This site documents the work of Dublin painter, illustrator and designer, Una Watters. It features a gallery of images of the extant work of an artist whose reputation, sadly, has fallen into neglect.
Born Una McDonnell in 1918 in north county Dublin, Una attended the National College of Art on the encouragement of Maurice McGonigal. She juggled classes with her day job as a librarian. One of her paintings, The Four Masters, still hangs in Phibsboro branch library where she worked; another, The People’s Gardens, is in the collection of Dublin City Gallery (Hugh Lane) but currently on loan to the Mansion House, Dublin.
Most of Una’s work was completed at an easel set up in the kitchen of the small cottage at Cappagh Cross in Finglas which she shared with her husband, the Irish language novelist and poet Eoghan Ó Tuairisc (Eugene Watters).
She exhibited frequently in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s alongside Louis le Brocquy, Sean O’Sullivan (who was her cousin), Harry Kernoff, William Leech and Muriel Brandt and featured in numerous Royal Hibernian Academy and Oireachtas shows.
Working in both oils and watercolour, she was eclectic in her range – rural landscapes, semi-naieve depictions of the new suburb of Finglas, religious subjects, and in her latter years paintings that moved towards cubism and abstraction.
She died suddenly at the age of 47 in November 1965.
In early 2022, we mounted a new retrospective of her work – Una Watters: Into the Light – at the United Arts Club in Dublin. A catalogue of this exhibition and her extant work is being prepared.
Meanwhile, on foot of the exhibition and subsequent publicity, and due to a generous donation, the National Gallery of Ireland acquired Una’s Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain in January 2023 and it now hangs in Room 15.https://www.nationalgallery.ie
But at least seven oil paintings that we know of, and many ore watercolours and sketches are out there waiting to be discovered. The search goes on.
Exhibition poster featuring Self-Portrait in Green (1943). Design by Kieran O’Connor.
Photographs of the 2022 exhibition: Dara McGrath.
Images appear by kind permission of the estate of Eugene Watters.
Mary Morrissy
Una Watters (1918-1965) 