52
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
56
Susan Mary (‘Lily’) Yeats (1866-1949) and R.
Brigid Ganly HRHA (neé O’Brien) (1909-2002)
“
THE PROUD AND CARELESS NOTES LIVE ON BUT BLESS OUR
HANDS THAT EBB AWAY” c.1919-1921
embroidered threads on green silk; (framed)
signed by Yeats within the design lower right; signed “B. O’Brien”
lower left
11.50
by 14.50in. (29.21 by 36.83cm)
This extremely rare, well preserved embroidered panel illustrates the
final refrain intoned by the Three Voices in unison at the end of W.B.
Yeats’ poem entitled
The Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and
themselves
from his collection of lyrical poems,
In the Seven Woods:
being Poems chiefly of the Irish Heroic
Age, which his sister Elizabeth
had published as her first Dún Emer Press hand-printed volume in 1903.
In 1902, Elizabeth Yeats and her elder sister Lily had returned to Ireland
from London at the invitation of Evelyn Gleeson, to set up workshops in
the Arts and Crafts venture Gleeson was establishing at Dún Emer, a
large house in Dundrum, south of Dublin.While Elizabeth Yeats set up a
handpress and began printing and binding books advised by her
literary brother,William Butler Yeats, Lily Yeats, a skilled needlewoman
(
who had been trained by William Morris’ daughter, May), focussed on
embroidery, often designed by their younger artistic brother, Jack Butler
Yeats. By 1904, she had seven girls working with her. In 1908, the sisters
seceded from Dún Emer and set up their own Cuala Industries nearby,
where Lily Yeats continued to run her embroidery workshop, often
adapting the designs of other artists, and producing a wide range of
embroidered domestic and autonomous panels. After continual ill
health, she became so ill that production was considerably diminished
in the mid 1920s.The last sale of embroidery under her direction was
held in 1931, under great financial duress, and in 1932 the Cuala
embroidery department wound down in its Baggot Street home.
This panel (described by Lily Yeats as one of her ‘needle pictures’) was
designed by Brigid O’Brien, daughter of the painter Dermod O’Brien,
who was trained at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, under Oliver
Sheppard, Seán Keating, Patrick Tuohy and Oswald Reeves, and at the
RHA Schools. In 1928, she was elected an ARHA. Barbara Dawson has
noted her willingness to apply her training to various projects and
media, including caricature and book illustration. Joseph McBrinn
records that she won the Taylor Scholarship in 1929 and in 1930 while
she was completing her first mural illustrating
St. Patrick,
for the
Presentation Convent school on George’s Hill, Dublin. Her first major
commission, completed in 1930, was for a painted frieze over 120 feet
long illustrating James Stephens’ version of
The Boyhood of Fionn
(
published with Arthur Rackham’s illustrations in 1924) for the Carnegie
Trust’s Child Welfare Centre on Cork Hill, Dublin. Although this major
work is now no longer visible, having been vandalized by being over-
painted, it is directly analogous with this fine little tableau. A later,
primitivistly stylised, predominantly black and white embroidered
version (unsigned by O’Brien) illustrating the same lines from Yeats’
poem was dated by the artist to 1935 in the Hugh Lane exhibition
catalogue (p.8).The Yeats’ were neighbours of the O’Briens, who lived in
Fitzwilliam Square, and frequented the nearby United Arts Club, where
the paths of W.B.Yeats and Brigid O’Brien’s father, the painter Dermod,
often crossed. In 1929,W.B.Yeats had commissioned the young painter
to try and boost his sister Lily’s precarious income by designing
Stations
of the Cross
for her to embroider on Irish silk poplin.
What is unusual about this very beautifully worked panel is the delicate
fineness of the pale green silk ground and the lively, evocative portrayal
of each of the three figures depicted between the two scrolls bearing
the text they illustrate.There is much more attention to narrative detail
and to the range and application of stitches carefully chosen than in any
other Cuala embroidery of this late period. Not since the embroidered
sodality banners of 1902-3 for Loughrea Cathedral had Lily Yeats
produced such successful and expressive figurative work. Although the
scale is small, close attention reveals the variety of couched and
stemmed stitches used to outline and fill in the costumes, hands and
features (particularly expressive), hair and musical instruments of the
imaginatively dressed, lamenting musicians.The direction the stitches
follow is an intrinsic part of the success of this panel’s design, as they
emphasize the volume of the surface they are describing, and draw the
viewer’s attention to the positions of the hands plucking the chords on
each musical instrument. Despite the obvious graphic influences of
Beatrice Elvery, Mary Cottenham Yeats and Wilhelmina Geddes
(
particularly the latter’s
St. Brendan
embroidered panel of 1924) and
that of Jack Yeats in his early predilection for figures standing high
above a low, recognizably Irish, horizon, this design is strikingly original.
The colours are distinctive with their soft pinks, turquoise, jade and gold,
even though there may be some fading on the golden-haired girl
player’s delicately worked spotted dress, flouncy petticoat and slippers.
The welcome appearance of this panel makes it all the more important
that others, such as
Tobias and the Angel
,
similarly designed by O’Brien
and worked by Lily Yeats, be traced and documented.
Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe
November 2012
Literature:
R. Brigid Ganly, H.R.H.A.: born 1909: retrospective exhibition
,
Gorry
Gallery, Dublin December 4th -17th 1987;
Maureen Murphy (ed.),
I call to the Eye of the Mind: A Memoir by Sara
Hyland
(
Dublin 1995);
Nicola Gordon Bowe and Elizabeth S. Cumming,
The Arts and Crafts
Movements in Dublin and Edinburgh 1885 – 19325
(
Dublin 1998);
Barbara Dawson in Christina Kennedy & Maime Winters (eds.),
Brigid
Ganly retrospective
:
catalogue of an exhibition at the Hugh Lane
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art
,
Dublin 1998;
Joseph McBrinn,
Mural Painting in Ireland 1855-1959,
unpublished Ph.D.
thesis, Volume II, N.C.A.D. (N.U.I.), Dublin 2007
€
2,500-
€
3,500 (
£2,000-£2,800 approx)