Four Courts Press

Dublin’s Stained Glass: A Review

Friends, take note – this is an ideal Christmas present! If it has never occurred to you to take a drive, a walk or a cycle through any part of Dublin, dropping into churches along the way, this book will convince you that it’s the ideal way to spend a day, surrounded by history and beauty.

As my regular readers know, I write frequently about stained glass, and I was a contributor to The Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass. The editor and main writer of that volume was David Caron, and I previously reviewed his marvellous book (I called it a ‘miracle’) on the life and work of Michael Healy. Now comes his latest work, Dublin’s Stained Glass, a book about the best 20th century glass in Dublin Churches, stunningly produced by Four Courts Press. This book needs to be in your library!

The John’s Lane church features in David’s Book, with a detail from the St Rita window. Here’s all of the narrative part of the window.

Here’s a statement you might not hear every day – the Catholic Church was the greatest patron of Irish artists in the 20th century. This is particularly true after Vatican II, 1962-65, the decrees of which included encouragement to use modern forms of architecture and art. But it is also true that the Church had the means to commandeer resources that were available to few private individuals in 20th century Ireland. The result of this is that the work of some of our best artists is public and easily accessible. While this book focusses on stained glass, David also points out where appropriate other example of fine art in churches (e.g. stations, altar furniture) as well as identifying the architects working to modernise or re-order our churches.

I have used my own photographs throughout this post, but they cannot compare with the magnificent photography by Jozef Vrtiel, David’s long-term collaborator and the single most talented photographer of stained glass in Ireland. This is truly a combined effort – David’s text and Jozef’s images complement each other superbly.

The book is laid out in sections: City, Dublin North and Dublin South (suburbs and county), encompassing thirty-nine locations. They are not all churches – Bewley’s on Grafton Street is included for its Harry Clarke windows (above, and above that), as well as the National Gallery with its excellent stained glass room, the Hugh Lane Gallery, home of Clarke’s Eve of St Agnes, and St Patrick’s Campus of Dublin City University, with its floor to ceiling expanse of dalle de verre by Gabriel Loire. This is a good example of a non-Irish artist included in the book. Gabriel Loire was French, and the internationally acknowledged master of the dalle de verre technique, in which slabs of glass, chipped round the edges to increase refraction, was embedded in concrete or resin, allowing for soaring walls of colour to be incorporated into the architectural scheme.

This little predella panel is at the base of The Blessed Julie window in Staunton’s Hotel on Stephen’s Green

But of course, mostly the stained glass is in churches. Catholic churches tend to be open much of the time, making them the easier option to visit. A little careful planning may be needed to visit non-Catholic churches. David gives the postal code for each location – very helpful as it works well with Google maps. Of necessity, schools, hospitals and other institutions had to be excluded since they are not publicly accessible most of the time.

In the Dublinia exhibition this is George Walsh’s Trades window

In his introduction, David tells us:

During the 20th century Dublin’s reputation as a centre for stained glass excellence, both in terms of artistry and craftsmanship, was internationally lauded and is evidenced by the many orders placed by overseas patrons. Stained glass was the one area of the visual arts in 20th century Ireland that had an established school of the highest calibre, as distinct from singular talents such as Jack B Yeats and Eileen Gray. The highpoint for Irish 20th century stained-glass was the period from 1915 to 1980 and the leading figures were Harry Clarke, Wilhelmina Geddes, Michael Healy, Evie Hone and Richard King all of whom trained in Dublin, worked out of Dublin studios and so it is not surprising that the city has a concentration of first rate stained glass by them and many others.

Evie Hone’s Head of St John at the National Gallery

I would add that stained glass was an area where both Irish men and Irish women could excel. Many of our finest stained glass artists were women and there has never been any tendency, as with other areas of artistic endeavour, to privilege the reputation of men over women. 

Ballyroan Church of the Holy Spirit, with Murphy-Devitt’s stations laid out in narrative progression. This church also has paintings by Sean Keating

David starts with the architecture of each church, identifying the architect or firm, and describing its main features and influences as well as dates of construction and/or modification. As he says, if one were to visit all or many of the locations in the book, one would get a comprehensive overview of the story of twentieth-century Irish stained glass. 

Let’s take one example – the church in Ballymun, Our Lady of Victories, one of the first batch of six churches in the Dublin Diocese that were built in the five years immediately after Vatican II, and which take into account the Guidelines of the council. Stepping into this church, as I did for the first time in May this year, is an immersive experience. First of all, it’s enormous – a reminder that in the 60s we were building Catholic churches which could accommodate thousands of congregants over the course of several masses every Sunday. 

Secondly, you are immediately aware of being bathed in light and colour. There is a ‘lantern’ surrounding the central altar and this is the work of Helen Moloney. Here is David’s description:

Although it comprises eight sides or ‘windows’ (each composed of five panels), Helen Moloney created just two different designs for the windows; from these she made four different colour versions and these were duplicated to create the eight different windows. Despite the fact that there are essentially just two designs and she chose a deliberately restricted colour palette, this repetition is hardly apparent and instead one experiences an almost overwhelming sense of intensely zinging complimentary colours enlivened by punchy graphic symbols. Moloney used only the best of mouth blown glass in a selection of rich colours including red, blue, yellow, purple, violet, orange, green, and aquamarine, and although she has included different shades of these, mostly they are full strength from maximum visual impact.

The second artist with work in Our Lady of Victories is my own favourite, George Walsh, at this time still working at Abbey Studios. The stations are by him, in an innovative technique using copper sheets, with details cut into them in the manner of a stencil (above). David comments, The effect is graphic and reduces the Stations to their essence. David points out that a rare feature of these Stations is the inclusion of a fifteenth station, the Resurrection. Walsh also has a St Joseph, a St Patrick and a Madonna and Child in the church.

Finally, Sheila Corcoran created a series of symbolic windows at ground level (above), representing the Evangelists and other sacred subjects. Neither Moloney nor Corcoran included any painting, relying solely on glass of different colours and shapes to create their images – an unusual choice for the time and very effective in this context.

Moving to South Dublin, I cannot resist a visit to Greenhills, to the Holy Spirit Church on Limekiln Lane (above). I visited this church two years ago in the company of Robert, David Caron, Paul Donnelly (the Harry Clarke Studios expert) and Ruth Sheehy. We were thrilled that Ruth – whose work on Richard King has pride of place in my library and whose expertise I documented once before in my post Stained Glass Detectives – and a Find! – was able to talk us through the window, illuminating each part of it, and expanding on Kings’ style and colour choices. My topmost photograph in this post was taken as she led us through an erudite tour of each element.

King was aided and abetted by the Murphy Devitt Studios. Johnny Murphy worked with King to provide all the surrounding glass, in harmonious shades and using the same mouth-blown glass. He also designed the dalle de verre windows at ground level, while Peter Dowd, Roisín Dowd Murphy’s brother, was responsible for the wonderful bronze doors. The day we were there a choir was practising for an upcoming concert. The sensory effect stays with me still.

A Harry Clarke panel of St Paul on the road to Damascus, from the Sandford Road Church. This is not one of the churches included in the book, which just shows what difficult choices had to be made to stay within the page-count.

I have only highlighted two churches, both dating to the 60s – and neither of them contains a Harry Clarke! Rest assured that this book contains lots of Clarkes – at least 6 of the locations contain Clarke windows, as well as those and others containing the work of his Studios artists after his death. You will also be happy to see Evie Hone, Michael Healy, Wilhelmina Geddes, Hubert McGoldrick, Catherine O’Brien, Patrick Pollen and several others.

Patrick Pollen’s Baptism of Christ from Lusk

What is does not contain (with a few key exceptions) are productions by unnamed artists working in the large studios (Earley, Watsons, etc), nor windows from the mass-production houses such as Mayer of Munich. 

Harry Clarke’s St MacCullin, also from Lusk

There are, as I have said, 39 locations in the book, but David would be the first to admit that if he were not constrained by page- and word-count he would have included several more. So let me add a couple that are so well worth visiting, even though they had to be left out of this volume. While at Lusk, for example, David suggests a visit to nearby St Maur’s in Rush and I concur – George Walsh’s series for this church typical of his mature style (below). Another place to see Walsh’s work is the Church of the Guardian Angels on Newtownpark Avenue in Blackrock.

St Mary’s Church in Sandyford has early Netherlandish glass – and yes, that is NOT 20th century, but it’s one of the few places to see it up close in Ireland. St Laurence O’Toole Church in Kilmacud has a huge and very stylised panel by Phyllis Burke (below). Sandford Road Church of Ireland has a Harry Clarke St Peter and Paul (see the illustration fourth up). 

I’ve written about a few of the churches in this book, so you know I have other favourites too. St Michael’s in Dunlaoghaire, for example, and one of the several Harry Clarke windows in St Joseph’s in Terenure. I am sure you have your own favourite Dublin Churches – any additions you’d like to make to my short list, dear Readers? 

This is one of a set of stations made from antique glass and polished granite, done by George Walsh and Willy Earley for the Clarendon St church

Grand so, you have all you need now for some ecstatic wanderings around Dublin Churches. I leave you with our own ecstatic wanderings – as a bookend to this post, here we are in Greenhills, quite in awe of Richard King’s and Johnny Murphy’s enormous window. Left to right is Paul Donnelly, David Caron, Ruth Sheehy and Robert.

Michael Healy by David Caron: Review

This book – MIchael Healy: An Túr Gloine’s Stained Glass Pioneer – is nothing short of a miracle. It’s beautifully written by David Caron, with superb photography mainly by Jozef Vrtiel, and outstanding production values by Four Courts Press. But a miracle? Yes – because David Caron uses his scholarship and knowledge of stained glass as well as the history and art movements of the period to produce an immensely readable book about an intensely private man who left behind practically nothing about his life except his magnificent work.

I will declare an interest right away – David Caron is a friend and mentor, editor and principal writer of the Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass, to which I am one of the contributors. I have been looking forward to this book for a long time, as have all his friends, colleagues and collaborators. It was launched to great acclaim in Dublin on November 1 – all the available copies were snapped up at the launch, including mine (stowed behind the desk), so I had to wait until December to get my hands on it. 

From a private bishop’s oratory, Sts Macartan, Brigid, Patrick and Dympna. Detail of Macartan, below. The rich reds and yellow shading of Macartan’s robes are the result of aciding and silver stain, described further down

All the photographs in this post are my own – but I haven’t seen that many Healy windows, and my photography does not bear comparison with Jozef’s magnificent images. The book is profusely illustrated – it’s one of its many strengths – with many photographs of the tiny details in which Healy delighted and which distinguish his windows from those of other artists. Healy spent all his working life at An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass) the Studio founded by Sarah Purser. If you are unfamiliar with this period in Irish stained glass, you might like to read my post Loughrea Cathedral and the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement before continuing.

Born in 1873 into grinding poverty in a Dublin tenement, through a combination of great good luck and his own prodigious talent and hard work, Michael Healy turned himself into one of the foremost stained glass artists of his time. Reading David’s account, it is difficult not to be overwhelmed at times by the hardship endured by Healy and his family in turn-of-the-20th-century Dublin. Packed into one room with miserably inadequate sanitation, whole families succumbed to disease and early death. Consumption was rampant and the only recourse for anything approaching treatment was the dreaded workhouse. Infant mortality rates were high and so we read about several Healy babies who failed to survive into adulthood, as well as adults carried to early graves, leaving widows and widowers to try to cope. 

Christ with Doubting Thomas, St Joseph’s, Mayfield, Cork

In the midst of all this was the First World War, the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, followed by the emergence of the new Irish State. David chronicles all of this, and the effect it was having on citizens, like Healy, who were trying to go about their business, but who also had deep convictions about politics and religion.

These windows, Sts Brigid, Patrick and Columcille, are in the National Gallery

In some ways, Healy was a typical young man of his time. Deeply religious, he spent some time in a seminary before deciding he was unsuited to the vocation. He belonged to a Catholic men’s lay organisation. David provides many instances where his working class Dublin accent, his republicanism, and his Catholicism must have put him at odds with his fellow artists at An Túr Gloine, mostly female, Protestant and from well-to-do backgrounds. They found him brooding and introverted, although they acknowledged his exceptional talent, and until Evie Hone arrived he did not make true friends with any of them.

The Annunciation, Loughrea Cathedral. This window was closely based on a design by the great arts and crafts stained glass master, Christopher Whall. Whall came over from England to supervise the execution of it by the Túr Gloine artists, including Healy. Celtic revival interlacing was very popular at the time, and a way of putting a nationalistic stamp on a window – note the subtle inclusions of interlacing here and there

I mentioned that he had strokes of good luck in his life, two in particular. One was the patronage of a perceptive priest, Fr Glendon, who enabled him to study in Florence for a period of time and who procured illustration work for him in Dublin. David points out here and there in the text the influence of Italian painters discernible in Healy’s windows, gained from his sojourn in Italy.

Detail of a Patrick window in Donnybrook

The other was that he found lodgings with a landlady, Elizabeth Kelly, and over time they grew close. Eventually, they become lovers and had a son, Diarmuid, together. Although the relationship was never publicly acknowledged (she was married, although her husband left her) it provided both of them with stability and comfort, and Healy was close to his son. In the 30s Diarmuid O’Kelly (although his mother went by Kelly) bought a Ford Model T and he and Michael would go on sketching expeditions up into the Dublin Mountains and out along the canals. 

Christ with Mary and Martha, Mayfield, Cork

Because of the opprobrium that such a scandal would have visited upon both Elizabeth Kelly and Michael Healy, Diarmuid was never told that Healy was his father, but he must have suspected, and in more recent times DNA testing confirmed the relationship. Reading about the frequent tragedies that befell the Healy family and the privations under which he grew up, I find it very comforting to know that Michael enjoyed the security and love of his adopted family as he got older.

St Simeon, one of Healy’s early windows for Loughrea Cathedral

David leads us on a measured journey through Healy’s life and work. He was the first recruit to An Túr Gloine, Sarah Purser’s stained glass studio, and later co-op. There, he worked alongside AE Child (also his instructor at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art), Catherine O’Brien, Beatrice Elvery, Ethel Rhind and Hubert McGoldrick. All of them looked up to him as the finest painter at the Studio. He, in turn, admired the work of Wilhelmina Geddes, and when her health caused problems he finished some of her windows, trying to respect her style and designs. But it wasn’t until Evie Hone arrived that he found a true colleague – Nikki Gordon Bowe described Hone as “his devoted disciple and admirer” and she finished some of his windows after he died.

Healy designed many Patrick windows – this one is in Glenariff Co Antrim

Each commission is described and through David’s detailed accounts we come to understand Healy’s style – what iconography he was attracted to, how he decided on the myriad details with which he embellished his windows, and most of all, his decorative methods. 

John the Evangelist, Loughrea Cathedral

Long before Harry Clarke made it is his signature, Healy was a master of aciding, a difficult (and dangerous) process used to remove colour from the surface of flashed glass. Flashed glass is clear glass which has a skim of coloured glass fired onto its surface. This top layer could be removed by scratching or etching it away, or by immersing the glass in a bath of hydrofluoric acid, having first applied beeswax to any surface where the colour should remain intact. By waxing and immersing, often several times, colour could be altered from, for example, a rich ruby red to the merest hint of pink, and all shades in between.

Healy’s Ascension, in Loughrea Cathedral

Healy would often plate two sheets of glass together – for example, one red and the other blue – each one carefully acided, and could by this means achieve an astonishing array of colours from the red-blue side of the spectrum. Added to this, he would often use silver stain on the back of the glass. Once heated in the kiln, the silver stain would permeate the glass, turning it yellow (repeated firings could deepen this from bright yellow to a rich amber colour). Finally, all the figuration would be painted and stippled on to the surface of the glass and the individual pieces of glass would be assembled and leaded together to produce the finished window. Healy was a perfectionist and Purser would despair of ever making enough money to keep the studio going since he spent so long on each commission.

This detail from Healy’s Virgin Mary window in Loughrea illustrates well his aciding technique using red and blue flashed glass plated together to produce not only infinite shades of colour but a sparkling jewel-like effect

It is through David’s lively analysis of each window that we truly come to appreciate Healy’s genius and his evolution as an artist, his style developing according to his exposure to more modern influences.

Considered one of his masterpieces, this is the Last Judgement Window in Loughrea, completed towards the end of his life. A detail from The Damned (right -hand light) is below

David wears his erudition lightly and when he dissects a window, pointing out elements that are easy to miss, and explaining what they mean and why Healy used them, I found myself pouring over Jozef’s wonderful photographs, picking out each separate item of iconography, and marvelling anew at the depths of learning that Healy brought to his designs. For example, David devotes five pages to the St Augustine and St Monica window in John’s Lane Church in Dublin and not a word is wasted.

Along the way we meet a host of characters – the redoubtable Sarah Purser and his colleagues at An Túr Gloine, enterprising priests and bishops, citizens memorialising their dead family members (CS Lewis!), art critics such as C P Curran, American heiresses, patrons of the arts, Celtic Revival influencers (OK, modern word, but you know who I mean). We get insights into the inner workings of the studio, wherein frequent bouts of unprofessional behaviour created tensions, and where Sarah Purser often had to crack the whip when productivity lagged. We come to understand the difficulties of soliciting business, agreeing on final designs and delivering orders, especially to overseas clients, in days when postal service to American and New Zealand took weeks.

A detail from the Patrick window in the National Gallery

We also come to see Healy as a rounded artist who did more than stained glass. His quick sketches of Dublin characters, drawn from life have all the attraction of immediacy and familiarity, while his watercolour landscapes are charming.  

An early Loughrea window, Virgin and Child with Irish Saints

Healy died in 1941. By the time you finish the book, you feel you have lost a friend – a difficult and complicated one to be sure, but one whom you admire and will never forget. While obviously a gruff character on the outside, David allows us access to his humanity, and points out the obvious sympathy with which he portrays some of his subjects. His Loughrea St Joseph (below), for example, shows, in the words of the art critic Thomas McGreevy, a “Joseph who knows the tragedy of the world and who has some special understanding of the destiny. . . of the child”. We are, of course tempted to see in the tenderness with which Joseph gazes down at Jesus a revelation of Healy’s suppressed feelings for his own son.

This book is not just for stained glass enthusiasts, though they will delight in it, but for anyone interested in life in Ireland at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, and indeed for anyone who enjoys good writing and a story that propels you through almost 70 years of the life of a significant artist. Available from the publisher or in all good bookstores.