Evie Hone's stained glass windows, now at Manresa Retreat Centre. Photos: John McElroy.

As I looked at the Evie Hone stained glass window from University Hall, recently relocated in St Francis Xavier church in Upper Gardiner Street, Dublin, my mind raced back over the years to the days when I first met the artist in Tullabeg.

In January 1944, Fr Donal O’Sullivan told the Jesuit scholastics there that he hoped to provide some stained glass windows for the domestic chapel. At that stage it was only a hope, because An Tur Gloine, which had provided the facility for stained glass making for many years, was about to cease production. Michael Healy, who had just completed three of the Dolors windows in Clongowes, had died in 1941.

Over the following few months, Evie Hone had produced another three of those Dolors windows which Healy had not lived to provide. Sarah Purser, who along with Healy, had been the main share holder in An Tur Gloine, had died in 1943. It was with great reluctance that the last two share-holders, Catherine O’Brien and Hubert V. McGoldrick, had brought production to a close in October of the same year.

Fr Donal was anxious that Evie Hone should provide the complete set of windows for Tullabeg. Her stained glass work had been done in the studio of An Tur Gloine, but with the closure of the studio, she was left without a facility for her work. Later, Fr Donal informed us that Evie had set up her own studio at her residence in Marlay Grange, Rathfarnham.

The name Evie Hone was unknown to most of the Jesuit scholastics in Tullabeg. While we all waited for the arrival of the first window, Fr Donal built up a great atmosphere of expectation. The point he kept on labouring was that the domestic chapel was not going to be the final resting place for her windows. I remember well the day when the first window arrived.

The domestic chapel was off limits for two days while the work was in progress. All religious duties, Mass, Benediction and Litanies took place in the public church. The first window to arrive was the Nativity window and Fr Donal gave us all a short talk on it and explained the ideas of the artist. The other four windows arrived in a matter of months.

During the war years, travel was severely restricted, so Evie Hone did not visit Tullabeg until all the windows were in place. Just a small group of us were allowed to meet her.

I remember how pleased she was when one scholastic noted that she had given none of the Apostles a halo until they appeared in her Pentecost window. That Pentecost window was installed on the Wednesday before Pentecost Sunday that year and we celebrated the feast with a High Mass. She was happy when I told her that the choir I directed had sung Mass No 3 by William Byrd (1542-1623) on the occasion. Byrd was born in Lincoln and had been choirmaster in the great Cathedral there for many years.

She had an interest in Lincoln Cathedral and was aware of its 13th century chancel window depicting Noah awaiting the arrival of the dove. The Byrd Mass seemed to build a bridge for her between the dove of Lincoln and the Dove of Pentecost.

It was during that visit to Tullabeg that she exhorted us to look carefully at stained glass and not to just glance at it and pass on. She also told me that she had just received a commission to paint a complete set of the Stations of the Cross. She had done individual drawings of some of the Stations in the past but never a complete set.

She did not say where these Stations would be located and some 50 years later I learned that they were in the little parish church of Kiltulla in the Diocese of Clonfert. (They are reproduced in my own book, The Way of the Cross.) She was especially interested to learn that St Stanislaus was the patron saint of Tullabeg and took a great interest in portraying him in the great three-light window in the domestic chapel.

To learn more about him she read no fewer than three lives of the saint (one in French) which she had received from Fr Donal. In the window she certainly captured his youthful appearance and also recalled for the viewer his long walk to Rome. Fr Donal often remarked that she had moved away from the statuesque style of so many other stained glass artists of the previous century, a style for which he had no great love and which he once referred to as “factory glass”.

By contrast, Evie Hone succeeded in introducing the notion of movement into so much of her stained glass work. There is nothing statuesque in her portrayal of the Magi in the Nativity window nor in the Apostles’ shadow falling on the sick in the base of the Pentecost window, as they moved past the invalids. Beatrice Elvery, (later Lady Glenavy), who was ten years her senior, had also rejected the statuesque style. One can almost see the seed falling from the hand of the farmer as he walks along in her great Sower window in the Cathedral of St Canice, Kilkenny.

In later years when I visited Fr Donal in Leeson Street, as his health was failing, he often talked to me about Tullabeg and the windows there. During one of my visits he told me that the last Jesuit to see Evie Hone alive was Fr Daniel Shiels. On the afternoon of 12 March 1955 he visited her, as he occasionally did, at Marlay Grange in Rathfarnham. She would usually bid him farewell on the door step of her home and walk across the yard to her studio to continue her work while he would make his way down the avenue to catch his bus back to Gardiner Street.

That day, in spite of a cold March breeze, she walked down the avenue with him, a thing she had seldom done before, and as they parted at the main gate, her last words to him were, “Fr Dan, please don’t forget to pray for me.” Next morning she died in Rathfarnham parish church as Mass was about to begin.

Fr Kevin Laheen, SJ, is the author of The Jesuits in Tullabeg: The Early Years; From Mission 1810 to Province 1860; O’Brien Publications, (2007).