Triumph of spirit: Irish artist Evie Hone
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By Dr John Wallace
looks at the remarkable career of Irish artist Evie Hone who overcame
significant physical disability to produce her great masterpiece, the
East Window of Eton College Chapel.
Evie Hone knew what suffering was. Her childhood was marked by
significant adversity: her mother died following her birth and by
twelve she had contracted polio. Sadly she was left with impaired
mobility and limited use of one hand.
As years of polio treatment passed, however, she refused to allow her
disability to deter her from her chosen path.
Sadly she also developed arthritis further adding to her physical
difficulties.
These setbacks meant that she needed a constant companion throughout
her life.
Evie Hone was born into a family of distinguished artists. She was a
descendant of Galton Hone, King's Glazier to Henry VIII, who made the
windows in King's College Chapel, Cambridge. She was also related to
the well-known Irish artist Nathaniel Hone.
She began her artistic journey accompanied by another Dubliner and
great innovator in Irish painting, Mainie Jellett.
They both studied in London before moving together to Paris in 1920.
Though shy Evie could also be was quite forthright, and she petitioned
to work with the well-known French artist, Albert Gleizes, attracted by
his theories on the creation of abstract art.
For the next 10 years, Hone and Jellett pursued their studies together
in France. According to art critic Brian Fallon, the credit for
introducing Cubism and French Modernism into Ireland must be given to
these two remarkable Irish women.
At the time when Ireland was finding it difficult to cope with the
Impressionists, Evie Hone brought progress and enlightenment into a
closed and insular Irish art world.
As a reformer she drew her inspiration from Modernism and the School of
Paris and she was also intensively active, both as a teacher and as an
organiser with a strong social sense.
By 1924, her avant-garde style was causing controversy. Because of a
justified frustration at the reactionary attitude of the official Royal
Hibernian Academy she, with Mainie Jellett, founded the Irish
Exhibition of Visual Art in 1943, which, in turn, allowed for the
emergence of progressive artists like Louis le Brocquy.
Her one break from art was in 1925 when she "took the veil" with an
Anglican community of nuns in Cornwall.
However, she left after one year to resume her artistic career. She
converted to Catholicism in 1937.
Despite her physical disability her artistic development gradually took
her away from painting into stained glass production. She had been
greatly impressed with the great windows of Chartes and Le Mans that
she had seen while visiting France.
Though a semi-invalid for most of her life, she now went on to
establish herself as one of the leading stain glass artists of the 20th
century. She worked largely in silence in order to satisfy a craving
for a serene vision.
In Rathfarnham, Evie Hone rented a house from Irish artist May Guinness
who had been decorated by the French Government for her ambulance work
in World War I.
Here in her workshop, Hone produced a replacement for one of the great
windows in Eton College Chapel that had been destroyed by a bomb in
1940. It is regarded as her masterpiece, defiant both in style and
spiritual commitment. She completed this enormous work despite
suffering from both polio and arthritis.
Work on the gigantic Eton College window brought on her first stroke in
1953, the year she received an honorary degree from TCD. The stroke,
however, did not stop her from completing further windows before her
final illness in 1955.
In that year, while entering her parish church in Rathfarnham, she
finally succumbed to her lifelong battle against physical ill health.
As art critic Hilary Pyle points out, Evie Hone displayed the true
resolution of the artist in her long and continuous struggle against
adversity.
Her burden of physical suffering never impeded her constant search for
artistic perfection and spiritual illumination. And, with her death,
the golden age of Irish stained glass was extinguished.
Evie Hone, A Pioneering Artist, which marks the 50th anniversary of her
death, will run until June 4, 2006 in Room 20 of The National Gallery
of Ireland, Dublin 2.
*Dr John Wallace is a consultant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist
with an interest in evidence-based medicine.