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Una Watters’ work is ‘must-see’ art

The National Gallery of Ireland has asked their volunteers to share the paintings they tell visitors not to miss when exploring the gallery for the first time. This month, Gallery volunteer and novelist Catherine Crichton chose Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain, 1959, by Una Watters (1918-1965). 

What do you like about this artwork? Does it have any personal significance for you?

A woman in a green shirt stands in a gallery looking at a painting on the wall of a woman in red with an umbrella over her head

”This modernist picture with its cubist influences is a stylish and evocative image of a familiar location. In contrast to the dull, wet day and Trinity’s stone façade, the girl wears a vibrant ruby-red coat. Hunched against the weather, she looks ahead, gripping her orange umbrella determinedly in both hands. The rain slants down in parallel rods, distorting her outfit’s chic lines, the paving and building stones, and the upright railings. The picture demonstrates wonderful technical skill. The vivid green of Trinity’s front lawn seems to bounce up, reflected in the sheeting raindrops.

“In 1965 Una Watters died suddenly, aged just 47. Her husband gave her paintings to friends and relatives as keepsakes and they disappeared from view. Many have now been rediscovered thanks to the writer Mary Morrissy and the artist’s niece, Sheila Smith. Una Watters attended the same school I did, the Holy Faith in Glasnevin. I like to think she was a proud northsider.”

What do you enjoy about volunteering at the Gallery?

“I love the surprised, happy look on visitors’ faces when we tell them the Gallery has free admission. And when they ask an obscure question and I actually know the answer (not that I always do). The online art appreciation courses are a great way to learn more about the national collection.” 

Una Watters’ painting hangs in Room 15 of the NGI.

Catherine Crichton’s novel on the renowned Irish stained glass artist, Harry Clarke, The Window, will be published by Stairwell Books in 2027 – https://catherinecrichtonwrites.com/about/about-my-novel-the-geneva-window/

For more information on the gallery’s volunteer programme see – https://www.nationalgallery.ie/join-and-give/become-volunteer/volunteer-artwork-month

Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain, 1959. © Dr Rita Kelly/Watters. Photo, National Gallery of Ireland.

Photo of Catherine Crichton: Bríd O’Donovan

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Trinity girl is top of the pops

Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain is going viral. Pop legend CMAT has been spreading the word on Instagram of her passion for Una’s painting. In late December last year she took her admiration one step further when she roped in the British art historian and writer, Katy Hessel, into her Una Watters campaign.

Hessel is the author of several books, including the ground-breaking “The Story of Art without Men”, a revisionist illustrated history of female artistic endeavour, which was published to great acclaim in 2022. “Will change the history of art. . . thank God,” artist Tracy Emin wrote of it.

Guesting on Katy Hessel’s blog, “Great Women Artists”, CMAT wrote about Una’s Trinity Girl. “I immediately became obsessed with it, without knowing anything about her (Una) at all. I just thought I knew the girl in the painting, and that she looked like me, and brought me back so clearly to what it was like when I lived there and was hopeful and traipsed around the city on foot, despite everything. . . Then I found out. . . that she lived in Finglas and died young.”

“I wish we knew more about her but right now it’s my favourite painting in maybe the whole world. I made my love take a picture of me with it last week when I brought him to see it as I’ve talked about it so much.”

Hessel duly took up the cudgels on Una’s behalf to highlight the work of Irish women artists. – https://katyhessel.substack.com/p/6-irish-women-artists-to-know. She includes Una in her shortlist, along with Mainie Jellet, Margaret Clarke, Mary Swanzy, Genieve Figgis and Dorothy Cross.

Una has found another fan in Hessel: “It’s no wonder CMAT loves Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain. It’s an incredible energetic, modernist take on a Dublin downpour. I love how the pouring rain – a shape so impossible to freeze in an image – becomes shards of fractured glass. It’s like she’s evoking the physicality of hailstones in a painting that already evokes so many senses. I also love the glamour of this Dublin girl, striding out on her own: her red coat, smart shoes, high-up ponytail, striking eyes and pink cheeks,” she writes.

“Watters’ story is a reminder of how easily the work of artists can be lost and how thrilling it is to bring them back into the light.”

Meanwhile, Una’s Trinity Girl also features as “Work of the Week” in today’s Sunday’s Business Post (15/03/26), as chosen by Michelle Cullen, a director at Accenture in Ireland, the global technology company, who describes Una’s work as “an utterly captivating piece”.

“The painting makes me think about journeys, physical and symbolic; about those who are displaced or navigating spaces where they are admitted, but may not feel welcome or at ease. The relentless rain mirrors that experience.”

The problem of female exclusion is a passion project for Cullen – she heads up the Accenture’s diversity programme and is a co founder of Women on the Walls, a project dedicated to commissioning portraits of women of note to be shown in public spaces. https://www.accenture.com/ie-en/about/inclusion-diversity/women-on-walls.

Working in partnership with the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin City University and most recently at UCC, the company has sponsored numerous paintings by Irish artists that celebrate women leaders in the fields of science, arts and social engagement. Cullen also serves on the board of the National Gallery of Ireland, where Una’s painting now hangs as part of the national collection, thanks to the efforts of this website and its followers.

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Una in print

An under-considered facet of Una Watters’ work has been her illustrative and graphics work. We’ve seen elsewhere on this blog – https://unawattersartist.com/2023/02/18/unas-little-book-of-kells/ – that she did a great deal of commissioned art and calligraphic work for Brian O’Higgins’s publishing company, which produced Christmas cards and religious booklets for the commercial market. But she also did magazine illustration, most prominently with the Irish-language journal, Feasta.

Feasta was published monthly between 1948 and 2023 by Conradh na Gaeilge and became one of most significant literary magazines published in the Irish language. Una Watters became a regular contributor to Feasta after her husband, Eugene (writing as Eoghan Ó Tuairisc) took over the editorship of the journal in 1963.

Her work for Feasta has been documented in an important article by broadcaster and Irish scholar Mícheál Ó hUanacháin, in the August issue of Comhar – https://comhar.ie/iris/85/8/dearadh-agus-maisiu/. Ó hUanacháin was heavily involved in the production of Feasta and saw Una’s work for the magazine at first-hand.

Because the article is in Irish, I will have to paraphrase the content and hope Mícheál will forgive me.

Eugene took over the editorship of Feasta in the summer of 1963. According to Ó hUanacháin, Eugene felt the magazine had a somewhat stale air with a narrow range of subject matter. He wanted to change all that. He immediately set to, rebranding it as a review “of literature, art, politics and Irish thought”. In keeping with this new motto, he also wanted to renew the appearance of the magazine. That was where Una came in.

Una’s first cover for Feasta appeared for the 1963 Christmas edition – An Sagart agus an Amharclann – about the influence of the clergy on the theatre. As well as the cover, her work was evident all over the Christmas 1963 edition – there was a card she’d designed for the O’Higgins company, a collage of portraits of actors in an Irish language production of “Roots”, a drama by English playwright Arnold Wesker at the Damer theatre, and a visual for a column on chess.

Between then and October 1965, Una completed 16 covers for the magazine. The subject matters varied widely – Jackie Kennedy, the singer Dusty Springfield, W B Yeats and T S Eliot, Roger Casement – as well as many incidental illustrations – graphics for a drama column, sketches of classical composers, and typographic symbols which were used as article dividers. She was an integral part of Eugene’s vision for and reshaping of the magazine as a lively publication engaged with cultural and current affairs.

Unfortunately, as Ó hUanacháin remarks, with Una’s death, that vision was halted in its tracks. Eugene gave up his editorship of the magazine, replaced temporarily by Ó hUanacháin himself. However, Una’s work lived on. For many years afterwards, her incidental graphics were still gracing the pages of Feasta.

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Double take

On a recent visit to Australia, I rounded a corner in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and was stopped in my tracks by this work. Could an Una Watters’ landscape have possibly found its way into one of Australia’s premier galleries without my knowing?

Well. . . no.

This is Gum Trees dated to 1933-35, by Dorrit Black (1891 – 1951), oil on canvas (42.0 x 59.8 cms), but it is so redolent of Una’s landscape work – the cubist influences, the undulating foreground, the stark geometry of the trees, the very deep recession of the work – that it could have been made by Una in another life. The techniques are similar to those in Wild Apples or The Pine Wood and the colour tones are reminiscent of the recently discovered To the Sea.

Clockwise: The Pine Wood, To the Sea, Wild Apples – Una Watters

Black had a huge impact on the development of modern art in Australia, according to Paul Finucane and Catherine Stuart in their beautiful and exhaustive compendium of Australian women artists – Odd Roads to be Walking: 156 Women who Shaped Australian Art – (Sheila Foundation Press.) She paid several visits to Europe in the 1920s and 30s and studied under André Lhote, the French painter, art critic and teacher who combined Cubism with a post-Impressionist palette. As a mentor he would influence a whole generation of late 19th/early 20th century Irish artists, who attended his studio classes, in Paris and in the south of France. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine his influence indirectly on Una Watters, a generation later.

Ironically, one of the artists I was seeking out while in Australia was the tonalist painter Clarice Beckett (1887 – 1935) whose biography has echoes of Una Watters’ story, but on a larger and more heartbreaking scale. She died young (Beckett was 48) after which her work vanished from view and her artistic legacy disappeared with it. She was rediscovered by chance in the late 1960s by art curator Rosalind Hollinrake, who managed to trace a staggering 1600 of her canvases to a remote, open-sided shed in rural Victoria where they had been left to rot. Only 369 were salvageable; the rest were beyond repair.

The Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide now owns 21 of her works, all on view and part of Dr Hollinrake’s personal collection. It represents the largest single assemblage of Becketts in Australia, though her work also appears in state collections in Sydney and Melbourne. So a really satisfying end to a sad story of neglect.

Wet Evening ( 1927) – Clarice Beckett

While in Australia, I gave a talk on Una’s work to the Aisling Club, an association of ex-pats and enthusiasts of Irish culture and history, who meet in the spectacular 26th floor premises of the Irish Consulate on Market Street, Sydney.

So, I’ve been busy spreading the word. And who knows? If Una Watters’ work has made its way Down Under, there’s no excuse for anyone in that Sydney audience not to recognise an Una now if they see one!

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Wheels within wheels

It’s always a triumph when a lost Una Watters comes to light. It’s a red-letter occasion when two are unearthed in the same week. As an indirect result of my recent talk in Ballinasloe about Una’s Galway-inspired work, an owner of one of her untraced oils from the 1966 posthumous exhibition has come forward.

With the help of Eugene Watters’ niece, Georgina O’Donovan, we’ve identified the new find as To the Sea (oil on canvas, 43.1 x 54.6 cms) dated to 1962. It depicts a couple on bicycles, viewed from the back, as they cycle towards the sea, their swimming gear rolled up in towels on the back carriers.

I presumed, at first, this was a Galway scene, but on further investigation, it seems this is an east coast painting, more specifically, we think, Laytown, Co Meath. Una’s naming of paintings is always a help in this regard, being plain and informative. To the Sea suggests proximity; cycling to the sea from Ballinasloe would have been quite a trip.

The bridges in the background also led me to believe it might have been Ballinasloe and its environs. (Una had a weakness for bridges) There seems to be several bridges in evidence here – a railway bridge, an iron footbridge, and on the left a stone arch. The railway bridge could be the Laytown Viaduct and the stone arch could belong to the Boyne Valley Viaduct. Geographically, these might not be visible in the same frame but Una often used this composite approach to her cityscapes – see my earlier blog on City Bridge – https://unawattersartist.com/2020/06/09/the-bridge-of-time/ – where several stone landmarks of Dublin are impressionistically viewed together, jigsaw-like, on the same plane.

The horizon of the painting is quite high – note the perspective of the road winding away behind the bridge, and the sea – typical of an uncertain Irish summer – is the opaque grey expanse at eye-level for the figures. A steamer puffing smoke ploughs away on the high horizon mark above the male cyclist’s head.

Una would have known this area very well from holidays there as a child and Georgina O’Donovan remembers her parents and Eugene and Una taking several cycling holidays together. “There is an innocence about it all,” she says about this painting. “The couple holding hands, the swimming gear on the carriers and the possibility of catching that boat to new lands and adventures.”  

Georgina has identified her father, Tom Watters, (Eugene’s brother) as the model for the man in the painting – see Tom Watters also in Wild Apples – see https://unawattersartist.com/2020/06/24/wild-apples/ and The Game of Chess. https://unawattersartist.com/2021/04/10/a-game-of-chess/

Una often depicted herself in her work as a dark woman in red, so this blonde woman in her sunny yellow dress is definitely not her. However, Georgina believes she bears a passing likeness to the mother of the painting’s present owner, who was gifted To the Sea after Una’s death.

In this work Una’s interest is also in the dynamic movement of the bicycles. The whir of the wheels, the tensing of the woman’s calves, the folds of her dress are depicted in strong physical strokes so speed and movement are made manifest on the canvas. This dynamism is mirrored in the foreground of the painting. The vegetation looks turbulent, tossed-looking, and the very ground underfoot unstable.

Una’s rendering of physical gestures often hints at emotional drama. The woman’s back is to us so she remains mysterious, but we see the man sketchily in profile as he holds her hand and turns to her. A beam of weak misted light from an unseen source grazes her shoulder, but it mirrors the slant of his gaze. She’s cycling in a straight line, but the front wheel of his bike is not evident, merely suggested by a series of veering circles. The implication is he’s having a slight wobble. Is he about to fall in more ways than one?

The second find is a watercolour, untitled, showing Ballyforan Bridge near Ballinasloe, which was completed in 1953. This was a favoured picnic site for the Watters family and a meeting point for fishing expeditions in the summer consisting of Eugene, Una, his brother Tom and wife Bridie, and their children. The watercolour is delicate in its rendering, serene in its mood showing the glassy River Suck on a still, mauve summer’s evening, while a man driving a hay cart is seen crossing the bridge. The arches of the bridge (bridges, again!) and the spindly trees either side are echoed in the water giving a shimmering, ethereal feel the work.