Church of St. Luke, Wallsend, Tyne & Wear
Address
Church of St. Luke, Frank Street, Wallsend, NE28 6RNRecommended by
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East WindowArtist, maker and date
Designed by Wilhelmina Geddes and made at An Túr Gloine, 1922Reason for highlighting
Geddes’ figurative work has the edge in terms of engagement, draftsmanship and painting style. She uses the aperture itself to inspire her artwork, thus her art is part of the building as the building becomes part of her art. Genius.
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 Lowndes & Drury / 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 this church, 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
Wilhelmina Geddes was a member of the Irish co-operative studio of An Túr Gloine (Tower of Glass) and just a mile up the road, at the Church of St Peter, are further rare English examples of their work in windows by Michael Healy (1913-21) and Ethel Rhind (1921). St Peter’s also has a fine modern window by Tom Denny (2017).