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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.

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Ms February 2024

Just five days ago, I made a cheeky call to the National Gallery of Ireland to include Una Watters’ Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain in one of its future annual calendars. Hey presto, no sooner wished for than granted! The NGI, it seems, was way ahead of me!

The 2024 calendar has just gone on sale in the gallery shop and my spies in Dublin tell me Una’s Trinity Miss holds the February slot. Other new NGI acquisitions share the pages of the calendar – a minor French fellow by the name of Paul Cezanne, for one, along with old gallery favourites such as John Singer Sargent, Paul Signac, William John Leech, Mildred Anne Butler, John Lavery and Mary Swanzy.

Aren’t they in good company!

The inclusion of Una’s work in the calendar is a real vote of confidence in her work. For us here at the blog, it means that Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain will be restored to our walls. It’s almost 11 months since the men from the gallery came to take the original away.

It’ll be like old times seeing Trinity Girl on a daily basis.

The February page might well be open all year!

Paul Cézanne, La Vie des Champs, 1876-77, which features on the cover of the calendar. Photograph: National Gallery of Ireland

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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?

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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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Watch this space!

May has been a great month for Una Watters news. As a result of an event at Phizzfest, Phibsboro’s community and arts festival, where I gave a talk on Una earlier in the month, a new painting has been discovered.

The watercolour of the River Suck, where Una and Eugene spent many happy hours fishing, is one of several Una made during the 1950s (we’re not yet sure of the date of this one) and its owner came along to the Phizzfest, having not known about last year’s exhibition, or been aware of the surrounding publicity. The owner of The Pine Wood ( oil on canvas, 1961) also came to the full-house event. We had an image of this work but hadn’t definitively identified its owner.

We’ve also discovered through contacts made at Phizzfest that Una made a banner for St Michael’s School, Finglas – again we’re not sure of the date – as a result of a request by her sister, Maureen, who was a Holy Faith nun ( Sister Mel) based in Glasnevin. Better still, the banner still exists. We’re hoping to see it in the coming weeks and take photographs of it. This is yet another testament to Una’s design skills and her range, as well as her embedded artistic presence in her own community.

Also present at Phizzfest was Gary Byrne, Una’s nephew, who brought along two samples of Una’s work – an early oil of The People’s Gardens (1943) and a pen and ink drawing – Old Woman – both of which you can find on this website under Uncatalogued Work.

Finally, and best of all, we’ve had word from the National Gallery that they plan to hang Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain “imminently” – perhaps as early as June. Watch this space – or should I say – watch that space on the walls of the NGI, where we’ve always felt Una rightly belongs.

Photograph: Marie Louise Halpenny