Evie Hone was a stained glass artist of great distinction, creating windows which displayed a complete mastery of a highly specialised craft. Although she also painted in oils and watercolours, it is the great windows she created in the 1940s and early 1950s which secured her international recognition. Her work can be seen at various places of worship in Ireland, England and the United States.
Early life
She was born Eva (Evie) Hone in Mount Merrion, Dublin, on 22 April 1894, the daughter of a prominent Dublin family whose descendants included several distinguished artists, among them Galyon Hone, glazier to King Henry VI. Her early years were blighted by infantile paralysis, evidently the result of a fall when she was eleven. A long process of treatment did not prevent her from travelling, and a visit to Assisi in 1911 sparked an interest in art and the Christian faith which determined the course of her later professional life.
Training in London and Paris
Her early training came in London where she studied under Bernard Meninsky and Walter Sickert, and then in 1920 in Paris as a pupil of the Cubist painter and sculptor André Lhote. Her subsequent work Abstract-Maternité was strongly influenced by the Cubism techniques gleaned not only from Lhote but also Albert Gleizes, with whom she studied intermittently in the 1920s.
Around this time her spiritual journey reached a point where she joined an Anglican convent in Truro, Cornwall, in 1925. However, the difficulty in finding artistic fulfillment in a strictly religious milieu meant that she left the convent about a year later. She returned to Dublin in 1927, and together with her friend Mainie Jellett, a fellow pupil in Paris, she exhibited and promoted abstract art in Ireland.
The development of an artist in stained glass
In the 1930s she came under the influence of the French painter and engraver George Rouault, whose religious engravings helped her discover the expressive power of stained glass art. Her conversion to Catholicism in 1937 was reflected in a pronounced religious emphasis to her work. Her first engraving, The Annunciation (c.1938), was one of many for Catholic and Protestant churches in Ireland.
Her large window, My Four Green Fields, based on the theme of the four provinces of Ireland, was a success at the Irish Exhibition at New York’s World Fair in 1939. It is now a impressive focal point in the government buildings in Dublin’s Merrion Street.
During the 1940s, from her studio at Rathfarnham in County Dublin, she produced windows for churches in Ireland and England. Prominent among these was the full-scale windows for the Jesuit chapel at Tullabeg, County Offaly (1946), which draw their inspiration from the Bible and The Meditations. Particularly striking is the Last Supper of Christ and the Washing of the Feet which merges the biblical themes of Christ’s divinity and Judas’ betrayal. These windows are now situated in in the prayer room at Manresa House, the Jesuit centre at Dollymount, Dublin.
The East Window at Eton: Evie Hone's masterwork
On the advice of Sir Kenneth Clark, she gained her most significant commission, the glass of the great East Window in Eton College Chapel, replacing the one damaged by a German bombing raid in 1941. Begun in 1949, the scale of the work was a challenge to her already exacting standards, and only after long and strenuous preliminary work involving several scale studies was the window erected in 1952. This ‘jewelled splendour of sapphire, ruby and emerald’ (Lysaght) was acclaimed as a work of great imaginative sweep, and it is generally understood to be her masterpiece.
Evie Hone died suddenly on 13 March 1955 at age sixty and was an inspiration to other stained glass artists, notably Patrick Pollen (1928-2010), whose windows grace churches throughout Ireland. In 2005, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin staged a special exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hone’s death.The Tate Gallery also honoured her memory and achievements with an exhibition in 1959.
Sources
- Curran, C.P. (1955) Evie Hone: Stained Glass Worker 1894-1955 Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review Vol. 44, No. 174 (Summer, 1955), pp. 129-142
- Lysaght, C. (ed.), Great Irish Lives. Times Books, 2008
- Anon. Evie Hone (1894-1955) Disability Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia, 2007
Alan Kinghorn - Alan is a freelance writer and researcher.
