Tag: girl going by trinity in the rain

Categories
News

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

Categories
News

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.

Categories
News

For your diary

After the flurry of the presentation of Una’s Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain to the national collection by Colbert Kearney in 2023, things have been quiet on the Una Watters front.

However, this year will see more activity. It’s an anniversary year – 60 years on from her death in 1965 – and hopefully that may see an upswing in Una Watters-related activities.

First development this year is the inclusion of Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain in the National Gallery of Ireland’s diary. Always a beautiful production, this year is no different, and Una appears for the week of May 26, 2025.

The director of the gallery, Dr Caroline Campbell, remarks in the diary’s introduction that Una’s Girl has already become a” popular favourite” among gallery patrons. This makes a trifecta of images the NGI has used of Una’s signature painting – it appeared in last year’s calendar and is for sale in postcard form in the gallery shop. (Speaking of merch, I’m waiting for the gallery umbrella and tote bag!)

As Sara Donaldson author of the notes accompanying the image in the diary writes – “Watters’s awareness of Cubist forms is evident everywhere, while Futurist-inspired ‘lines of force’ represent the sheets of rain, evoking the atmosphere of a wet urban scene.”

Speaking of dates for the diary, I will be doing a lecture – “The Lost Reputation of Una Watters” as part of Ballinasloe & District Historical Society’s Town Talks series in March – more details to come closer to the time.

Meanwhile, I’m on work on a book on Una so if any of you out there have stories or memories of her or Eugene Watters, do contact me via the email on the blog.

Categories
News

Picture Postcard

First the painting, now the postcard! Una’s Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain, now proudly part of the national collection, got another boost this month with the news that there’s now a postcard of the painting on sale at the National Gallery of Ireland shop.

This fine postcard reproduction also gives the painting the potential of reaching a mass audience.

I’m a sucker for a postcard memento so I’m delighted to know that Una’s striking image has a chance to reach gallery visitors who, like me, enjoy extending the memory of standing in front of the real thing with a pocket-sized reproduction.

Speaking of the real thing, Girl Going by Trinity hangs in Room 15 of NGI, along with several of Una’s contemporaries, Mainie Jellet, Mary Swanzy and Louis le Brocquy.

November is both Una Watters’ birth and death month (born this day, November 4, 1918 – died November 20, 1965). The Dublin weather she depicts here is distinctly Novembrian. Perfect for a calendar!

What about it, National Gallery? Una Watters as November’s calendar girl?

Categories
News

Cover Girls

It’s not just in the art world that Una Watters’s work is getting noticed. Her Self-Portrait in Green (1943) appears on the cover of poet and academic Gerald Dawe’s just published book. Politic Words is a collection of essays and writings on the literary and cultural influence of Irish women writers and critics, such as Edna Longley, Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Lucy Caldwell and Leontia Flynn.

The book also considers the legacies of traumatic Irish history such as the Famine and the Northern Troubles, as well as the political impact of Brexit. Politic Words: Writing Women/Writing History is the final part of a trilogy of cultural studies by Dr Dawe and is published by Peter Lang in its “Reimagining Ireland” series.

Meanwhile, Dr Paige Reynolds, Professor of English at Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts, has chosen Una’s Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain (1959) – now on display at the National Gallery – as the cover for her study of modernism in the work of Irish women’s contemporary fiction.

Dr Reynolds examines the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Eimear McBride, Claire-Louise Bennett and Sally Rooney, among others, in what the publishers promise will be a new literary history. The volume could not have a more fitting visual ambassador than Una Watters. As Dr Reynolds has said: “It’s both perfectly in tune with the arguments of my book – and gorgeous.”

Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode from Oxford University Press, will be published in November.