It’s the little things in life that give disproportionate pleasure. Recently I have been given two presents. This lens and screen cloth is almost too good to use – I may get it framed. If you’d like one, it’s on the National Gallery of Ireland website.
You will recall from many previous posts that Evie Hone is my Jameson grandmother’s first cousin and I got to appreciate her pictures as a child at Barmeath. Her work, especially her abstracts, were not immediately appreciated in the conservative Irish milieu in the 1920s and 30s. My grandfather said one reminded him of a rabbit’s intestines. Eton was an early adopter of her stained glass, commissioning her to design and install windows for College Chapel to replace the ones destroyed in WW II. She had polio as a child so this was an onerous task. She completed the magnificent East window but died, in 1955, before she could tackle the side windows. The richness of colour and the detail of her composition are remarkable.
One wonders how she might have continued but John Piper was given the task when she died. His windows are equally arresting and his style contrasts with Hone’s traditionalism agreeably. The Eton website describes them.
“The designs for the windows flanking it, four on each side, are by John Piper and were executed in glass by Patrick Reyntiens. The subjects are divided into four miracles on the north side and four parables on the south, each built around a general theme of success and failure. The miracles are: The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the Stilling of the Waters, and the Raising of Lazarus. The parables are: The Light Under a Bushel, the House Built on the Rock, the Lost Sheep, and the Sower.”
Success and failure; something for Eton boys to ponder over during prolix sermons.
This is the second present I was given this month; a 20th century ceramic dish.
Not as sought after as a work by Hone or Piper, alas, but of interest to me as I made it in 1997 in my pottery period. I enjoyed working with clay at Eton and was lucky enough to be taught by Gordon Baldwin. In the late 1990s I briefly resumed potting under the tutelage of Sophie MacCarthy.