Martyn, Whall, Child, and the Founding of An Túr Gloine
In order to correct the problems he identified with the art of stained glass, Martyn contacted Christopher Whall (1849-1924) ‘the undisputed leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement in stained glass in England’ inviting him to assist in setting up a stained glass department in the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Whall at that time was designing a twelve-light window for the Southwest Transept of Canterbury Cathedral and was unable to leave his business interests and his teaching in the London School of Art. Instead he sent his pupil and leading craftsman, A. E. Child (1875-1939), who was appointed as master of the Department of Stained Glass at the DMSA in September 1901. In the same year Martyn persuaded and part-funded Sarah Purser (1849-1943) in setting up ‘An Túr Gloine’. She was a successful artist in both the Royal London and the Royal Hibernian Academies where she exhibited with Walter Osbourne, John Butler Yeats and Nathaniel Hone. Her studio was based in Harcourt Terrace in Dublin, but larger premises were required to establish a new stained glass workshop on the same site. This was finally achieved in January 1903, with the help of a bank loan and investments from both Purser and Martyn. An Túr Gloine led by Sarah Purser and managed by A. E. Child embraced the arts and crafts principle that each piece of art, in this instance each stained glass window, should be ‘the work of one artist who makes the sketch and cartoon and selects and paints every morsel of glass him or herself’.
Stained Glass Studios in Dublin and the Establishment of Earley & Co.
With the foundation of An Túr Gloine, there were now three significant stained glass studios in Dublin in the early 1900s, Earley’s, Joshua Clarke’s, and Purser’s co-operative. In direct competition, John Bishop Earley and William Earley established Earley & Co. in February 1903 and were featured in The Irish Builder which provided a photographic supplement showing the St. Audeon’s Church window accompanied by a review full of praise for this new phase of Earley Studios.
The Irish Arts and Crafts Society and the Ideal of the Artist Craftsman
The Irish Arts and Crafts Society was founded in Ireland in 1894 some forty years after Earley & Powell had started trading but it did not draw widespread critical attention until its 1910 exhibition in Dublin. Although Ireland had avoided the explosion of mechanised factory work that had occurred in England, the celebration of the individual artist craftsman who was free from ‘brutalised labour’ became the ideal of the society and was popularised by its president, Lord Mayo. Morris & Co. is perceived as an example of a business which followed the Arts and Crafts principles as accepted by Sarah Purser of An Túr Gloine but her credo quoted above was so extreme that it would have excluded all work from Morris & Co. and from Clarke’s and Earley’s studios. It was far removed from the reality of running a busy studio with many commissions waiting to be fulfilled and her own studio was not immune to the delegation of the work to employees other than the artist.
Arts and Crafts Society Exhibitions and Earley Studios’ Absence
The Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland held seven significant exhibitions, these being in 1895, 1899, 1904, 1910, 1917, 1921, and 1925. The fifth exhibition, held in 1917, was reviewed in The Studio by Oswald Reeves, a past pupil of the DMSA, who commented that Harry Clarke’s multiple exhibits in several media had ‘gone further in achievement than any of his fellows’. The Society continued under the guidance of Reeve but many of the previous exhibitors had either met an untimely death (Clarke and Geddes) or had become too busy fulfilling commissions to provide work for an exhibition. There is no record of any of the Earleys submitting works to the Society.
Critical Opinions on Irish Stained Glass in Historical Treatises
The opinions of Elliott, Martyn, and Moore became the mainstay of many subsequent viewpoints given in historical treatises on Irish stained glass of the first half of the twentieth century. Martyn’s condemnations of Irish stained glass are quoted in Bowe’s Harry Clarke- The Life and Work (2012), and Ann Wilson in Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State (2014) builds her arguments against the quality of Irish stained glass from the 1860s up to the Honan Chapel windows of 1917 mainly upon Martyn and Elliott’s writings. Mairin Allen (1912-1988), a lecturer in the history of art at the National College of Art, Dublin, wrote in ‘Church Art’ in the Irish Art Handbook (1943): To a people, fired by the ideals of a monastic state, art may well have been an integral part of public worship. Is it not strange, then, that in a country still professedly Christian we have not, in this twentieth century, a living native art expressive of the theocentric. In this publication, she gives praise only to principles popularised by Martyn and Purser forty years earlier and ignores or dismisses stained glass from studios other than An Tur Gloine or the Harry Clarke studios.
John Turpin’s Views and the “Orthodox Narrative”
John Turpin in the Dublin Historical Record (1985) agrees with the above views stating that: ‘The stained glass that was available to churches around 1900 was of a very low standard-both Irish made or the more usual foreign variety chiefly from Mayer of Munich’. However, Turpin moderated his opinions and, in a journal article ‘Modernism, Tradition and Debates on Religious Art in Ireland’ (2002), drew attention to Allen’s lack of giving credit ‘to the fine decorative art provided by Victorian art industries linked to the Gothic Revival, such as Minton tiles and Hardman glass’ and refers to her interpretation of the era as being ‘the orthodox narrative’. Turpin presses home the point that church art with religious themes ‘have received scant scholarly attention’ and that a ‘preoccupation with Modernist theory by commentators on modern art in Ireland has, by definition, excluded most of the religious art created’.
Perception of Earley & Co. and its Studio Practices
In the climate created by some of the above views, Earley & Co. who produced large-scale and multiple works on a regular basis, may therefore have been perceived as being more industrialised and of less artistic worth than other Irish studios. This may have been compounded by the perception that Earleys followed their origins as a branch of the Hardman studios in Birmingham, England, which had a large studio with multiple cartoonists following Pugin’s and John Hardman Powell’s designs. However, by the late 1880s all cartoons were by John Bishop Earley and after 1903 there were seldom more than two designers and two cartoonists, John Bishop Earley and William Earley, the latter being the sole designer and cartoonist for the twenty years from 1920. This was far closer to the Arts and Crafts ideal espoused by Christopher Whall, A.E.Child, and the Tur Gloine Studio where the designer/artist was involved with every part of the fabrication process of the stained glass window.
Earley & Co.’s Approach: Devotional Art in Arts and Crafts Style
Earley & Co. aimed to produce devotional stained glass made from high quality materials with accomplished naturalistic draughtsmanship of a traditional nature. They saw no conflict with the aesthetics and principles of the Arts and Crafts movement and would have viewed their house style as being an excellent example of religious art expressed in antique glass designed by artists and fabricated under their close supervision. This final 1930 example from the Mercy International Centre in Baggot Street in Dublin incorporates all that is best in the Arts and Crafts style in Ireland.
¹³ E. Martyn (1906): ‘Preface’: In: R. Elliott: Art and Ireland: Dublin, Sealy, Bryers & Walker. p. v-x.
¹⁴ M. Harrison (1980): Victorian Stained Glass: UK, Barrie & Jenkins: pp.68-69.
¹⁵ N. G. Bowe (2012): Harry Clarke-The Life and Work: Ireland, The History Press: p.39.
¹⁶ J. O’Grady (1996): The Life and Work of Sarah Purser: Dublin, Four Courts Press: pp.70-92.
¹⁷ N. G. Bowe, D. Caron and M. Wynne (2021): Gazetteer of Stained Glass: Newbridge, Irish Academic Press: p.36.
¹⁸ V. Kreilkamp (2016): ‘Introduction’: In: V. Kreilkamp (ed.): The Arts and Crafts Movement-Making it Irish: ,USA, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, University of Chicago Press: pp.9-26.
¹⁹ J. O’Grady (1996): Sarah Purser: Dublin, Four Courts Press.
²⁰ P. O. Reeves (1917): ‘Irish Arts and Crafts’: The Studio, Vol. 72, No.275, 15th October 1917, pp.15-22.
²¹ N. G. Bowe (1985): ‘The Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland (1895-1925) with special reference to Harry Clarke’: The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850-the present:No.9, p.29-40.
²² N. G. Bowe (2012): Harry Clarke-The Life and Work: Ireland, The History Press: p.39. and A. Wilson (2014): ‘Harry Clarke: The Honan Chapel Windows (1915-1917)’: In: Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State: Dublin, Irish Academic Press: pp.19-46.
²³ M. Allen (1943): ‘Church Art’: Irish Art Handbook: Dublin, Cahill and Company.
²⁴ J. Turpin (1985): ‘The Metropolitan School of Art, 1900-1923: (Part 2)’, Dublin Historical Record, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Mar. 1985). pp.42-52.
²⁵ J. Turpin (2002): ‘Modernism, Tradition and Debates on Religious Art in Ireland 1920-1950’: Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Autumn, 2002, Vol. 91, No. 363.