Notes
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 vandalised 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, recognisably 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
