Hone; Evie (1894-1955); painter and stained glass artist

Evie Hone was born in Dublin into an established Anglo-Irish family which had previously included distinguished Irish artists; she was a descendant of Joseph Hone, a brother of Nathaniel Hone. At the age of eleven she became partially lame from infantile paralysis. A visit to Assisi in 1911 made a profound impression on her. In 1918, she attended classes at Westminster under Walter Sickert (1860-1942), after which she went to Bernard Meninsky, who in 1920, advised her to study in Paris. In 1921, together with her friend Mainie Jellett (1897-1944), they worked first under André Lhote and later in 1921 they persuaded the cubist painter Albert Gleizes, to take them on as pupils, where they worked until 1931. In 1924 with Mainie Jellett, Hone exhibited at the Dublin Painters Gallery.

In 1933 she began to work in stained glass, joining An Tur Gloine and getting her first commission for Ardcarne near Boyle in 1934. She worked with An Tur Gloine until it closed in 1944. Hone’s early paintings, of the period when she was exploring Cubism, are often difficult to distinguish from those of Mainie Jellett, but she had a more committed sense of colour.
In 1943, she was a founder member of the Irish exhibition of Living Art. Her work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Gallery, Ulster Museum and Crawford Gallery. A memorial exhibition was held in Dublin in 1958.

Evie Hone produced some seventy-four windows in the twenty-two years during which she worked in stained glass. Her reputation may rest largely on the expressive intensity of her stained glass output, but she was an artist who closely involved herself in the Irish art scene in a number of ways.