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
Notes
1 The parish of Laleham was in the county of Middlesex until 1965, when the Greater London Area was formed and it was transferred to Surrey.
2 Notably John Ruskin, ‘Modern Painting on Glass’, The Stones of Venice, vol. II, London, 1906 ed.; Christopher Whall, Stained Glass Work, London, 1905; Lawrence B. Saint and Hugh Arnold, Stained Glass of the Middle Ages in England & France, London, 1913.
3 W.M. Geddes, ‘Making Stained Glass Windows’, Belfast News-Letter, 25 September 1930.
4 Thomas McGreevy, ‘Religious Art and Modern Ireland’, The Gaelic Churchman, April 1922, pp. 128-29 and ‘Women Artists in Ireland: Position Here and in England’, Irish Independent, 4 December 1922.
5 She retained her shares in the cooperative, and was paid small dividends between 1925 and 1932.
6 She did, however, translate her design into an embroidered panel, along with others which earned her and her sister a certificate at Wembley.
7 ‘Bruyere’, ‘Some Irish Artists, xvi – Miss W.M. Geddes’, Irish Times, 14 July 1923.
8 The Studio, vol. LXXXVIII, December 1924, p. 345. Her work in various media was featured, and well reviewed, in exhibitions in Dublin, Boston and Paris between 1922 and 1925.
9 I am grateful to Colin S. Gale, Archives & Museum, Bethlem Royal Hospital, for making this and the following information available.
10 Archive material relating to Laleham, held in the Records of the Diocese of London, Guildhall Library, London. I am indebted to Barbara MacLean for pointing me towards this. The PCC consisted of the vicar and two churchwardens, one of whom, the church’s patron, the 5th Earl of Lucan, was a friend of the Duke of Connaught, who had commissioned Geddes’ Ottawa window.
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