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Una goes national – twice

The Red Bridge (1956)

Hot on the heels of acquiring through donation three Una Watters’ paintings, the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) has hung two of the works in Room 15. The Red Bridge, above and Isabella, below, are two of the three paintings recently donated and they now hang side by side.

For the time being, Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain, (1959), which has been on display since 2023 in the same room and become a firm favourite with gallery patrons, has been removed to facilitate the new arrivals. A temporary situation, we hope.

Having four of Una’s works in the national collection, and two on display, is a situation we couldn’t have dreamed about when we started our quest to rehabilitate Una’s reputation way back in 2020.

It means the public has a chance to see the range and versatility of Una’s talent. The Red Bridge (1956) highlights her Cubist-influenced rendering of landscape, featuring the River Suck in Ballinasloe, Co Galway, where Una and husband Eugene spent their summers. The town and surroundings often featured in her work.

Isabella (1956)

Isabella (also 1956) is a portrait of Eugene’s sister, Isa, and shows another string to Una’s bow – portraiture. There are several portraits among her paintings – one of her husband, featured in her retrospective 2022 show, which, those who knew him say, captures his personality exactly.

Self-Portrait in Green (1943)

There’s also a striking self-portrait which we used for the poster of the 2022 retrospective – an intense work which commands the viewer’s attention with its candour. As a view of the sitter’s back, Isabella may be less forthright, but it manages to create a intriguing sense of mystery.

The last of the trio of paintings donated, Harvest (1965) – a very late work – is not on the walls of the NGI yet, but there are plans to show all of Una’s works together some time in 2027. In the meantime, if you want to see Una in duplicate, now’s the time to visit!

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Three more Unas bound for the National Gallery

Isabella, (1956)
Harvest, (1965)
The Red Bridge (1956)

Exciting news to report! The best yet! The National Gallery of Ireland has acquired three – yes three! – more of Una Watters’ paintings to add to the national collection. They will join Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain, which has been hanging in Room 15, and garnering lots of public interest, since it was donated in 2023.

The works, which have been donated to the gallery,  are all oils – Isabella (1956), Harvest (1965) and The Red Bridge (1956).

These are all premier works (well, that could be said of all Una’s work, really) showing her at the height of her painterly powers. They also demonstrate her versatility of form – portrait, narrative painting and landscape.

The donations once again highlight the generosity of the paintings’ owners – a generosity that was so often on offer when Sheila Smith, Una’s niece, and I first got together to organise “Into the Light”, the 2022 retrospective exhibition which started the ball rolling on this project.

Our campaign got going in earnest during Covid as we trawled the country – albeit remotely – trying to trace Una’s work. We ran appeals through the Irish Times, as well as RTE television and radio in our quest to find her lost paintings and to alert the public to a painter whose reputation had been totally eclipsed. In truth, we saw no further than that. We never dreamed that one day four of Una’s works would be part of the national collection

But due to the largesse of the owners of Una’s paintings, who not only gave us work but often drove to the United Arts Club in Dublin to deliver the paintings in person, that show helped to put Una on the artistic map.

It was their faith in Sheila and me – two amateurs in the art world – and their dedicated enthusiasm for Una’s work that made the 2022 show possible. And it’s exactly the same spirit that has now elevated Una Watters to what we’ve always considered her rightful place – a nationally recognised painter of note. To them, to the United Arts Club and in particular, Brid Tunney who facilitated the 2022 show, and to all the supporters and followers of this website, a big thank you.

There are plans to show the new works some time in 2027. In that regard, I no longer have to say watch this space. Watch the National Gallery instead!

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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.