Sneem

Brigid 1500: Mary of the Gael

St Brigid, according to some accounts, died in 524. Therefore, we are celebrating this year the 1500th anniversary of her death. Once again, I have gone back to primary sources for incidents from her life and am illustrating them with stained glass images. This year I have added as a source the famous Canon O’Hanlon’s Life, from his Lives of the Irish Saints Series, Vol 2, a work of overwhelming erudition.

The Patrick and Brigid window in Meath Hill, by George Walsh. I love that Brigid has precedence over Patrick in this enormous cruciform window

If you haven’t already done so, now is a good time to go back and read my 2022 post, St Brigid: Dove Among Birds, Vine Among Trees, Sun Among Stars and my 2023 post, Brigid: A Bishop in All But Name. In them, I explain what the original sources for the Life of Brigid are. They all contain similar accounts and may be ultimately based on a single source – the Life of St Brigid by St Ultán – and are laid out as a series of miracles that lead us from her birth to her death.

This is a detail from a window in Ballynahown, Co Westmeath, and is probably by Watson of Youghal. I like the clever way the oak leaves are used as frame and background

Many more miracles, legends, myths and stories accreted to her cult over the centuries. A good example of such a story is the one where she makes a cross from rushes – that one is nowhere to be found in the original Lives, but is an integral part of the folklore surrounding her, and therefore almost invariably found in her iconography.

This is a photo by Frank Fullard, used with permission and thanks. It is a simple treatment of St Brigid from Kilmaine, Co Mayo

She is associated with many places and numerous holy wells – just take a look at all the St Brigid’s wells Amanda has documented in Cork and Kerry. But of course it is Kildare that rightly claims her. Kildare (Cill Dara – the Church in the Oak Wood) is where she built her church and established her city. It is the origin of three of the attributes we see in many windows – a church, oak leaves and a lamp. (For the story about the Bishop’s Crozier, see the previous posts.)

Detail from the Brigid Window in Carrickmacross – she’s consulting with her architects

The Book of Lismore has this story about building the church:

Brigit went to Bishop Mel, that he might come and mark out her city for her. When they came thereafter to the place in which Kildare stands to-day, that was the time that Ailill, son of Dunlang, chanced to be coming, with a hundred horseloads of peeled rods, over the midst of Kildare. Then maidens came from Brigit to ask for some of the rods, and refusal was given to them. The horses were (straightway) struck down under their horseloads to the ground. Then stakes and wattles were taken from them, and they arose not until Ailill had offered the hundred horseloads to Brigit. And therewith was built Saint Brigit’s great house in Kildare, and it is Ailill that fed the wrights and paid them their wages. So Brigit left (as a blessing) that the kingship of Leinster should be till doomsday from Ailill, son of Dunlang.

Detail from the Brigid window in Sneem, Co Kerry, by Watson of Youghal

It was a large establishment. O’Hanlon says:

We are informed, that her Rule was followed, for a long time, by the greatest part of those monasteries, belonging to sacred virgins in Ireland; nearly all of these acknowledging our saint as their mother and mistress, and the monastery of Kildare as the headquarters of their Order. Moreover, Cogitosus informs us, in his prologue to her life, that not only did she rule nuns, but also a large community of men, who lived in a separate monastery. This obliged the saint to call to her aid, and from out his solitude, the holy bishop, S. Conlaeth, to be the director and spiritual father of her religious; and, at the same time, to be bishop of the city. The church at Kildare, to suit the necessities of the double monastery and to accommodate the laity, was divided by partitions into three distinct parts. One of these was reserved for the monks; one for the nuns; while a third compartment was intended to suit the requirements of the laity.

Harry Clarke’s 1924 window in Cloughjordan is of the Ascension with Irish Saints – this is a young St Brigid, holding her church

And what about the lamp? This is interesting, as its first appearance was not in any of the lives but in the writings of the notorious Giraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales. He will get a post of his own in due course, but for the moment, if you are not familiar with him, there’s a delightful sketch of him and his writings about Ireland in the 12th century here.

Brigid window in Kilgarvan, Co Kerry, by Earley and Co

Here is his story about the sacred fire, now usually rendered as a lamp, as faithfully related by O’Hanlon:

Speaking of Kildare city, in Leinster, which had become so renowned, owing to its connexion with our glorious abbess, Giraldus Cambrensis says, that foremost, among many miraculous things worthy of record, was St. Brigid’s inextinguishable fire. Not, that this fire itself was incapable of being extinguished, did it obtain any such name, but, because nuns and holy women had so carefully and sedulously supplied fuel to feed its flames, that from St. Brigid’s time to the twelfth century, when he wrote, it remained perpetually burning through a long lapse of years. What was still more remarkable, notwithstanding great heaps of wood, that must have been piled upon it, during such a prolonged interval, the ashes of this fire never increased.

Another detail from the Watson window in Sneem

What is furthermore remarkable, from the time of St. Brigid and after her death until the twelfth century, an even number, including twenty nuns, and the abbess, had remained in Kildare nunnery. Each of these religious, in rotation, nightly watched this inextinguishable fire. On the twentieth night, having placed wood on its embers, the last nun said:” O Brigid, guard thy fires, for this night the duty devolves on thyself.” Then the nun left that pyre, but although the wood might have been all consumed before morning, yet the coals remained alive and inextinguishable. A circular hedge of shrubs or thorns surrounded it, and no male person dare presume to enter within that sacred enclosure, lest he might provoke Divine vengeance, as had been experienced by a certain rash man, who ventured to transgress this ordinance. Women only were allowed to tend that fire. Even these attendants were not permitted to blow it with their breath; but, they used boughs of trees as fans for this purpose.

This is the predella from the Brigid window in Moone, by the Harry Clarke Studios (see blow for the main panel)

All of the Lives and O’Hanlon’s account tell of Brigid’s many miracles in providing food and clothing for the poor, in healing sicknesses, in turning the hearts of evildoers to God, in freeing slaves, and in punishing those who are selfish or cruel.

Brigid and the Beggar, by William Dowling, Gorey C of I

However, the story I like best perhaps is this one from the Vita Prima: 

In the same place also when saint Brigit was staying as a guest, a married man came with a request that saint Brigit should bless some water for him to sprinkle his wife with, for the wife actually hated the husband. So Brigit blessed some water and his house and food and drink and bed were sprinkled while his wife was away. And from that day on the wife loved her husband with a passionate love as long as she lived.

She may have been a nun, but she obviously served up a good love potion when the situation required it. This story is not only repeated in the Book of Lismore, but embellished, thus: 

When he had done thus, the wife gave exceeding great love to him, so that she could not keep apart from him, even on one side of the house ; but she was always at one of his hands. He went one day on a journey and left the wife asleep. When the woman awoke she rose up lightly and went after the husband, and saw him afar from her, with an arm of the sea between them. She cried out to her husband and said that she would go into the sea unless he came to her.

The aged St Brigid by George Stephen Walsh, in Ballintubber Abbey – another image generously loaned by Frank Fullard

My final point for this post about St Brigid is the matter of where she is buried. Most authorities give this as Downpatrick, where she is laid to rest alongside Patrick and Columcille. However, a medieval legend grew that she went to Glastonbury in old age and died there. That is why she is venerated in Britain as well as in Ireland – the top photograph in this post is from the St Brigid window in Exeter Cathedral. Here’s the full window, in which she is flanked, for some reason, by St Luke and St John busily writing their gospels.

Here is another British window, this one designed by Nuttgens in 1952 for St Etheldreda’s Church in London. (Used with thanks under the Creative Commons License – original is here.) It’s a particularly good narrative window, showing the building of her church under the Oak Tree, her crozier, and two cows – there are many stories of milk and cows in the Lives.

But O’Hanlon is having none of the Glastonbury story.

We cannot receive as duly authenticated, or even as probable, several assertions of mediaeval and more recent writers, who have treated concerning this illustrious virgin. It has been stated, that about the year 488, Saint Brigid left Ireland, and proceeded towards Glastonbury. There, it is said, she remained, until advanced in years, on an island, and convenient to the monastery in that place. Whether she died there or returned to Ireland is doubted. But, it seems probable enough, such a tradition had its origin, owing to this circumstance, that a different St. Brigid, called of Inis-bridge, or of Bride’s Island, had been the person really meant. She lived many years on a small island, near Glastonbury, called Brigidae Insula i.e., Brigid’s Bridge. This latter St. Brigid is said to have been buried, at Glastonbury.

This Brigid window is in Moone, Co Kildare from the Harry Clarke Studios. It features, as do many Brigid windows I have seen, a deer, but I can find no mention of a deer in any of the Lives. Perhaps one of our readers knows where the deer icon comes from?

I will finish with a quote from the Book of Lismore, which gives me the title for this post, and gives Brigid one of her most frequent soubriquets.

It is she that helpeth every one who is in a strait and in danger: it is she that abateth the pestilences: it is she that quelleth the anger and the storm of the sea. She is the prophetess of Christ she is the Queen of the South: she is the Mary of the Gael

I don’t know whose window this is – it’s from Ballybunion – but I love the composition

And a final image from Glynn, Co Wexford, because I love the pared-to-the-bone simplicity of this Richard King medallion..

Posts about St Brigid

St Brigid and AI

Brigid 1500: Mary of the Gael

Brigid: A Bishop in All But Name

St Brigid: Dove Among Birds, Vine Among Trees, Sun Among Stars

Connecting with St Ives

Have you ever met a Zorse? That’s a cross between a zebra and a horse. Probably not… But I have met the lady who invented them (above)! And, by quirky chance, she’s one link between Ireland and the group of artists who formed the ‘St Ives School of Painting’, Cornwall, in the twentieth century. You already know from last week’s post that the forthcoming exhibition in Uillinn, Skibbereen – West meets West, opening on 3 June, celebrates the historic connections and similarities between these two western outposts of Britain and Ireland, explored through the medium of art.

I was pleased to find this poster (produced for the London, Scottish and Midland Railway Company) by Stanhope Alexander Forbes, an artist who was born in Ireland but spent most of his long working life in Newlyn, Cornwall

It was the coming of railways from the capital to Cornwall (arriving to Penzance in 1860, and to St Ives in 1877) that opened up the far south-west of Britain to tourists – and to the artists who were drawn to this hitherto remote and unspoiled ‘rural idyll’. They were particularly attracted to the picturesque fishing villages, and rather overlooked the equally interesting and visually dramatic mining communities which were the centre of the county’s economy in the latter years of the nineteenth century.

The picturesque St Ives fishing community as seen in these postcards which served the burgeoning tourist industry in the early 1900s

The first art gallery in St Ives opened in 1887, and an art school was opened the following year. By the time the photographs on the postcards above were taken, there were ten private schools of painting in the town. The development of St Ives as a national (perhaps even international) centre for ‘modern art’ began after the Great War when Ben Nicholson and Christopher (Kit) Wood visited and ‘discovered’ the seafarer and naïve artist Alfred Wallis, who spent his retirement years painting nautical scenes on old fish boxes, driftwood and even scraps of cardboard.  They found his small cottage (now marked by a plaque) filled with these images, many of them (to the artists’ horror) attached to the walls by nails driven through their centres.

Art in St Ives, Cornwall: upper left – Christopher Wood self portrait; upper right – Alfred Wallis The Blue Ship; lower – Ben Nicholson Mural for the Festival of Britain

As the century progressed and another European war loomed, remote St Ives became home to many artists – some conscientious objectors, others just escapists. It made for a cosmopolitan mix. Ceramicists Bernard Leach and Hamada Shoji arrived from Japan in the 1920s. Many potters from all over the world were apprenticed at the Leach Pottery (which exists today in St Ives and is also now a museum), and spread Leach’s style and beliefs. At the outbreak of war in 1939 Nicholson (then the centre of the London based British avant-garde movement) returned with his wife, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, followed by their friend Russian Constructivist pioneer Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam. To quote the history pages of the St Ives Society of Artists:

…Soon Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, eastern philosophy, true naïveté and the English marine tradition were being discussed behind the blackout curtains of the town. The place was a hotbed of creativity and its importance grew…

Post-war, the artists’ community expanded, and changed. The names we now remember from the mid-century years include Sven Berlin, Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, John Wells, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost and many others. A good insight of what life was like there is given in the entertaining autobiographical notes of Irish artist Breon O’Casey, son of playwright Sean O’Casey:

…One day, watching television, sometime in the late fifties, I saw a film about Alfred Wallis, a primitive painter who had lived at St Ives in Cornwall. The film showed St Ives and the studios of some of the artists living there. I realised it was the place for me… Ah St Ives! In those days still a working fishing port, with tourism and art only tolerated, but kindly tolerated. The relief of mingling with other crazy artists was enormous. It was literally as if a great weight was lifted from my shoulders. This is exactly how it felt. One must remember the strong antagonism to modern art then, and the nervous energy used up resisting it… One was with a group of people who were hoping to make a living from their art and indeed some were professional artists. That times were hard mattered little. If no one has much money it doesn’t matter. And I certainly never experienced the depths of poverty and the necessary determination to survive it, that my father had experienced. Nor indeed did I face the privations that, as one reads, Matisse faced, never mind those suffered by the true early warriors, Van Gogh and Gauguin… My studio was in a ramshackle, wooden structure tucked in behind other similar studios facing out over Porthmeor beach to the wide Atlantic. I slept in a curtained off alcove at one end – illegally – and in the winter the thud of the great waves would shake the whole crazy structure like a dog shaking a rat. It was kept standing by the law of inertia which says: if an object has been in one place for a number of years, it will resist, of itself, natural physical forces trying to move it…

Breon O’Casey in 2009: he died in Cornwall in 2011. Right – O’Casey’s Trio

Peter Lanyon was one of the most influential artists in the St Ives School during his working life. He was a native of the town – born in The Red House, Bellyars, St Ives in 1918. Both his parents came from families who were connected with mining. Lanyon was a teacher and an artist. Irish artist Tony O’Malley (1913 – 2003) received his only formal art education from Peter Lanyon and, after Lanyon’s death in 1964, O’Malley dedicated all his work to his friend and mentor. Irish sculptor Conor Fallon (1939 – 2007), a friend of O’Malley and O’Casey, was also inspired by Peter Lanyon’s work and spent some years in St Ives before moving back to Kinsale. Lanyon claimed that he sought in his work to ‘get under the skin’ of his native county and explored it by going underground in the mines and flying over it in a glider. Lanyon died as a result of a gliding accident; the work of one of his sons – the late Matthew Lanyon – will feature in the West meets West exhibition in June this year.

Top: Bojewyan Farms by Peter Lanyon (courtesy Sheila Lanyon). Lower: Lanyon, left, in 1961 – photo by Ida Kar; Irish artists Tony O’Malley (centre) and Conor Fallon (right)

This post is a necessarily brief historical summary of the St Ives artists and their influences on the annals of art in the islands of Britain and Ireland. Many important names have been omitted. But we cannot leave the subject without mentioning Sven Berlin – and coming back to the Zorse!

‘The Dark Monarch’ – a fictionalised novel by Sven Berlin that characterised and defamed many of his fellow artists in the St Ives colony – they drummed him out of town! Right – Juanita Casey, Berlin’s second wife (photo Dolmen Press)

Sven Berlin (1911 – 1999) was a colourful and controversial addition to the St Ives group. Born in London, he came to Cornwall in 1938, meeting with Nicholson and Hepworth and writing the first book on the life of naïve artist Alfred Wallis. While there he met Juanita (1925 – 2012), who was named by her uncle after his favourite circus lion. Her mother, an Irish Traveller, had died in childbirth and her father, an English Romany, had given her up for adoption. She joined a circus at the age of 13, beginning a lifelong obsession with horses. She was a writer, artist and poet and – later – a horse breeder and circus trainer. She spent some years working on boats in Penzance and exhibiting paintings in the Newlyn Gallery, and there she became involved with Sven Berlin; they married in 1953. Soon after, Sven was ostracised from St Ives and they travelled in their Romany caravan to the New Forest and lived for a while in the Shave Green Gypsy community.

Sven Berlin in St Ives, left, and with Juanita and their family in their Gypsy wagon

The marriage broke up when Juanita met and eloped with a groom, Fergus Casey. While with him she trained and rode zebras and embarked on her project to produce the Zorse – apparently unsuccessful.  Her lifestyle was forever Bohemian. Her obituary in the Independent newspaper observes:

…Casey wrote that her children looked upon her “the way steam enthusiasts admire a hissing antique boiler.” Often, she would be the first to admit, her creativity and spontaneity took over from her domestic duties and responsibilities…

Fergus, a journalist, was drowned in Galway and Juanita, with her daughter, Sheba, continued to travel – firstly to Sneem in Co Kerry, and then to Okehampton in Devon, England where she once again joined the circus, as a horsemaster. I met her in Okehampton when she was in her eighties, and was fascinated to listen to many of her incredible stories – although while telling them she was always keeping half an eye on her television set in the corner, which was always on and always tuned in to the horse racing channels!

Below, Juanita Casey, living in Okehampton, Devon, in her eighties and an illustration from her novel  The Selene Horse

Don’t forget! West meets West – the work of contemporary Cornish artists, at Uillinn, Skibbereen, from 3 June to 8 July