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Wilhelmina Geddes - Belfast’s hidden treasure
This year a plaque will mark the house in Marlborough Park South, Belfast where the artist, Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955), lived when she was attending the Belfast School of Art between 1903 – 1911. Nicola Gordon-Bowe explores the little-known works completed by Geddes in Belfast.
Although, when she died in London in 1955, she was described as “the greatest stained glass artist of our time”, her striking graphics, embroidered designs and windows are still little known in the city in which she grew up.
This may be partly because, as the Irish Times had earlier observed, “In Miss Geddes' drawing there is great emotion. One can feel the tragedy in some of her figures... Her glass is quite unlike that of most other stained glass workers; the religion which it reflects is the religion of power and fighting, not the religion of peace and restfulness”.
Furthermore, two of her four fine windows in Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church were destroyed during WW2, the two that survived have been mounted back-to-front, artificially lit, in Church House, and her haunting Children of Lir window (1929) commissioned for Belfast's new Municipal Museum on Stranmillis Road in 1929 (2) languishes in storage along with her dramatic little Picasso-esque Rhoda panel.
