writing – Una Watters (1918-1965)

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.

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.