Five trailblazing female stained glass artists

The challenge of selecting just five trailblazing women, whose work can be seen in the collection at The Stained Glass Museum, is a unique one when exploring a gallery filled with talented and accomplished artists.

The museum, which can be found located high in the rafters of Ely Cathedral, is a hidden gem of a gallery which displays over 800 years of stained glass history, from the medieval to the modern, the secular and the sacred.

Mary Lowndes

One of the earliest pieces in the gallery created by a known woman artist is The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple by Mary Lowndes (1856–1929).

This large panel is a copy in glass of a painting by William Holman Hunt, and was once a part of All Saints Church in Oxford. When the church was converted into a library for Lincoln College, University of Oxford in the 1970s, the window was removed and acquired by the museum.

Mary Lowndes was an artist, a business owner and a suffragette, whose work can be seen in churches and civic buildings across the country.

Following her artistic training at the Slade School, by the 1890s she was working independently from her own studio in Chelsea, but did not have access to the necessary kiln facilities to complete her commissions. This need for her own studio space, which afforded her the ability to work independently, and with the facilities she needed, led her to go into business with a fellow glass maker, Alfred Drury.

Together, they founded Lowndes and Drury and later The Glass House.

The studio flourished and allowed others to flourish too. It created a space where independent artists could access the studios and equipment they needed to create their own work - particularly women artists who could not take up positions in traditional studios.

The Glass House became a centre for English Arts and Crafts stained glass design. In what we would now recognise as a modern co-working space, artists could work collaboratively, and take an active role in each stage of the window production.

Not content with blazing a trail in her working life, Lowndes was a founding member of the Artist Suffrage League, and utilised her design skills in the production of banners and flyers to further the cause of women’s suffrage too.

Wilhelmina Geddes

Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955) was a significant figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement and in the 20th century British stained glass revival, where she was amongst the first generation of women stained glass artists to benefit from professional training and achieve recognition in her own right.

She benefited from both the increased number of commissions available after World War I, and by having the studio space to complete them in. After training in art in both Belfast and Dublin, she worked at the Irish stained glass cooperative An Túr Gloine in Dublin, before moving to London and renting studio space in Mary Lowndes’ The Glass House, something she did until the end of her life.

This window, Faith, Hope and Charity was to be her final window.

Despite her failing eyesight, she completed the cartoons, a type of working preliminary drawing used when designing a stained glass window. The window was then made posthumously by her colleague at The Glass House, Charles Blakeman, in 1956 for a church in Battersea. When the building was later sold for development, the window was acquired by the museum.

The window is typical of Geddes’s artistic style and her personality. Strong and expressive figures parallel those seen in her work at churches across the world. Geddes, like her art, was also known to be a strong, expressive figure herself. On occasion, she was described as a difficult character, but she and her work were widely admired by fellow artists and her patrons.

Throughout her life, Geddes suffered periods of mental and physical ill health, meaning her work was interrupted and her artistic output was relatively small. This did not stop her devotion to her craft, nor her meticulous processes.

Evie Hone

Until recent years, Geddes’ reputation was eclipsed by her colleague and pupil, fellow Irishwomen, Evie Hone.

Evie Hone (1894-1955) did not let the childhood illness and accident which led to her paralysis curtail her artistic career. Instead, she allowed it to encourage her inner spiritual quest which in turn, influenced and enlivened her art.

Her trips across Europe in search of medical treatment also encouraged her love and study of art, which took her from her home city of Dublin to London, Paris and beyond. She studied under several notable Cubist painters and exhibited her paintings in a variety of solo and joint exhibitions across Europe.

Hone’s lively, figurative, and representational style led her to the study of stained glass in the early 1930s.

After a rejection from Dublin’s stained glass co-operative studio An Túr Gloine, Hone moved to London to work with and learn from fellow Irish artist Wilhelmina Geddes at Mary Lowndes’ The Glass House. Here, she successfully translated her Cubist, expressionist art into the medium of glass, and found a style between early medieval and modernist styles.

This style is evident in her studio piece in the museum's collection Christ meeting his mother.

From the 1940s, she worked from her own studio in Marlay Park, Dublin where she produced some of her finest work, including windows for several large churches across Ireland. Her best-known work is the enormous eighteen-light window depicting the Crucifixion and the Last Supper for Eton College Chapel.

Rather than being defined by her physical disabilities, she is remembered by the beautiful glass she created which can be seen in churches and museum collections across the British Isles and America.

Rosalind Grimshaw

Similarly to Hone, Rosalind Grimshaw (1945-2020) did not allow the challenges of her Parkinson's disease to impact her career.

Despite the limitations she faced, she opened her own studio in Bristol and worked with assistants to enact her designs. One of Grimshaw’s most well-known, and largest, works came at the end of her career, even as her physical challenges became more severe.

Her Six Days of Creation Millennium window at Chester Cathedral, made in collaboration with Patrick Costello, is typical of Grimshaw's experimental and daring approach to glass.

Pictures of Violence, which was acquired by the museum, is a montage of different representations of violence, implied through various images symbolic of war, hostage, famine. It is typical of Grimshaw’s approach to design and is a tapestry of poignant imagery which exhibits her technical skills in painting, acid-etching and leading glass.

Pinkie Maclure

Just as the symbolic imagery in Grimshaw’s Pictures of Violence invites reflection on violence in modern society, Pinkie Maclure’s (b.1966) Beauty Tricks uses symbolic imagery to challenge viewers to reconsider their own beliefs surrounding physical beauty standards and self-esteem.

Like the artists who came before her, Maclure challenges the traditional and the expected. In turn, she encourages the next generation to continue to challenge social norms and definitions of beauty.

Recognising that the 'beauty of stained glass allows you to talk about the ugly', she combines traditional iconography with modern markers of perceived perfection, ranging from Barbie dolls to a Madonna figure marked in readiness for cosmetic surgery. The bright colourful tones contrast starkly with the message within the panel, which has prompted numerous reflective conversations in the gallery since Beauty Tricks was acquired by the museum in 2017.

A musician and artist, Maclure grew frustrated by the lack of creativity in her initial stained glass restoration work, but maintained a fascination and admiration of historical stained glass. Her creative practice reinvented the traditions of stained glass by creating contemporary, secular works - circumnavigating the traditional commissioning process known well by the likes of Lowndes, Geddes, Hone and Grimshaw.

Not only has Maclure challenged the status quo in her artistic practices, but her work also encourages audiences, and the next generation of stained glass artists to continue to forge their own paths.