Mainie Jellett

Life
1897-1944 [Mary Harriet]; b. 36 Fitzwilliam Sq., Dublin; dg. of William Morgan Jellett, the last TCD MP elected for Unionists to Westminster, and relative of John Jellett, the TCD Provost; ed. National College of Art, 1917-19; exhibited in studio of Jack Yeats, 1931; moved to London with Evie Hone, and thence to Paris; commissioned by Irish govt. to design murals for pavilion a Glasgow Fair; fnd. with others Irish Exhibition for Living Art [EILA]; Ernie O’Malley, a supporter, helped fund a scholarship in her honour. BREF DIB DIH

Works
The Land of Eire (1940; acquired by Ernie O’Malley in 1943)
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Two Nativity scenes by Mainie Jellett

Criticism
Bruce Arnold, ‘Mainie Jellett and Modernism’, in Patrick Murphy, et al., Irish Women Artists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (Dublin: NGI, Mun. Gall., Dublin; DHG 1987), pp.30-33; Arnold, Mainie Jellett and the Modern Movement in Ireland (Yale P 1991), 216pp., ill.; See also comments in Keith Jeffrey, ‘Irish Culture and the Great War’, in Bullán (Autumn 1994), p.87. See also Hilary Pyle, ‘Modern Art in Ireland: An Introduction’, Éire-Ireland, 4, 4, (Winter 1969), pp.35-41.)

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Commentary
Hilary Pyle, ‘Modern Art in Ireland: An Introduction’, Éire-Ireland, 4, 4 (Winter 1969), , pp.35-41: Pyle remarks that ‘Mainie Jellett never relaxed her devotion to non-representational principles, though it was an abstract style born in the realism of/ personal emotion or experience, and colored by a very deep religious feeling.’ (pp.37-38.) Further, Evie Hone in Paris, the two of them subsequently studying under Lhote and then Albert Gleizes with whom they explored cubism. (p.37.)

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Notes
Death-date: her date of death is recorded as Feb. 1946, at St Vincent’s Hospital, in Anne Madden, Louis le Brocquy, Painter (1994), p.65.

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