Holy Trinity Church, Southport, Lancashire
Address
Holy Trinity Church, Hoghton Street, Southport, PR9 9DXRecommended by
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Chancel south windowArtist, maker and date
Designed by Wilhelmina Geddes and made at An Túr Gloine, 1914Reason for highlighting
A window of striking design and artistry with figures treated in a reverent but unsentimental manner. The two main lights show an Annunciation, with a grave and self-possessed Virgin disturbed while reading, gracefully inclining her head towards Gabriel. Geddes confers individuality and dignity upon a figure sometimes represented with a submissive or fearful demeanour. She stands, while Gabriel kneels and leans towards her, his eyes downturned, one hand held up towards her. The juxtaposition of the two figures, highlighted by the glowing radiance of their yellow-gold haloes, draws the eye to the space between them, a holy space with a single white lily as the focus.
The palette is mainly dark blue and dark red with white and beacons of brightness in the haloes. In the lights above, a host of angels, with little accents of colour in some of the haloes; above them a shining white infant Christ presides. Below the main scene is an Expulsion (left), the naked figures driven from Eden towards a grinning Death by an angel. On the other side, Gideon sleeps beneath a lowering sky with the fleece beside him and the angel in the background.
Artist/maker notes
Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955) was a vital figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement and the 20th century British stained glass revival.
Raised in Belfast, she attended the city’s school of art from the age of 16 achieving successes in drawing, watercolour and graphic design. An illustration she exhibited in Dublin in 1910 caught the attention of Sarah Purser, and discerning a potential for stained glass she invited Geddes to An Túr Gloine to explore her suitability for the craft. The following year Geddes made a set of three small panels for Purser which confirmed how her confident drawing and painting style could easily translate to this medium. Purser fostered her talent, bringing her to view medieval glass in Paris and Chartres in 1912 and 1914, though Geddes also found inspiration elsewhere including gothic and Romanesque sculpture. Over the next few years Purser assigned her increasingly larger windows for prominent Belfast and Dublin locations.
Geddes remained in Ireland until 1925, when she moved permanently to London and established 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 the Church of St Luke, Wallsend, and her monumental 89-light Te Deum rose window for Ypres Cathedral, Belgium. Her last large work was her window for the Church of St Peter, Lampeter, installed in 1946.
Recent appreciation of her work includes Peter Cormack’s estimation that ‘Many would consider the powerfully expressive work of Wilhelmina Geddes, in particular, to be among the Arts & Crafts movement’s highest accomplishment in any medium’ while her art is described by her biographer as having ‘unique power and originality’.
Sources:
Dublin’s Stained Glass, A guide to the finest twentieth-century windows by David Caron (Four Courts Press, 2025)
Wilhelmina Geddes: Life and Work by Nicola Gordon Bowe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015)
Arts & Crafts Stained Glass by Peter Cormack (Yale University Press,2015)
Wilhelmina Geddes by Jasmine Allen in (ed. Karen Livingstone) Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2024)
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: Source: Dublin’s Stained Glass, A guide to the finest twentieth-century windows by David Caron (Four Courts Press, 2025)
Other comments
Described as ‘an amazing tour-de-force of Edwardian patronage’ (Pevsner) Holy Trinity church was designed by Huon Matear and built from 1895 with furnishings largely by the Bromsgrove Guild, including stained glass by A.J. Davies. Other glass artists represented are H.G. Hiller, Barrowclough & Sanders, Percy Bacon Bros. and Shrigley & Hunt.