girl going by trinity in the rain – Page 2

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?

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.

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