Church of All Saints, Laleham, Surrey
Address
Church of All Saints, Shepperton Road, Laleham TW18 1SBRecommended by
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St Christopher with St Eustace and St Cecilia (Percy Goldwin Belfour memorial window)Artist, maker and date
Wilhelmina Geddes, made at Lowndes & Drury / The Glass House, Fulham, 1926Reason for highlighting
Having relocated from Dublin to London in 1925, Wilhelmina Geddes took a studio at the Glass House, and this window for Laleham was the first she made there. It has been described by Jasmine Allen of the Stained Glass Museum as ‘a stupendous and unconventional design, the window is astonishingly modern for an ecclesiastical work.’
In the centre light the tanned vigorous figure of St Christopher battles with the torrent while the pale Christ Child on his shoulders holds fast to his hair and beard. The left light depicts Percy Balfour kneeling on the river bank, hands pressed together in supplication and in the distance, a stag, a reference to St Eustace, the patron saint of hunters. The right light depicts St Cecilia, with striking cropped hair, playing the organ (Balfour was the church’s organist) but distracted by the vignette positioned below Balfour which depicts the moon. The tracery comprises two roundels – anglers in one, and carollers in the other. Originally installed over the altar, the new vicar took exception to its radical depiction and insisted it be relegated to the west wall where one can view it today. Geddes’ biographer, Nicola Gordon Bowe, provides a detailed account of this particularly well documented window with its punchy colours and enigmatic imagery in her superb life and work of the artist.
Artist/maker notes
Wilhelmina Geddes (1887–1955), lauded in her The Times’s obituary as ‘the greatest stained glass artist of our time’, had a career of two halves; the first dozen years at An Túr Gloine (Tower of Glass) in Dublin was followed by her relocation to London in 1925, taking a studio at The Glass House, Fulham. Her output in terms of windows was relatively modest, a mere forty windows (not all completed by her) and a handful of small panels, partly a result of ongoing health issues, and partly because she undertook some very large, labour-intensive commissions such as her astonishing 5-light war memorial window for St Luke’s Church of England, Wallsend, and her monumental 89-light Te Deum rose window for Ypres Cathedral, Belgium.
Sources:
Obituary, The Times (16 Aug. 1955).
Jasmine Allen ‘Wilhelmina Geddes’ in (ed. Karen Livingstone) Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement (Victoria and Albert Musuem, 2024).
Nicola Gordon Bowe, Wilhelmina Geddes, Life and Work (Four Courts Press, 2015).
Lowndes & Drury was formed in 1897, by the artist Mary Lowndes (1857-1929) and the craftsman Alfred John Drury (1868-1940), with the aim of providing facilities for independent artists to design and make stained glass windows. They moved from cramped conditions in Chelsea to newly purpose-built premises, The Glass House, Fulham in 1906. The firm continued after the founders’ deaths, under Alfred Drury’s son, Victor, until he retired in the early 1970s. However, The Glass House premises continued in use under Carl Edwards and subsequently his daughter, Caroline Benyon, until she moved her studio to Hampton in 1992.
Source: The Journal of Stained Glass, Vol. XLI, 2017