[In]Visible Women

The National Gallery of Ireland holds an important archive associated with the development of Irish art and its history. This exhibition showcases a selection of material from the Centre for the Study of Irish Art and the Yeats Archive relating to Irish women artists of the early twentieth century.  It sheds light on their practices and contributions to major exhibitions and artistic initiatives. By focusing on various aspects of the life, education and work of artists including Mary Swanzy, Sarah Purser, Mainie Jellett and Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, it highlights the important role women played in the development of modern art in Ireland.

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.

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.

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.

As both artists and entrepreneurs, women made significant contributions to the development of art cooperatives in Ireland. These focused on the professionalisation 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, Beatrice Elvery 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, Asia and America.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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 Women: Irish Women Artists from the Archives was on display in Room 11 at the National Gallery of Ireland from 19th July 2018 to 3rd March 2019.