘experimental’ and to ‘look more fiery than it did in the design’. Although aware of ‘Miss Geddes’s reputation as ‘a very brilliant and original artist’ and the intention to encourage ‘a striking modern piece of work’,27 he accused her of ‘persisting in giving a harsh and violent interpretation to a sufficiently unusual design…intolerable over the altar’.28 ‘After much conflict’ he gained permission for the window to be moved and adapted to fit into the west end, at the back of the church – ‘where, when the setting sun shines through it, it is truly magnificent’.29
The devout intensity, and deep, dark, fulminating drama in this window is characteristic of those Geddes made between 1922 and 1927, at the climactic midpoint of her career, as she made the wrenching move permanently from Ireland to England and set up on her own. Her painting in these windows is blacker, more graphic and gloweringly expressionist than in her later work, ‘her beautiful, strong fluid line’ coaxing out the jewelled splendour of the rich colours that she always took such pains to select, but which in these windows is strikingly sonorous. She introduces a new sinewy monumentality into her figures, regardless of their scale, which she continues to interweave with her habitually masterful invention into a complex yet clearly readable narrative. Her Laleham window is an incomparable masterpiece, as unique as each of her ensuing windows, which nonetheless gradually become more loosely, washily painted, their figures more disembodied than those that mirror Geddes’ own internal conflicts during this key period in her life.
Nicola Gordon Bowe’s The Life and Work of Wilhelmina Geddes will be published in 2009.
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