OF ALL AREAS of the visual arts in twentieth-century Ireland, it is in the field of stained glass that the country acquired a reputation for artistic excellence and superb craftsmanship.
Windows from An Túr Gloine (the Tower of Glass), Harry Clarke’s studio, Earley & Company, among other studios, were highly prized, often ordered by the Irish diaspora, both those in religious life and laity and can be found on all continents.
The Irish stained glass revival had its origins in County Galway on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Edward Martyn, landlord, playwright and generous philanthropist, decided to erect a memorial stained glass window to his mother in their parish church at Labane, Ardrahan, not far from Loughrea.
Disappointed by the standard of stained glass being produced in Ireland and eager to avoid importing from abroad, he set about establishing stained glass classes, to be taught in the Arts and Crafts tradition, at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (now NCAD). His initiative was ably abetted by his friend the celebrated portrait painter, Sarah Purser, who quickly took principal responsibility and set up a new stained glass studio named An Túr Gloine which opened in January 1903 and where graduates of the School’s stained glass classes would be employed.
In order for An Túr Gloine to be a success the studio needed immediate patrons and Edward Martyn did not hesitate to draw upon his Loughrea connections; as a generous benefactor to the Catholic Church, he was on excellent terms with his local bishop, Dr Healy, Bishop of Clonfert, who was then giving consideration to the embellishment of his newly constructed cathedral.
Dr Healy, who like Martyn was also a supporter of home industry, was assisted by the cathedral’s dynamic administrator, Fr Jeremiah O’Donovan (who later left the Church and wrote novels under the name Gerald O’Donovan). With a timely financial bequest from a local woman who had emigrated to the USA, the first window was ordered for the cathedral; located in the sanctuary, it depicts The Annunciation.
An Túr Gloine’s first recruit was Michael Healy (1873–1941) and it is recorded that he worked on Loughrea’s The Annunciation under the supervision of A.E. Child, the London-born stained glass artist who was both instructor of the craft at the School of Art and manager at An Túr Gloine. For Healy, his painting of an angel in The Annunciation was the beginning of a creative association with the cathedral that continued for almost four decades, concluding with one of his masterpieces the year before he died.
Michael Healy was born to an impoverished family in a tenement flat at 40 Bishop Street, Dublin, not far from where Jacob’s Factory was located, and he seems to have been both creative and solitary from a young age. The family moved about quite a bit, from one tenement flat to another, though never moving far from Bishop Street or Bride Street. A devout Catholic he had tried to become a Dominican lay brother at the order’s seminary in Tallaght, then a rural location some distance from the city, but life as a lay brother proved incompatible with his desire to be visually creative so after some months he departed. However, the intervention of a kindly and supportive Dominican priest, Fr Henry Glendon, allowed Healy to study in the galleries of Florence for 18 months while undertaking illustration work for Fr Glendon’s publication, The Irish Rosary, and his time in Italy proved to be a transformative experience.
On his return he was recommended to Sarah Purser for her fledgling stained glass studio due to his drawing prowess – skilled draughtsmanship being essential to work in the medium.
Michael Healy’s first solo window – conceived, designed and entirely made by him – came in 1904. St Simeon was designed for Loughrea’s baptistry and Healy’s ability to convey character into the aged saint’s face is remarkable for a novice artist in the craft. Noteworthy is the translation of the word ‘saint’ into Irish and its treatment in Celtic-style lettering, a reminder that the stained glass being created at An Túr Gloine was part of the wider Celtic Revival movement as well as adhering to the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement. St Simeon, along with two other windows made for Loughrea’s baptistry, were sent on exhibition to the St Louis World Fair before being installed in 1906.
Flanking Loughrea’s sanctuary are two side altars, both of which feature rose windows and in 1906 the first of them was entrusted to Healy. It depicts the Virgin Mary staring directly at the viewer with the Christ Child on her lap, and in the periphery are six Irish saints. The second rose window, made in 1907, features Mary in a different guise, one of familial domesticity as she carefully tends to some needlework under the watchful gaze of the young Jesus and St Joseph.
Edward Martyn’s relatives on his mother’s side, the self-made Smyth family of Masonbrook, Loughrea, proved to be staunch supporters of An Túr Gloine and over three generations commissioned several memorial windows for Loughrea Cathedral. The first window which Healy undertook for the Smyths was a single light depicting a youthful St Anthony of Padua; a fine window but one that does not prepare the viewer for the remarkable windows by Michael Healy which were to follow. By now, 1908, Healy’s star was on the ascent and he was proving to be the most talented member of the studio. Two years later he designed and painted a magnificent 5-light window for Letterkenny Cathedral on the theme of the Convention of Drumceat with St Colmcille centre stage among a multitude of clerics, bards, kings and princes.
By 1912 it seemed like the commitment to filling Loughrea Cathedral with the finest of Irish stained glass had come to an end; two successive bishops commissioned no windows and likewise there were no orders from the generous Smyth family. It may have been that priorities lay elsewhere and of course the First World War disrupted everything.
In the mid 1920s Healy was asked to undertake memorial window for a member of the Smyth family, nineteen year old John Smyth III, who had died in Dublin of pneumonia. A striking and youthful St John, robed in ruby and emerald glass, gazes ahead accompanied by his traditional evangelical symbol of the eagle, fashioned from burnished gold. In the predella (base) panel below, Healy depicts St John in old age, kneeling at his desk and absorbed in a holy book – perhaps his Gospel – when to his astonishment Christ appears before him.
In 1929, with the windows in the cathedral’s north wall almost all filled with stained glass, attention moved to the south wall and Healy was tasked with creating a single-light window celebrating Christ the King to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bishop John Dignan’s priesthood.
Healy’s representation of Christ as an austere figure, similar to a slightly earlier window for the Catholic Church at Warrenpoint, shows the influence of Byzantine art and mosaics.
In Christ the King Michael Healy employed a technique called aciding, one that was also favoured by his contemporary Harry Clarke. The artists used hydrofluoric acid to etch away a thin layer of colour on the surface of a piece of clear glass or flashed glass as it is known. This allowed for subtle tones and shades to be introduced, and where etched through completely, pinpricks of daylight could penetrate, and as the clouds and general weather conditions changed, windows which had been acided in this manner come to life and sparkle in an almost magical manner and give them a jewel-like appearance.
A few years later Healy was commissioned to make a companion window to Christ the King, and this one would celebrate Our Lady in her role as Our Lady Queen of Heaven. It was commissioned by Bishop Tief in Kansas, the descendent of Irish emigrants. Again Healy employed the aciding technique but more extensively, and technically he brought it a stage further where he sandwiched, or plated, two pieces of acided glass – one ruby and one blue – together, carefully registered, so that not only would the artist achieve shades of red and blue but a myriad shades of mauves, violets and purples. The outcome is stunning. The serene face of Our Lady was almost certainly influenced by the medieval Kilcorban Madonna, a local sculpture which had been used in a procession at the 1932 International Eucharist Congress in Dublin that Bishop Tief had attended.
Two years later, in 1935, Healy was commissioned to create another window for the cathedral’s south wall, this time paid for by a New Jersey-based parish priest, Fr Frederick Mitchell, who was a native of Loughrea. Whereas Christ the King and Our Lady Queen of Heaven both have a detached icon-like quality, this window depicting St Joseph with the young Jesus is full of empathy and harks back to his rose window of 1906 depicting the Holy Family. In his new window, an elderly and ashen-faced St Joseph looks on as Jesus, full of wide-eyed innocence, presents him with a butterfly, a symbol of the resurrection. St Joseph’s expression is one of immense sadness, knowing that death by crucifixion is the destiny of his son.
For the predella panel at the bottom of the window, Healy chose the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, a scene he had depicted previously in other windows. The vignette is set at night time and St Joseph has made a little fire and holds a lantern so that Our Lady can tend to the infant Jesus, and in the background the donkey grazes; it’s a gentle, tranquil scene.
By now Michael Healy was in his early sixties and Loughrea Cathedral had only two significant windows yet to be filled with stained glass – these were the pair of large three-light windows, positioned side by side, in the south transept above the confessionals, and in 1935 he was asked to create a window depicting The Ascension for the left hand opening. The Ascension allowed Healy to treat a theme that combined his interest in juxtaposing the real with the transcendent. As the apostles and Our Lady gather below, kneeling in prayerful adoration, the figure of Jesus is surrounded by a mandorla and accompanied by phalanxes of angles appear to levitate heavenwards.
Again Healy has introduced extensive aciding and plating so that the entire window shimmers and sparkles.
The Ascension was completed in 1936, and it was time to move on to its companion window, his final one for the cathedral; fittingly it depicts The Last Judgement. The subject of The Last Judgement, popular in medieval and renaissance art, is one that was less frequently treated in the twentieth century, though it is worth noting that Harry Clarke’s final window, made for the Catholic Church in Newport, County Mayo, also treats this dramatic theme.
Healy’s The Last Judgement has the figure of Christ in the upper part of the centre light, but it is the lower third of all three light that demands the viewer’s immediate attention: it features an incredible sea of faces and hands which is separated, good from bad by a powerful thrusting column of energy. The contrast between the two groups of faces, which number fifty in all, is very striking – the contorted faces of the damned, their eyes bulging, mouths screaming, and knuckles clenched in sheer terror are like buoys in a storm as they are thrown about in the grip of a violent crimson and purple sea.
By comparison, the expressions of the saved convey the essence of inner peace and tranquillity, their hands joined in prayerful thanksgiving. Although only their faces and hands are visible, they appear to be floating on their backs in a sea of sparkling clear water. Completed a year before Healy’s death, The Last Judgement can be viewed as among the high points of Michael Healy’s achievements and is the jewel in the crown of Loughrea Cathedral’s remarkable collection of Irish stained glass.
Michael Healy, 1873-1941: An Túr Gloine’s stained glass pioneer by David Caron is now available (Published by Four Courts Press).
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