Through a glass, colourfully – An Irishman’s Diary about Wilhelmina Geddes

Challenged to name a famous Irish stained-glass artist, most of us could manage Harry Clarke.

A few might mention Evie Hone too. But you’d probably need a specialist interest in the subject to have heard of Wilhelmina Geddes, although she was at least the equal of the aforementioned pair and arguably their superior.

Her latter-day obscurity in Ireland contrasts with a far-reaching reputation. In part, this is because two of her greatest works are abroad – in Ottawa and Ypres, respectively.

And her fame has travelled much longer distances than that. Since 2010, thanks to the International Astronomical Union, Geddes has an impact crater named after her on the Planet Mercury – an honour shared with Picasso, Debussy, Hokusai, and some very select others.

The challenge of restoring her reputation back on Planet Ireland, meanwhile, remains.

But there’s just been a dramatic development in that cause – Nicola Gordon Bowe’s magisterial new biography of the artist, which landed in bookshops last week with the force (and some of the weight – it’s about 2.5kg) of a small meteorite.

It traces the Geddes story from her birth in Leitrim, in 1887, via a Methodist upbringing in Belfast and early adulthood in revolutionary Dublin, to a self-imposed exile – begun on her 38th birthday – in London.

Which makes for a fascinating tale, even in words. But the text is shot through, as it should be, by glorious colour reproductions of the artist’s work, illuminating the narrative as her windows did churches.

In the author’s self-deprecating admission, these were a perfect excuse for diplomatic editors.

Instead of asking her to cut back on the sprawling word-count, they could say, “Surely you’d like to make room for even more of these beautiful pictures.” She usually did.

Speaking at the book’s launch, Edward McParland of Trinity College wondered aloud how Geddes had fallen into such neglect here, compared with Clarke and Hone. Religious politics explained some of it, he surmised.

Geddes wasn’t as easy a fit with the emerging Ireland of the early 20th century as Clarke, a darling of the Catholic Church, or indeed Hone, who, though raised an Anglican, eventually converted, under the guidance of her friend John Charles McQuaid.

Belfast Methodism aside, however, Geddes had other northern traits that didn’t lend themselves to popularity.

She a sharp tongue, lacked a talent for ingratiation, and could be hard on those she worked with, not least herself.

Her health was never robust either, which didn’t help.

Even so, she played a central part of the mini-renaissance that, during the early 1900s, earned Irish stained glass a global reputation.

Having studied art in Dublin under William Orpen, she then learned how to turn her paintings into windows as a member of Sarah Purser’s celebrated glass co-operative, An Túr Gloine.

Speaking of renaissances, one critic would later marvel that her talent for the simple rendering of action seemed to come “straight from the middle ages”. The artist herself was more specific.

Her inspiration was the great French church windows of the 12th and 13th centuries – not, as she said, “the namby-pamby fourteenth-century style”.

Paradoxically, therefore, her own style was too modernist for some tastes, although nobody ever disputed her mastery of draughtsmanship.

This was in contrast with, for example, Hone, who would study under Geddes but whose greatest claim to modernity, as her teacher once commented pithily, was “incapacity to draw”.

Flinty humour was another Geddes trait, and emerged in surprising places, including a civil war-torn Dublin of 1922.

Watching the battles in O’Connell Street, even Belfast Methodists were caught up in the excitement.

“We were standing immediately under a sniper’s post, but he wouldn’t snipe for us”, the artist lamented in a letter.

That same year, the critic Tom McGreevy commented that if the newly independent country managed to “keep the Jack Yeatses and Wilhelmina Geddeses [...], we may let ourselves dream radiant dreams of what the Ireland of say 2000 AD will be”.

But Geddes had long wanted to move to London and did, in 1925, never to return. Her years there produced great work.

They also involved much loneliness. She suffered depression and, as she grew older, was often cold and hungry too.

By the time of her death, in 1955, she was already slipping into obscurity, eclipsed by her former student Hone (who died the same year).

As for McGreevy’s Ireland of 2000AD, most of it had completely forgotten her. But it was some time around the millennium that Nicola Gordon Bowe embarked on her epic work of scholarship, now published as Wilhelmina Geddes – Life and Work.

Thanks to that, the Ireland of 2015 AD has reclaimed a long-lost daughter.