Peter Costello
Wilhelmina Geddes: Life and Work
by Nicola Gordon Bowe
(Four Courts Press, €50)
As an art historian Nicola Gordon Bowe is best known for her revelatory book about the work of Harry Clarke, as both an illustrator and an artist in stained glass. So thorough was this work, that any other book published since has seemed merely derivative. She could be said to have changed the way that Clarke was seen in Ireland.
However, that was some years ago, and many must have wondered what she was doing in the years since, aside from her teaching at the National College of Art and Design. Here is the answer: an immense work running to 480 pages, richly illustrated and deeply researched over three decades, but dealing this time with a figure few will have heard of. And once again it is a revelatory work, a beautifully produced showcase of an artist’s work, another fine edition from Four Courts Press.
Just who was Wilhelmina Geddes it may be asked? Born in 1887, she was an Ulster artist reared in a Belfast Methodist family, who began her early studies at the Belfast Art School. She showed exceptional talent at an early age, before moving down to Dublin in 1911. Here she continued her studies under Orpen at the College of Art and after visits abroad to London, York and Paris, she joined Sarah Purser at An Túr Gloine.
It was there that she created her first stained glass windows. This was art in which she excelled in a very individual way. A visit to France, on which she saw Chartres, was followed by further commissions for windows, some going as far away as New Zealand.
But she was affected as many were by the Great War and in Dublin by all the troubles that followed down to the 1920s. Illness too weakened her.
In the immediate post-war years she made some remarkable memorial windows. Two can be seen in St Ann’s in Dublin and All Saints in Blackrock. She was busy enough in these years, not only with windows but also with other kinds of graphic work. But she wanted most of all to move to London and this she did in 1925.
In London she really began to rise in the estimation of critics and finally found fame of a kind in the late 1930s. To this era belong some major commissions, the most impressive of which was the memorial window to Albert, King of the Belgians, at Ypres, a remarkable rose window in which the influence of her visit to Chartres could be seen.
She was a woman with her own strong opinions, and she continued to explore ideas, especially psychoanalysis, with her friend Dr Glover, a pioneer British Freudian, whose payments for editorial work kept her going in many a lean year.
Example
An example of her thought recalled here is very striking. She and a colleague were discussing a project for a window showing Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19). Now in art this scene often shows Isaac as a teenage boy and this was the line her colleague wished to follow. But Geddes disputed this. She had collated the dates suggested by the biblical texts, and said that it seemed to her that Isaac was much older, a man in his thirties.
This is a very striking story. The sacrifice of Isaac is taken as an Old Testament type of Crucifixion.
To show Isaac as about 33, the supposed age of Jesus when he died, would be to draw out the parallel. One imagines that this view would undoubtedly have appealed to the earnest Bible readers of her Belfast girlhood.
But extraordinary artistic skill and an independent mind were not to be enough.
Christianity
The years of WWII and after, down to her death in 1955, make for sad reading. Though she was greatly admired by many – John Betjeman and the great John Piper, both artists imbued with a vital sense of Christianity spoke highly of her – it was not enough.
She found it difficult to complete projects. Though supported by Dr Glover and other friends, some of whom would lend her money, she was in a bad way. She died in August 1955. She was described then as “the greatest stained glass artist of our time”.
But this was not enough to keep her a place in the canon, so to speak.
Some of her best work was destroyed in the air raids on Belfast. She was lost to Ireland as an artist (she had sharp words for Sarah Purser), and she passed into a long period of neglect, from which Nicola Gordon Bowe has now triumphantly rescued her.
Nothing can substitute for seeing her work in place and the potential pilgrim is provided with a list of places where her windows and other work can be seen. But the images in this book, often of strong saints and prophets, forceful and determined characters such as Ulster still produces, provide more than enough for the reader at home to realise that here indeed was a truly great religious artist.
