‘Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship’
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 10 April 2025–10 August 2025
The exhibition is supported by The Klesch Collection as Lead Sponsor, Friends of the National Gallery of Ireland and the Art of Friendship Giving Circle
Niamh MacNally and Brendan Rooney, with texts by Sarah McAuliffe and Joseph McBrinn, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship, National Gallery of Ireland, 2025, 144pp ISBN 9781911716082 €45
Stephen Huws
1 Decoration by Mainie Jellett (1897–1944), 1923. Tempera on wood panel, 89 x 53 cm. National Gallery of Ireland. Photo, National Gallery of Ireland
The only previous joint exhibition of Mainie Jellett (1897–1944) and Evie Hone (1894–1955) was held in Dublin in 1924, with a rather overwhelmingly negative response. Arriving fashionably late, 101 years on, this new major exhibition of nearly 100 works on canvas, stained glass, and paper by Hone and Jellett at the National Gallery of Ireland seems likely to attract a different reaction. Despite being exhibited together in isolation only twice, the careers and art of these two women have long been seen as closely connected. They were both from Dublin and both from wealthy Church of Ireland families and met in Walter Sickert’s classes in the Westminster School of Art in London in the late 1910s, before going to Paris in the 1920s. There they studied first under André Lhote (1895–1962) and then Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) where they internalised the techniques of Cubism and abstraction, lessons which would remain with them and inform the rest of their careers.
The exhibition begins with this Paris period, where their work is intensely similar. As curator Brendan Rooney explained to me in our interview, he is inviting viewers to compare their work, hoping that by the end people will indeed be able to tell the two artists apart. The similarity of Hone and Jellett’s work is one of the core ideas the exhibition wishes to reconsider, following broadly chronological themes. The exhibition successfully shows how much these artists continued to share in their interests, while also developing them in different stylistic directions. Both began to tire of the pure abstraction for which they had sought Gleizes’ teaching, slowly returning to figuration. This was a gradual process, beginning with canvases which minimally suggest subjects’ outlines through large shapes of block colour. An influence from and interest in religious and devotional subjects contributed to this redirection: their fabulous works, inspired by Fra Angelico (c1395–1455), revisit his subjects by abstracting them into pure line and form. This exercise culminates in Jellett’s Decoration (Pl 1), abstract shapes arranged so as to suggest an altarpiece of the Madonna and Child, described by Rooney as ‘arguably the most significant modernist painting in the history of Irish art’.[1] Decoration shows much Jellett has taken from Gleizes’ teaching, being perhaps his more faithful pupil, but its striking originality is Jellett’s employment of these skills to reinterpret devotional art of the Italian Renaissance.
For Hone it is in her stained glass that we see her training paying dividends as she expresses her supreme skills in colour through glass and lead. Hone’s commitment to her new medium can be seen in that – unlike other modernist artists who also produced phenomenal designs for stained glass like Henri Matisse (1869–1954) or Marc Chagall (1887–1985) – Hone fully trained in the craft. On her death she was regarded as the ‘modern master of stained glass’.[2] Preparatory designs for Hone’s window for Eton College (Pl 2), perhaps her magnum opus, stand in for the completed windows, which for many logistical reasons cannot feature in the exhibition itself.
2 Study for Part of the East Window, Eton College Chapel: ‘The Crucifixion (top) and The Last Supper (bottom)’ by Evie Hone (1894–1955), 1950. Watercolour with varnish on paper, 123 x 89 cm. National Gallery of Ireland. Photo, National Gallery of Ireland
Instead of any full windows by Hone, which are thankfully still installed in various chapels and other sites across Ireland, England, and the USA, we are treated to a great gathering of her smaller panels of stained glass (Pl 3).
3 Study for Part of the East Window of Eton College Chapel: Chalice by Evie Hone (1894–1955), c1949–1952. Stained glass, 85 x 78 cm. Eton College. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College
This room is one of the highlights of the exhibition, the low lighting allowing the colours to shimmer out of the dark and create an atmosphere even more hushed than most art galleries manage, as if people automatically feel they have moved into a more reverential space. Gifts for friends or test pieces for larger works, these beautifully displayed smaller works have helped overturn the greatest obstacle for an artist of stained glass, whose best work is usually resistant to exhibition. While not quite as powerful an experience as seeing the whole Eton window in the flesh, these pieces afford us a close-up look at details at a distance otherwise never possible.
Hone’s stained glass is among the reasons she is usually observed to be the better colourist than Jellett. While Hone’s use of colour is always magnificent, in her later paintings it becomes much more subdued and muted, with Jellett’s late work almost, if not entirely, matching her talents.
4 The Ninth Hour by Mainie Jellett (1897–1944), 1941. Oil on canvas, 86.3 x 64.2 cm. Hugh Lane Gallery
In paintings such as The Ninth Hour (Pl 4) we can see Jellett deploy a striking rainbow in angular, fractured shapes, suggestive of the Crucifixion and not entirely unlike a stained glass window. However, this is nothing like Hone’s work of this period, the two having by now fully diverged. Jellett’s final work, Western Procession (Pl 5), depicts a ‘quintessentially Irish subject’ in an international, modernist way that makes Rooney wonder where she could have gone next. Both produced work of great force, but the quality of their late work makes their early deaths, Jellett’s particularly untimely, even more lamentable.
5 The Western Procession by Mainie Jellett (1897–1944), 1943. Oil on canvas, 38.1 x 76.2 cm. National Gallery of Ireland. Photo, National Gallery of Ireland
The title of the exhibition is apt, as Hone and Jellett were great friends, not only of one another, but of art itself, and of many Irish artists and art institutions. Among their many activities they were instrumental in furthering the goals of the very National Gallery where this exhibition takes place. Touchingly, it was Hone who donated Jellett’s Decoration (Pl 1), that most significant painting of Irish modernism. This exhibition and the exquisitely illustrated accompanying catalogue have produced a compelling story of the intertwining lives and work of these two great artists, whose achievements deserve to be celebrated. While not entirely rejecting the art-historical narrative which has surrounded Hone and Jellett, it encourages a more nuanced perspective, which is likely to be the starting point for all future research into these subjects. The friendship these women showed to Irish art has been justly repaid.
- Niamh MacNally and Brendan Rooney, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship, exh cat., Dublin 2025, p64. ↑
- CP Curran, ‘Evie Hone: Stained Glass Worker’, Studie, 44, no. 174 (Summer 1955), p129. ↑