IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 29 SEPTEMBER 2025

58 41 Mainie Jellett (1897-1944) ABSTRACT COMPOSITION gouache 19 by 15in. (48.3 by 38.1cm) Frame Size: 27 by 22in. (68.6 by 55.9cm) Provenance: de Veres, 22 May 2012, lot 9; Private collection Mainie Jellett began her journey as an artist taking watercolour lessons as a young girl and later working under artists Sarah Cecilia Harrison and May Manning. She entered the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1914 during William Orpen’s tenure and three years later went to London to study at the Westminster Art School with Walter Sickert. There she met Evie Hone who became a lifelong friend. In 1920 she won the Taylor Scholarship facilitating her travel to Paris with Hone where they worked in the studio of André Lhote and encountered Cubism for the first time. Later, both decided to work with Albert Gleizes and focus their practice on pure abstraction. On returning to Ireland Jellett began to exhibit her Cubist works and give painting lessons from her home. Her work was not well received with George Russell particularly critical in his reviews. Jellett continued to exhibit in Paris and showed regularly in Dublin in the 1920s with the Dublin Painter’s Gallery. The following decade saw a more religious subject matter enter her oeuvre as well as a greater realism. She exhibited at the RHA from 1930 to 1937 as well as the Watercolour Society of Ireland until 1943. By the 1940s she was a leader in the Modern movement in Ireland and joined the avant-garde White Stage Group whose members included Basil Rakoczi, Kenneth Hall, Louis le Brocquy, Thurloe Conolly and Patrick Scott. Jellett exhibited in the inaugural Irish Exhibition of Living Art, where she had been appointed chairman but was unable to attend as she fell ill and died a short time later. Abstract Composition is undated but stylistically would tie in with her work of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It displays Jellett’s absorptions of the Cubist technique of translation and rotation but incorporates a colour range and form that evokes the Madonna and child image. In her essay, Mainie Jellett: Translating Cubism, Dr Riann Coulter argued that, “The hostility that Jellett encountered in 1923 did not break her resolve to convert Ireland to the Modernist cause, but it did make her realise that, in order to communicate with a wider Irish public, she would have to adapt”. 1 She later writes, “An alternative vehicle was needed, a discourse both spiritual and Irish that could sustain her abstract aesthetic. It was through the familiar iconography of religious imagery that Jellett’s reconciliation of Ireland and Modernism was to be achieved.”2. Celtic art also had its role to play making Jellett’s work more palatable. Coulter writes, “The stylistic influence of Celtic art can be discerned in Jellett’s religious work. Her use of the rectilinear framing devices to contain the spiralling form... [r]elates to manuscript illuminations from The Books of Kells, where imposing frames enclose figures, and areas of dynamic knotwork are anchored within static borders.”3 The present painting exhibits these three elements of Jellett’s later work - Cubist, religious and Celtic - that helped ingratiate her work to Irish audiences and ultimately place her within the history books as a leader of the modern art movement in Ireland. After her death Jellett was celebrated with a memorial exhibition at the Dublin Painters Gallery and the Victor Waddington Gallery. The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (IMMA) exhibited a large retrospective of her work in 1991. She has since been the subject of two major exhibitions in Ireland in the last decade, ‘Analysing Cubism’ (IMMA) travelling to the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and later the F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio, Banbridge, Co. Down in 2013 and, most recently, at the National Gallery of Ireland, ‘Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The Art of Friendship’, April to August 2025. Her artistic legacy and her position as a leader in the modern Irish art movement continues to be explored by academics while at auction her works have enjoyed sustained demand with a world record price achieved for her oil painting, Achill Horses, 1933, with Whyte’s in May 2025 (lot 37, 26 May €210,000). Adelle Hughes August 2025 Footnotes: 1 Kissane, Seán, Ed., Analysing Cubism, Crawford Art GAllery, Cork, 2013, p.104 2 Ibid., p.105 3 Ibid., p.106 €18,000-€22,000 (£15,650-£19,130 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot41