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Artist: Evie Hone HRHA (1894-1955) Title: Marley Woods Signature: signed lower left Medium: gouache and watercolour on paper Size: 16½ x 23½cm (6.5 x 9.3in) Framed Size: 41.8 x 48.8cm (16.5 x 19.2in) Provenance: Private Collection a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} After the dissolution in 1944 of An Tur Gloine, the stained glass workshop of which she had been an active member, Evie Hone set up her own studio in the courtyard of Marley Park house in Rathfarnham, on the southern outskirts of Dublin city (The name is nowadays spelt 'Marlay'). The woodlands at Ma... Read more Evie Hone Lot 6 - 'Marley Woods' Estimate: €500 - €750 After the dissolution in 1944 of An Tur Gloine, the stained glass workshop of which she had been an active member, Evie Hone set up her own studio in the courtyard of Marley Park house in Rathfarnham, on the southern outskirts of Dublin city (The name is nowadays spelt 'Marlay'). The woodlands at Marley were a source of constant inspiration, with Hone delighting in painting the many trees and shrubs in the demesne. In this confident gouache and watercolour sketch, she depicts a group of mature Beech trees, outlining their solid forms with dark rapidly-painted expressive lines, and using a combination of greys, greens, blues and yellows to capture the effect of light on the trunks. This technique of using dark outlines derived from Hone's experience as a designer of stained glass windows, and also from her admiration for the artist Georges Rouault The composition is also reminiscent of Hone's stained glass designs, with angled branches counterbalanced by vertical tree trunks, creating enclosed areas of colour. The sketch was probably painted in autumn or winter, as the trees have little foliage. Along with Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone is credited with introducing European Modernist art, and Cubism in particular, into Ireland. Throughout her life she was a deeply religious person, and her art forms part of a quest for spiritual enlightenment and solace; at an early age Hone had contracted polio, which left her partly disabled, and much of her childhood was spent as a convalescent, both in Ireland and travelling on the Continent. Her father Joseph Hone, who was in the malt business, was a descendant of the eighteenth century Irish artist Nathaniel Hone Seeing Giotto's frescoes in Assisi in 1911 inspired Evie also to become an artist. In 1918 she studied under Walter Sickert and then Bernard Meninsky at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, before moving on in 1920 to France. At a time when teaching at the School of Art in Dublin was in the hands of mainly Realist and Impressionist artists, Hone was Paris studying under the Modernist painter Andre Lhote. A few months later, in company with her fellow-student and friend Mainie Jellett, she moved on to study with the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes Well-connected politically, Gleizes had converted to Catholicism three years earlier, and his idealism and devotion to religious subject matter in art was very much to the taste of the two young Irish artists. After returning to Ireland, Hone specialised in creating stained glass windows for churches and other locations, receiving in all about forty-eight commissions, the most famous being the windows at Eton College Chapel (1848-52). She worked in the Dublin stained glass studio An Tur Gloine until 1943, and in that same year was one of the founders of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Although her early abstract paintings are virtually indistinguishable from those of Mainie Jellett, her later work is more individual and shows the influence of Rouault as well as of Irish medieval carvings. Hone died at Rathfarnham in 1955. Peter Murray, January 2022