Church of St Peter, Wallsend, Tyne & Wear
Address
Church of St Peter, 98 Church Bank, Wallsend NE28 7LHRecommended by
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North nave war memorial window - St George, the Angel of the Resurrection, and St ChristopherArtist, maker and date
Michael Healy, made at An Túr Gloine, Dublin, 1921Reason for highlighting
This war memorial by Michael Healy of Dublin’s An Tur Gloine (Tower of Glass) studio delivers drama and pathos combined with sublime drawing skills and technical virtuosity. Between 1918 and 1922 An Túr Gloine received many orders for war memorial windows, and of them Healy undertook six; one of which came from Dublin-born Revd Charles Osborne for St Peter’s Church, Wallsend. The central figure of the Angel of the Resurrection is closely adapted from a slightly earlier and equally stunning 3-light east window made by Healy for the Church of Ireland, Castlecomer, County Kilkenny – a rare example of Healy reusing a previous interpretation. Unlike his SS Patrick, Peter & Luke (1913) for St Peter’s, this one of 1921 demonstrates Healy’s increasing devotion to the combined aciding and plating techniques, at which, like his compatriot and rival, Harry Clarke, he excelled. Noteworthy in this window are the left and right predella panels showing dead soldiers slumped by a gun carriage (left), and a nurse offering succour to a prostrate soldier in khaki (right).
Artist/maker notes
Michael Healy (1873-1941) was born in Dublin into abject poverty and in his late twenties had the good fortune to be recommended to Sarah Purser when she was looking for new recruits for her nascent An Túr Gloine studio, although he had yet to work in the craft. Throughout his near four-decade career at the studio he created around one hundred windows for churches throughout the island of Ireland, for England, and for as far away as Newfoundland and New Zealand. A skilled draughtsman and technical innovator, his windows convey everything from austere majesty to tender humanity, often revelling in beguiling narrative detail. Reclusive by nature, Healy was a habitual recorder, mainly in rapid pencil and watercolour impressions, of Dubliners going about their daily business, often done on his lunch break from An Túr Gloine.
Source: Michael Healy 1873–1941, An Tur Gloine’s Stained Glass Pioneer by David Caron (Four Courts Press, 2023).
An Túr Gloine (the Tower of Glass) was a studio founded on cooperative ideals for stained glass artists, with a sideline in opus sectile mosaic, which was established in Dublin in 1903.
Source: Dublin’s Stained Glass, A guide to the finest twentieth-century windows by David Caron (Four Courts Press, 2025)
Other comments
St Peter’s Church has several fine windows, four by Michael Healy (1913, 1919, 1921, 1921) and one by his An Túr Gloine colleague, Ethel Rhind (1921), and one by Tom Denny (2017). Nearby is St Luke’s, Wallsend, which has one of Wilhelmina Geddes’ crowning achievements, her awe-inspiring east window (1922).