My Four Green Fields

This is by Hilda van Stockum, a Dutch writer of childrens books and an artist. She spent part of her life in Ireland where she met Evie Hone and painted this portrait, probably at Marley, in Rathfarnham, where Evie had a house and studio.

Evie is my Jameson grandmother’s first cousin and spent a lot of time in the Second World War living at Barmeath. Work she did there comes onto the market quite often and I have bought some but her artistic legacy is greater than that.

She was born in 1894 in Co. Dublin and studied in London at the Byam Shaw School of Art and then under Bernard Meninsky at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Later she met Mainie Jellett when they both studied under Walter Sickert at the Westminster Technical Institute; so far, so normal. But then she and her friend Mainie went to France and worked under André Lhote and, in 1921, Albert Gleizes in Paris.

It had a profound effect on them and, also, Gleizes. He was initially reluctant to teach two Irish girls. Peter Brooke explains in his book, Albert Gleizes, For and Against the Twentieth Century:

“The year 1921 finished with what was perhaps the most important external event of this whole turbulent period – the arrival on his doorstep in Paris, one rainy night, of two quite unknown Irish art students, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. They were to be Gleizes’s first pupils and it was in teaching them that he was forced to clarify his thoughts sufficiently to be able to write La Peinture et ses lois. So far, we have seen Gleizes, who always insisted on the “collective” nature of artistic activity, working and disputing with painters and writers who, rightly or wrongly, considered themselves to be equals. Increasingly from now on we will see him as a “master” surrounded by pupils.”

In La Peinture et ses lois, Gleizes writes, “I owe it to Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone”, high praise for two Irish girls with pretensions to be artists. And artists they became although their abstract work was not well received in conservative Ireland. Hone’s work hangs today in the National Gallery in Dublin, there was a retrospective of her and Jellett’s work at the Tate, yet her pictures can sometimes still be picked up at auction for less than £1,000.

End of story? Mais non. Evie contracted polio as a child, imposing a physical handicap which did not interfere with her painting. So she converted to Catholicism and studied to make stained glass windows. Besides the technical demands this is physically challenging if the window is of any size and she made two whoppers. The first is My Four Green Fields, commissioned by the Irish government for the Irish pavilion at the World’s Trade Fair in New York in 1939. It depicts the four provinces of Ireland. This picture of it is of added interest as, for scale, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are standing in front of it with the Irish Prime Minister and his wife.

She fitted in one more major commission before her death, in 1955. The windows in Eton College chapel had been destroyed in the war and she was asked to design a new east window. (Piper was given the side windows.)

It is, unlike her earlier cubist abstract pictures, entirely traditional composed of vibrant colours. Somewhat surprisingly, it was put on an Irish postage stamp as a tribute to her. The subject-matter, of course, would have been most acceptable – but the location?