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Birth of Beatrice Moss Elvery Campbell, Painter, Stained Glass Artist & Sculptor

Beatrice Moss Elvery Campbell, Lady Glenavy, painter, stained glass artist and sculptor, is born in Dublin on April 30, 1883.

Elvery is the second among seven children of William Elvery , merchant, and Theresa Elvery (née Moss), singer and music teacher, whose parents are English Quakers. Her father’s ancestors were silk merchants from Spain, called Alvarez. Her early childhood is spent in Carrickmines, County Dublin. In 1896 the family moves to Foxrock and she attends the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Her mother’s family is artistic – one aunt is the artist Phoebe Anna Traquair – and she and her sisters are talented artists and singers. Her younger sister, Dorothy Kay, becomes a noted portrait painter in South Africa. At the age of sixteen, she wins a three-week scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, London. Back in Dublin, she models for William Orpen, then teaching in the school. They become friends, and she regrets never studying painting under him. She concentrates on sculpture under John Hughes and has great success, winning the Taylor scholarship three years in a row (1901–03). The first year she wins, the judges, seeking evidence that she had worked unaided, asks her to model a head from life in their presence.

Elvery’s first exhibit in the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is a bronze statuette of a boy in 1902. Thereafter she is a lifelong exhibitor with the RHA, showing almost annually until her death. Friendship with the older Sarah Purser introduces her to Dublin’s artistic milieu and to the arts and crafts movement. In the movement’s 1904 exhibition she shows ten items, including terracotta statuettes, a holy water stoup, and a plaster cast of a lectern, which is cast in bronze in Paris that year and placed in her former parish church in Carrickmines. The movement’s historian, Paul Larmour, calls this lectern “a remarkable piece of organic Art Nouveau . . . There is nothing else like it in Ireland.”

In 1904, after a brief period studying in Paris with her sister and fellow students Estella Solomons and Frances “Cissie” Beckett, Elvery takes lessons in stained glass from Alfred E. Child, and is then persuaded by Purser to join her Tower of Glass (An Túr Gloine) studio. She remains six years, executing windows for St. Stephen’s Church, Mount Street, Dublin; St. Nicholas Church, Carrickfergus; and a war memorial at the Church of Ireland church, Carrickmines. Although her work is generally well received, she does not rate her skill in the medium highly – “I never got the right feeling for glass or the detached, austere quality necessary for ecclesiastical art” – and her window for a Gort convent leads to a critical review of Purser’s studio by W. B. Yeats. She does not, however, confine herself to glass but also designs for silversmiths and illustrated books for children. For Iosagán agus Sgealta Eile (1907), by Patrick Pearse, she provides a black-and-white frontispiece and four colour illustrations. For the Cuala Press, run by Lily and Elizabeth Yeats, she designs calendars, Christmas cards, and fifteen hand-coloured prints, which continue to be issued until after World War II.

Elvery’s social life in Dublin is busy. An active member of the United Arts Club, she is called by Lady Gregory “the beautiful Miss Elvery,” and Orpen’s portrait, showing her long-necked, graceful, and vivacious, bears out this description. Tiring of glass, and wishing to become a painter, she leaves in 1910 for the Slade School of Fine Art in London. There Henry Tonks is less complimentary than her Dublin teachers. He finds her work facile: “The speed, the slickness, the skill. It is horrible!” Orpen also comes to this view: “her only fault was that the transmission of her thoughts from her brain to paper or canvas, clay or stained glass, became so easy to her that all was said in a few hours. Nothing on earth could make her go on and try to improve on her first translation of her thought.”

Back in Dublin, Elvery takes a studio in Kildare Street and teaches for a time in the Metropolitan School of Art, before her parents arrange a marriage with Charles Henry Gordon Campbell, eldest son of the future Lord Chancellor of Ireland, James Campbell. They marry on August 1, 1912, and move to London where he is called to the English bar. It is not initially a love match but they are well-suited – he likes artistic, Bohemian circles and they become friends with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, the painter Mark Gertler, the publisher John Middleton Murry, and his wife, the writer Katherine Mansfield, who describes Campbell as “a queer mixture for she is loving and affectionate, and yet she is malicious.”

Campbell’s husband becomes secretary of the Department of Industry and Commerce in the Irish Free State and in 1922 the family moves to Clonard, Terenure, Dublin. His government position means that within six months the house is burned down by anti-Treatyites, who are, however, almost comically accommodating – local men, they express distress at the job and allow her to save the children’s Christmas presents. In 1931 she becomes Lady Glenavy after her husband succeeds to his father’s title, an important member of Dublin’s social and artistic scene. She helps establish the Dublin Drama League and assists Shelah Richards in the production of two plays in 1936. Her friendships are wide and varied and her conversation imaginative and engaged. Dressed in beige – what her son calls “variations on a theme of porridge” – she entertains constantly. Her house has what she terms a “caravanserai” character and is constantly full of people.

Appointed an associate of the RHA in 1932, Campbell becomes a full member in 1934 and takes her turn at teaching. She also joins the more radical Society of Dublin Painters and holds in February 1935 a one-person show at their premises, 7 Stephen’s Green, but she never shows with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, though her work is more avant-garde than that of most academicians. At its best in still lifes and figure compositions, her work has “a sense of drama and an enigmatic or near-surrealist appearance.” Brian Kennedy notes that she is the first Irish painter to go surrealist (though she never thinks of herself in this way) and although she is serious about her work – taking lessons at an advanced age from Patrick Hennessy  – she is also diffident. Her memoir does not trace her development as an artist and mentions only one work with approbation – The Intruder (exhibited at the RHA in 1932). Now in the National Gallery of Ireland, it depicts in bold, rich colours a female centaur beckoning a young man from a group of picnickers. It immediately attracts attention. Richard Orpen wants the academy to buy it, but they think it obscene.

About 1941 the Campbells move to a large Georgian house in Rathfarnham, and twenty years later they transfer to a smaller house in Sandycove. After her husband’s death in 1962, she publishes her memoirs, And Today We Will Only Gossip (1964). The title is well chosen as the book is not self-revelatory but full of characters she encountered. Monk Gibbon calls her a “unique mixture: of talent and diffidence; of gregariousness and contempt for the herd; of gentle consideration and a savage determination to wound. Only those who knew her well knew her at all; and even to them she remained something of a mystery” (The Irish Times, December 2, 1980).

Campbell dies in Dublin on May 21, 1970, and is survived by her two sons, the writer and humorist Patrick Campbell and the novelist Michael Campbell, and predeceased by her daughter, Bridget, an Irish international lacrosse player and talented scientist, who is killed by a bomb during the London blitz.

Campbell’s work is in inter alia the Ulster Museum, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Lane Gallery, and the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, County Cork.

(From: “Campbell, Beatrice Moss” by Bridget Hourican and Pauric J. Dempsey, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: “Bridgit – a picture of Miss Elvery (Beatrice Elvery),” oil on canvas by William Orpen, 1909)


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Death of Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, Educator & Publisher

Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, known as Lolly, Anglo-Irish educator and publisher, dies on January 16, 1940. She works as an art teacher and publishes several books on art and is a founder of Dun Emer Press which publishes several works by her brother, W. B. Yeats. She is the first commercial printer in Ireland to work exclusively with hand presses.

Yeats is born at 23 Fitzroy Road, London, on March 11, 1868. She is the daughter of the Irish artist John Butler Yeats and Susan Yeats (née Pollexfen). She is sister to W. B., Jack and Susan Mary “Lily” Yeats. From the age of four she lives in Merville, Sligo, at the home of her grandfather William Pollexfen. In November 1874 her family moves to 14 Edith Villas, West Kensington, London. Her governess is Martha Jowitt from 1876 until 1879 before the family moves to Bedford Park, Chiswick, in 1878.

Yeats returns to Howth, County Dublin, in 1881. She enrolls, with her sister Susan, in the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1883 and takes classes at the Royal Dublin Society.

The family moves to Eardley Crescent, South Kensington, London, in 1886. While there Yeats starts to write fiction and publishes a homemade magazine, The Pleiades, with six friends, contributing “Story without a plot” to the Christmas 1888 issue. In addition, she publishes “Scamp and three friends” in The Vegetarian.

Yeats also attends the Chiswick School of Art with her sister Susan and brother Jack Butler Yeats, learning “Freehand drawing in all its branches, practical Geometry and perspective, pottery and tile painting, design for decorative purposes.”

In the 1890s Yeats lives at 3 Blenheim Road, Bedford Park, London, and trains as a kindergarten teacher at the Froebel College in Bedford, Bedfordshire. She undertakes her teaching practice at the Bedford Park High School. In 1892, when her training is completed, she teaches as a visiting art mistress at the Froebel Society, Chiswick High School and the Central Foundation School.

Yeats earns a good income from lecturing and publication of four popular painting manuals: Brushwork (1896), Brushwork Studies of Flowers, Fruits and Animals (1898), Brushwork Copy Book (1899), and Elementary Brushwork Studies (1900).

Yeats trains and works as an art teacher and is a member of William Morris‘s circle in London before her family returns to Dublin in 1900. She writes and creates the artwork for Elementary Brush-Work Studies (1900), an educational book that teaches young children the technique of painting flowers and plants using her simple method. At the suggestion of Emery Walker, who works with Morris on the Kelmscott Press, she studies printing with the Women’s Printing Society in London.

In Dublin, Yeats accepts the invitation to join Evelyn Gleeson to form the Dun Emer Guild along with Lily, who is an embroiderer. She manages the Dun Emer Press from 1902 with a printing press acquired from a provincial newspaper. The Press is located at Runnymede, the house of Evelyn Gleeson. This is set up with the intention of training young women in bookbinding and printing as well as embroidery and weaving. In 1903 she starts printing and Dun Emer’s first book is W. B. Yeats’s In the Seven Woods (1903).

Despite being a gifted printer, the costings exceed the quality of work that Yeats produces with the result that the press is often at risk financially. Eleven books, decorated with pastels by George William Russell, appear under the Dun Emer imprint produced from a first-floor room. She has several disagreements with her brother William over his directions as literary editor. She also dislikes Evelyn Gleeson. In October 1906 she travels to New York to advertise her products but publishes Dun Emer’s last book, William’s Discoveries (1907), in late November when she returns to Dublin.

After many years of strained relations between the Yeats sisters and Evelyn Gleeson, their business relationship is finally ended. Subsequently, in 1908, Lolly and her brother William start the Cuala Press, publishing over 70 books including 48 by the poet. Yeats manages the press while her sister Lily controls the embroidery section. Cuala continues to be a family strain. Their father, John Butler Yeats, has to castigate his son William for sending overtly critical letters to his sisters about the press. However, Cuala produces magnificent books: W. B. Yeats’ The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and a series of Broadsides (published 1908–15, with illustrations from Jack Yeats).

Yeats works with Cuala Press until just before her death in Dublin on January 16, 1940, after a diagnosis of high blood pressure and heart trouble.

(Pictured: “Elizabeth Corbet Yeats” by Jack Butler Yeats, oil on canvas, circa 1899, National Gallery of Ireland)


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Birth of Anne Butler Yeats, Painter and Costume and Stage Designer

Anne Butler Yeats, Irish painter, costume and stage designer, is born in Dublin on February 26, 1919.

Yeats is the daughter of the poet William Butler Yeats and Georgie Hyde-Lees, a niece of the painter Jack B. Yeats, and of Lily Yeats and of Elizabeth Corbet Yeats. Her birth is commemorated by her father with the poem A Prayer for My Daughter. Her aunts are associated with the arts and crafts movement in Ireland and are associated with the Dun Emer Press, Cuala Press, and Dun Emer industries. Her brother Michael Yeats is a politician. She is known as “feathers” by her family.

Yeats spends her first three years between Ballylee, County Galway, and Oxford before her family moves to 82 Merrion Square, Dublin in 1922. She is very sick as a child and spends three years in two different hospitals, St. Margaret’s Hall, 50 Mespil Road, and Nightingale Hall, Morehampton Road, Dublin. She then goes to the Pension Henriette, a boarding school in Villars-sur-Bex, Switzerland from 1928–30. In 1923 her Aunt Elizabeth “Lolly” gives her brush drawing lessons which aid her in winning first prize in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) National Art competition for children under eight years old in 1925 and 1926.

Yeats trains in the Royal Hibernian Academy school from 1933 to 1936 and works as a stage designer with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1936, at the age of 16, she is hired by the Abbey Theatre as assistant to Tanya Moiseiwitsch. She studies for four months at the School of Theatrical Design in Paris with Paul Colin in 1937. At 18, she begins her costume career on sets with Ria Mooney‘s company. At the Abbey, she designs the sets and costumes for revivals of W.B. Yeats’ plays The Resurrection and On Baile’s Strand (1938).

In 1938 Yeats designs the first production of W.B. Yeats’ play Purgatory. The designs for Purgatory are her most successful achievement. Purgatory is the last play that W.B Yeats sees on stage, and when it is performed it is a full house. When working on Purgatory, Hugh Hunt wants to have a moon on the back cloth of the production, but she refuses. “If she does not win, she is going to say that she doesn’t wish to have her name on the programme as a designer of the setting.” This could be the main reason why her name is not on many productions that she worked on. She also designs the first play of her uncle Jack Yeats to receive professional production, Harlequin’s Positions.

In 1939 Yeats is promoted to head of design at the Abbey until her departure in May 1941. In 1939 it is commented that her designs are “getting arty” and not in keeping with style of the Abbey. One of her last designs is her father’s last play, The Death of Cuchulain, for the Lyric Theatre on the Abbey stage in 1949. She designs and stage-manages for the Peacock Theatre, the Cork Opera House, the Olympia Theatre, the Gaiety Theatre, the Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre and the Players Theatre.

Among the work Yeats is credited with in the Abbey Theatre, she also works on five productions in the Peacock Theatre with the Theatre Company: Alarm Among the Clerks (1937), The Phoenix (1937), Harlequin’s Positions (1939), The Wild Cat (1940), and Cavaliero (The Life of a Hawk) (1948).

Yeats chooses to move towards painting full-time beginning a brief study at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1941. She experiments with watercolour and wax. She has a touching naive expressionist style and is interested in representing domestic humanity. She designs many of the covers for the books of Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill over a twenty-year period from 1958. She does illustrations for books by Denis Devlin, Thomas Kinsella and Louis MacNeice, and works with many young designers, such as Louis le Brocquy.

Yeats participates in group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Monaco, and Scotland, along with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and Taispeántas an Oireachtas.

Yeats dies at the age of 82 on July 4, 2001, and is buried in Shanganagh Cemetery, south Dublin.

The Royal Hibernian Academy holds a retrospective of her work in 1995, as does the National Gallery of Ireland in 2002. She donates her collection of Jack B. Yeats’ sketch books to the National Gallery of Ireland, leading to the creation of the Yeats Museum within the Gallery. Her brother, Michael, in turn, donates her sketchbooks to the Museum.

(Pictured: “Coole Park,” oil on board by Anne Butler Yeats, Duke Street Gallery, Dublin)


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Death of Anne Butler Yeats, Painter, Costume & Stage Designer

Anne Butler Yeats, Irish painter, costume and stage designer, dies in Dublin on July 4, 2001.

Born in Dublin on February 26, 1919, Yeats is the daughter of the poet William Butler Yeats and Georgie Hyde-Lees, a niece of the painter Jack B. Yeats, and of Lily Yeats and of Elizabeth Corbet Yeats. Her aunts are associated with the Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland and are associated with the Dun Emer Press, Cuala Press, and Dun Emer industries. Her brother Michael Yeats is a politician. She is known as “feathers” by her family. Her birth is commemorated by her father with the poem “A Prayer for My Daughter.” She spends her first three years between Ballylee, County Galway and Oxford before her family moves to 82 Merrion Square, Dublin in 1922.

Yeats is very sick as a child, spending three years in two different hospitals. She then goes to the Pension Henriette, a boarding school in Villars-sur-Bex, Switzerland from 1928–1930. In 1923 her Aunt Elizabeth “Lolly” gives her brush drawing lessons which aids her in winning first prize in the RDS National Art competition for children under eight years old in 1925 and 1926.

Yeats trains in the Royal Hibernian Academy school from 1933 to 1936 and works as a stage designer with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1936, at the age of 16, she is hired by the Abbey Theatre as assistant to Tanya Moiseiwitsch. She studies for four months at the School of Theatrical Design in Paris with Paul Colin in 1937. At 18, she begins her costume career on sets with Ria Mooney‘s company. At the Abbey, she designs the sets and costumes for revivals of W.B. Yeats’ plays The Resurrection and On Baile’s Strand (1938).

In 1938 Yeats designs the first production of W.B. Yeats’ play Purgatory, which is her most successful achievement. Purgatory is the last play that W.B Yeats sees on stage, and when it is performed it is a full house. When working on Purgatory, Hugh Hunt wants to have a moon on the back cloth of the production but Yeats refuses. “If she does not win, she is going to say that she doesn’t wish to have her name on the programme as a designer of the setting.” This could be the main reason why her name is not on many productions that she works on. She also designs the first play of her uncle Jack Yeats to receive professional production, Harlequin’s Positions.

In 1939 Yeats is promoted to head of design at the Abbey until her departure in May 1941. In 1939 it is commented that her designs are “getting arty” and not in keeping with the style of the Abbey. One of her last designs is her father’s last play, The Death of Cuchulain, for the Lyric Theatre on the Abbey stage, in 1949. She designs and stage-manages for the Peacock Theatre, the Cork Opera House, the Olympia Theatre, the Gaiety Theatre, the Austin Clarke Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre and Players’ Theatre.

Among the work Yeats is credited with in the Abbey Theatre, she is also recorded as having worked on five productions in the Peacock Theatre with the Theatre Company: Alarm Among the Clerks (1937), The Phoenix (1937), Harlequin’s Positions (1939), The Wild Cat (1940), and Cavaliero (The Life of a Hawk) (1948).

Yeats chooses to move towards painting full-time beginning a brief study at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1941. She experiments with watercolour and wax. She has a touching naive expressionist style and is interested in representing domestic humanity. She designs many of the covers for the books of Irish-language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill over a twenty-year period from 1958. She does illustrations for books by Denis Devlin, Thomas Kinsella and Louis MacNeice, and works with many young designers, such as Louis le Brocquy.

Yeats dies at the age of 82 in Dublin on July 4, 2001. She is buried near her brother, Michael Butler Yeats, at Shanganagh Cemetery in Shankill, County Dublin.

The Royal Hibernian Academy holds a retrospective of her work in 1995, as does the National Gallery of Ireland in 2002. She donates her collection of Jack B. Yeats’ sketch books to the National Gallery of Ireland, leading to the creation of the Yeats Museum within the Gallery. Her brother, Michael, in turn, donates her sketchbooks to the Museum.

(Pictured: “Gossip & Scandal,” 1943 oil on canvas, by Anne Butler Yeats)