- [In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives by Catherine Sheridan at the National Gallery of Ireland

The National Gallery of Ireland holds important archives associated with the development of Irish Art.  The ESB Centre for the Study of Irish Art and the Yeats Archive contain rich collections relating to Irish women artists of the early twentieth century.

Focusing on various aspects of the life, education and work of artists including Mary Swanzy, Sarah Purser, Mainie Jellett and Elizabeth Corbet Yeats we explore important role women played in the development of modern art in Ireland.

Dun Emer Industries embroidery room, Dundrum, Dublin, 1905.

Family

In the early twentieth century, the majority of women studying or practising art in Ireland, shared similar social backgrounds. They came from a relatively privileged sector of Irish society, predominately upper middle class professional or mercantile families, where artistic pursuits formed part of their education.

Often rejecting contemporary social conventions, these women pursued their own goals as artists, educators and entrepreneurs. For such women their privileged social and financial backgrounds played a central part in facilitating their careers.

Susan Mary Yeats (neé Pollexfen) and Elizabeth Anne Pollexfen. Carte de visite, c. 1863.

Elizabeth Corbet “Lolly” Yeats (1868 – 1940) educator, designer, and landscape painter. She trained as an art teacher as well as a printer, and was a member of designer William Morris’s circle in London before her family returned to Dublin in 1900. She was a founder member of the Dun Emer Guild and the first commercial printer in Ireland to work exclusively with hand presses.

Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, Brush Work, London, 1896

Watercolour manual for children to teach the technique of painting flowers and plants.

Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, hand painted fan, 1905

Watercolour on silk and engraved tortoiseshell.

Features a decorative landscape superimposed by a design of pansies and crocuses, which frames woodland on the left and an inscription taken from the poem ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’ by William Butler Yeats.

Education

Women benefited from the gradual opening up of art institutions and increased access to formal art training in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Royal Dublin Society, a precursor to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, admitted women from 1849. In 1893 women were permitted to attend the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) schools. Enrolment figures for the period from 1895 to 1905 highlight the number of students who attended the RHA schools with an average of six men and seventeen women during each academic year. Access to formal art education, in particular classes in life drawing and human anatomy, were essential for women’s artistic training.

Female artists from the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, c. 1910.

Helen Lillias Mitchell MRDS MRHA (1915-2000) founder of The Irish Guild of Weavers, Spinners, and Dyers, and of the Weaving Department of the National College of Art and Design. She was awarded an Honorary Life Member of the Royal Dublin Society in 1993 and elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1995.

Lillias Mitchell, Snowdrops, 1929.

Watercolour on paper, painted at Elizabeth Yeats’s art class, when Mitchell was aged fourteen.

Travel

Women artists with the financial means often travelled abroad in order to continue their artistic training and to study new Modernist trends. Sarah Purser, Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone and Mary Swanzy all studied in Paris. Jellett and Hone studied non-representational art under André Lhote and Albert Gleizes. In 1923, Jellett brought back her first Cubist works to Dublin and she is recognised as one of the first artists to introduce abstract painting to Ireland. At the same time, Swanzy was creating and exhibiting figurative compositions that incorporated abstract elements associated with Cubism and Futurism.

Mainie Jellett, The Virgin of Éire, c.1940s.

NGI4319. Oil on canvas.

Mary Harriet "Mainie" Jellett (1897-1944) painter and early proponent of abstract art in Ireland. She studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, the Westminster Technical Institute in London, and worked in Paris where she encountered Cubism.  She was a leading figure of the modern art movement and a co-founder of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943.

Postcard to from Mainie Jellett to ‘Miss H. Clarke’ [Margaret Clarke], 25 August 1937.

Mary Swanzy HRHA (1882-1978) was a landscape artist and one of Ireland’s first abstract painters. She painted in many styles reflecting her interests in cubism, fauvism, and orphism.  She studied at May Manning’s studio, the Metropolitan School of Art, as well as in Paris.  Independent wealth allowed her to travel extensively to develop her practice and in 1949 she was made an Honorary Member of the RHA. 

Mary Swanzy, painting palette.

Painting palette last used in Mary Swanzy’s studio in Blackheath, London.

Arts & Crafts

In 1902 Evelyn Gleeson, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats and Susan Yeats founded the Dun Emer Guild. This Irish female craft cooperative was based on the ideals and aesthetics of the English Arts and Crafts movement and the Irish Cultural Revival. The Guild, which was run by women and only employed women, specialised in printing, book binding, weaving and embroidery. It would later split and become the Dun Emer Guild, under Gleeson and Dun Emer Industries, overseen by the Yeats sisters. While her sister ran Dun Emer Press, Susan Yeats was responsible for the embroidery workshop which designed and produced ecclesiastical textiles such as church banners, vestments and altar cloths. In 1904 the cooperative gained international exposure at the Arts and Crafts Society Exhibition in St Louis, Missouri, where they exhibited needle work, cushions, and portieres made from Irish linen, wool and silk thread.

Susan Mary "Lily" Yeats (1866-1949) embroiderer associated with the Celtic Revival. She studied and taught embroidery in the style propounded by William Morris, working under his daughter May in London. She was a founder member of the Dun Emer Guild and in 1908 established the embroidery department of Cuala Industries, with which she was involved until its dissolution in 1931.

Lily Yeats, embroidered cushion cover, silk thread and wool embroidery on blue poplin, c.1902. (detail)

Exhibitions

A number of women artists were active in the establishment of art societies and exhibitions that enabled them and their peers to showcase their work. One of the most influential of these was the Society of Dublin Painters, founded in 1920. The Society aimed to provide an alternative public exhibition space to the RHA due to the Academy’s continual resistance towards the display of modern Irish art. In 1923, Mainie Jellett exhibited Decoration (NGI.1326), one of her earliest Cubist works, at a Society exhibition. The painting was greeted with general antagonism by the art establishment, the influential critic George Russell describing it as ‘a late victim to Cubism in some sub-section of this artistic malaria’. Jellett continued to champion Modernism in Irish art and in 1943 she was a co-founding member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, one of the most significant exhibitions of contemporary Irish art until the 1970s.  

Mainie Jellett, Decoration, 1923.

NGI.1326. Tempera on wood panel.

Sarah Purser HRHA (1848-1943) portraitist and stained glass artist.  She studied at the Metropolitan School of Art and in Paris and exhibited in the RHA throughout her life.  She financed An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass), a stained glass cooperative and was extremely active in the Dublin art world.  She was on the Board of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1914 to 1943.

Members of the Board of Governors and Guardians of the National Gallery of Ireland, Sarah Purser seated, Brinsley McNamara, Registrar, standing and Dermod O’Brien, seated, on right, photograph, c.1925-1935.

An Túr Gloine

As both artists and entrepreneurs, women made significant contributions to the development of art cooperatives in Ireland. These focused on the professionalization of design and craft disciplines such as stained glass, embroidery, tapestry, and letter press printing. In 1903, Sarah Purser established the cooperative An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass) to train Irish artists in stained glass which they produced for Irish churches, schools, and convents. Among those to benefit from this initiative were Evie Hone, Wilhelmina Geddes, and Catherine O’Brien. An Túr Gloine sought to improve stained glass production in Ireland and provide an alternative to importing commercially produced stained glass from abroad. The cooperative gained international success receiving commissions in Europe, Canada, and America.

An Túr Gloine stained glass studio, photograph, c.1904.

Dun Emer Press

Elizabeth Corbet Yeats managed the Dun Emer Press with her brother William Butler Yeats as editor. Printing began in 1903 and the press concentrated on publishing new Irish literature, often by writers associated with the Irish Literary Revival. It also produced an illustrated monthly series of Broadsides between 1908 and 1915. Edited by Corbet Yeats’s younger brother, Jack B. Yeats, the eighty-four issues include two hundred and fifty-two hand coloured illustrations.

The cobweb cloak of Time has dropped between the world and me,
The Rainbow ships of memory have drifted out to sea.
P.C.S.

Pamela Colman Smith (Broadsheet 7, July 1902)

Recognition

Art critics, commentators and administrators did not always recognise women artists in the same way as their male counterparts. In a 1922 article in the Irish Independent Thomas MacGreevy, later appointed Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, observed that within the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), some of the members ‘apparently only titter at the idea of a woman artist’. In 1924, over one hundred years after its establishment, the RHA elected Sarah Purser as its first female member. She was followed three years later by Margaret Clarke. Despite such challenges and low visibility, women played a key role in the development of modern art and the decorative arts in Ireland.

[In]Visible: Irish Women Artists from the Archives

National Gallery of Ireland

19 July – 3 March 2019
Curators
Leah Benson, Emma O’Toole and Tanya Keyes, Library & Archives, National Gallery of Ireland

For further information on our Library and Archive collections go to: https://www.nationalgallery.ie/what-we-do/library-and-archives

Reading room open Monday to Friday 10am – 5pm.

Story edited by Catherine Sheridan