Michael Healy, Stained Glass Artist

A Machine Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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[p.497]
Thomas McGreevy Note: Most of the text of a broadcast from Radio Eireann (June 5, 1942) is included in this article N

In the centuries that followed the Protestant Reformation pretty well all the ecclesiastical buildings which had been erected in Ireland both before and after the Norman invasion were laid in ruins. And until Catholic Emancipation, practically nothing was set up in place of the lovely things which had been destroyed. When church building did start again, the age of bad architecture had arrived. With a few exceptions — most of them in the classical style — the churches and chapels built in the last hundred years or so are, architecturally speaking, of poor quality. It took three generations for an Irish architect of genius, Scott, the designer of the basilica at Lough Derg, to appear. But we have only a very few buildings by Scott. For architecture is the most expensive, as it is the most communal, the least individual, of the arts. The arts that are dependent on architecture, however, sculpture and, in the case of church architecture especially, the art of stained glass painting, these may come to fruition more easily, and be more widely distributed over a given area than good architecture. A big stained glass window costs no more than a small picture of the same quality. And a beautiful window may be set up even in a church that, as architecture, is undistinguished. That is where the subject of this study comes in.

Michael Healy was born in Dublin in 1873. He died at Mercer's Hospital, Dublin, in September, 1941. Outside a very small circle his name is hardly known. And yet for forty years he was quietly but unfailingly beautifying our land, doing all that a great artist could do to give worthy expression to the religious life of the people of Ireland. The pioneer artist of the modern Irish stained glass movement, it is largely owing to his genius that to-day there are few places in the country which are more than twenty miles from a major work of modern art. In Dublin and the greater towns something in the way of visual art has, of course, always been happening, if it was no more than the erection of a terrace or crescent or square of well-designed houses. But for hundreds of years the visual arts were practically unknown outside the towns. Nowadays, however, if you drive, say, a hundred miles, through almost any part of Ireland you will find that you can stop at least half a dozen [p.498] times, go into churches, and look at stained glass windows which represent the most venerated figures and events of religious history, very often of our own religious history, and represent them with an elevated tenderness of feeling, a beauty of draughtmanship, and a splendour of colour, that were only rarely surpassed in the works of the great stained glass artists of mediæval France or the painters of Renaissance Italy. And what is more important than their being there for art-loving travellers is the fact that these windows are there to stir the imagination of people of sensibility who live in remote places. There are there in nearly every county, from Cork to Antrim, from Wexford to Donegal, at Mayfield and Bushmills, Gorey and Letterkenny, in Sligo and Mayo, Roscommon, Leitrim, Fermanagh, Clare, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Laoighis, Kildare, Meath, in Cork city, Galway city, Dublin city, above all at Loughrea — they are there to induce that mood of meditation and recollection which only genuine works of religious art can induce, and, more profanely considered, to constitute standards of taste and artistic points of departure, and not only for grown-ups but, even more important, for artistically gifted children.

Forty years ago, then, a movement was started to break with the bad mass-production pseudo-religious art that was coming in large quantities from abroad. And the pioneer artist of it was this Irishman of the people, sprung from the humbler ranks of society, yet a man of extraordinarily wide range of understanding and power of interpretation, and a master of the richest and most fastidious sensibility both in colour and draughtmanship, Michael Healy.

It was indirectly through Harry Clarke, the most brilliant stained glass artist of a later generation, that I, myself, first came to understand what a great artist Michael Healy was. Harry was a contemporary and friend, and I used sometimes to borrow his bicycle in order to get to places and things worth seeing which were at a distance from a railway station, St. Doulough's church, near Malahide, for instance, and Jerpoint Abbey, near Thomastown. On a Saturday, getting on for twenty years ago now, Harry lent me the bicycle to go to Clongowes to see Mr. Keating's then fairly new Stations of the Cross in the School Chapel. I am not discussing the work of living artists here, so I must not dwell on that remarkable series of modern Irish paintings. What I was not prepared for in the Chapel at Clongowes was a radiantly gleaming window behind the altar which represented scenes from the life of St. Joseph, Joseph listening to the angel's message, Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, and, loveliest of all, Joseph, during a rest on the Flight into Egypt, engaged in the homely business of making a fire, with Our Lady, the holy Child on her knee, sitting [p.499] under a cluster of trees, and the donkey grazing a little way off. I did not know who had done the window, but apart altogether from its remarkable colour harmonies, rich crimsons and blues and greens, all cooled to a lovely silveriness of tone by the technical process known as aciding, apart from all that, the sacred personages were represented with such noble simplicity and such grave reverence as to make it evident that the artist who had imagined and executed them could enter into and convey the spirit of the Christian story as few artists since the end of the Middle Ages have done. I was rather excited at my discovery and enquired of a manservant at Clongowes where the window had come from. He said he didn't know, but volunteered to ask the Rector. I protested against disturbing anybody so august, but he insisted. "He'll be only glad to know you like the window," he said. I waited in some trepidation, but in a few moments the Rector came downstairs, declared himself to be Father Joy, a countryman of my own, and gave me the kindest of welcomes. He was gratified by my interest in the window, told me that it was Healy's and that it was due to, I think, Father Mulcahy that it, as also the Keating Stations, had been commissioned. I, in my turn, was gratified to learn that the author of the lovely window was somebody I actually knew myself. I had known Michael Healy for some years at the time and I was interested in his work, but I had mostly seen it in small pieces in the studio at The Tower of Glass where he worked, only very little of it set up complete in the churches for which it was designed. And none of it that I had seen in such circumstances had struck me as the St. Joseph window did now, as, that is to say, indubitably the work of a master, a master in the high tradition of the great stained glass artists of the Middle Ages. I was probably more receptive to the window's effect for the fact that, a little while before, I had sold half my books and gone off to stare at the greatest stained glass windows in the world, in the most beautiful of all Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, fifty miles from Paris. And more recently still, I had been able to see the lovely glass at Segovia in Spain, and at Barcelona, and, on the way home, the next best glass after Chartres, that in the cathedral at Bourges in the middle of France. Naturally I was excited to think that there was a living Irishman, a man I knew myself, whose work was worthy to be mentioned in the same breadth with that of the great men of thirteenth century France and fifteenth century Spain.

I wanted to do something about my discovery, to share it, to write about it. There was, however, a difficulty. Harry Clarke would not mind my having used his bicycle to discover the work of Michael Healy. Harry was not that kind of man. He knew [p.500] better than I did what a fine artist Michael Healy was. The difficulty was Mr. Healy himself. He hated publicity. I knew him fairly well. I even had reason to think he liked me. Miss Purser, for whose enterprise in founding The Tower of Glass we must always be grateful, had once said jokingly to me, "Mr. Healy likes talking to you — I don't know why." I knew that if Healy did like talking to me it was because I was interested not only in his work but in the processes of mind behind it, in what he said about the human, the non-technical side of it. I had no pretensions to technical knowledge. Healy was also friendly, I think, because during the revolutionary years our political sympathies lay in the same direction. He was a very reticent man, but, a child of the people, he was passionately interested in the country's destinies, in its past, its future and its present. Absorbed in the happenings of the time and their implications, he would talk to me about them with, for him, some freedom. And then my interest — a youthful, lighthearted interest compared with his — in the scraps of information about religious history which I had picked up here and there, was a greater bond than I realized.

But the question now was whether he would be cross if I, an ignorant layman, presumed to write about his work. However, I decided to risk it. So without a word to himself, or to Harry Clarke or to Miss Purser, I wrote my very inadequate appreciation of the Clongowes window and sent it to Æ, the editor of The Irish Statesman. It was published the following Saturday. And for a week or so I went near none of them. Then somebody told me that at The Tower of Glass, "they" were rather pleased than otherwise. They, of course, might mean the other artists, Miss Geddes, Miss Rhind, Miss O'Brien and Mr. McGoldrick. Mr. Healy's name was not specified. Still, I ventured to go round. They were all welcoming, but it was a relief when Mr. Healy beamed, if anything rather shyly, through his spectacles and made it clear that he would not hold my indiscretion against me. And so we became even better friends than before. The end of that story is that when, some months before he died, I saw him after an interval of four or five years he told me he was working on a big commission of seven two-light windows representing the Seven Dolours for Clongowes. He regarded them as his magnum opus and, talking about them, he volunteered the opinion that probably my article of long ago had helped to get him the commission. I should like to believe it was true. He did not live to finish the series. Only three of the Dolours, that is to say six lights, were completed. But even as they stand, they are enough to immortalize his name. They are of amazing richness and delicacy of colour, and the [p.501] figures, the Holy Child, Mary, Joseph and Simeon, are of a graciousness which has hardly been approached in Irish art since, I would say, some of the fifteenth century carved figures in the cloisters at Jerpoint. It seems to me hardly extravagant to compare the Divine Child in The Flight Into Egypt window with the wonderful Christ-child in the Paris version of Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks. I am glad, as I believe Healy himself would be glad, that the series of Dolour windows at Clongowes is being completed by his friend and fellow-artist at The Tower of Glass, Miss Evie Hone.

Healy, I have said, was a reserved man. He could crack a joke and had a ready smile, but he never spoke of his personal background or history. He left it to be understood that he was a man of the people. Though religious subjects might arise in connection with his work, he never told me there was a reason why he should have special knowledge of them. I did not know that he had once tried to be a Dominican brother and only returned to the world because conditions in late nineteenth century Ireland seemed to him to make it unlikely that he would ever be able to follow in the steps of the great cloistered painter, Fra Angelico. Nor did I know that every morning before leaving his modest lodging in Pleasants Street to go to his work he read from the Divina Commedia in the original Italian. As a young man he had made his way to Florence and spent a year-and-a-half there. A life-long Dominican friend, Father Glendon, then editor of The Irish Rosary, guaranteed enough work to enable the young artist to spend sufficient time in the wonderful little city on the Arno for him to develop his taste, to discover who, amongst the great artists of the past, his true forebears were, and to grow familiar with the temper, the attitude of mind, that would make it possible for him to re-create the great tradition in terms of his own Irish experience and environment.

Healy's work in The Irish Rosary begins in August 1898 with illustrations for a serial story of La Vendée, Sealed Up, (translated from the French by a Child of the Sacred Heart). In this month also he signs an illustration to one of a series of articles on The Convict Priests of '98 by Cardinal Moran; and for the remainder of that year, and into 1899, there are drawings accompanying an oriental story called The Last Crusade by John C. Sunderberg. In these illustrations, Healy, who was only twenty-four, rises with masterly assurance to the imaginative effort called for by subjects ranging from aristocratic counter-revolution in eighteenth century France to the torture of Irish political prisoners in Australia and [p.502] the difficulties of Christian Persians in the course of a more or less holy war waged against them by influential if irresponsible followers of Islam. The drawings have not only Healy's own beautifully refined quality of line, they also have dramatic appropriateness, expressive movement and an unfailing sense of character — down, in this last particular, to the quiet insistence on the Semitic features of both Moslems and Christians in the oriental story.

But as time goes on, it becomes evident that he was not cut out for a routine illustrator. His illustrations for an article on Saint Odilia in 1899 have a sketchiness, what might even be called a weakness, that was probably due to a failure of interest in that type of work. And in a continuation of a series called Among the Savage Tribes of Ecuador his pencil seems wearier still. A Holy Family drawing that accompanies a Christmas poem has, however, the genuine and deep, though temperately stated, devotional quality that was at all times peculiarly his own. And it has the added interest of showing strong Florentine influence in the matter of grouping and the treatment of the draperies. This must have been executed about the time Healy went to Italy, though whether it was before or after his arrival in Florence is of little importance. For it is only natural to assume that like any other eager youngster setting out for the city of the early Renaissance he would study all the reproductions of Florentine pictures that he could lay hands on.

Early in 1901 he was back in Dublin and reappears, no longer as a regular, but as an occasional illustrator in The Irish Rosary. And now there is a technical difference in his work that is notable if — like everything else about his evolution — undramatic. The illustrations to a story of Dublin slum life called The Coal Porter's Family (by Molly Flannery Woods) show a heightened awareness of what is called form — as distinct from linear quality — and A Family Group accompanying this story suggests not so much Florentine fifteenth century as modern French influence. The drawing is more masterly than ever but it has a feeling for volume, a suggestion of power, that relates the artist to Daumier, who, for all the profanity of his humanitarianism, was the first modern artist to break with the ideally graceful Graeco-Roman forms of the High Renaissance and to recapture something of the more robust vitality with which the stained glass artists of mediæval France endowed the sacred personages of Christian history. This suggestion of French influence remains in all Healy's illustrative work in The Irish Rosary, notably in the drawings for the stories, Two Students by W. Flanagan (July 1901) and Edward Fortescue's Wife by Louise Kenny (December 1903). An indifferent but even [p.503] more obviously Frenchified drawing is Gertrude and Her Puppies which went with a chapter of a serial story by S. M. Lyne. The finest of all his Rosary illustrations, however, is probably the radiantly sensitive Ould Biddy, which accompanied a sketch of an old serving-woman by Charlotte Dease. With the beautifully comprehensive economy of great art, the drawing realizes the nobility, fidelity and intelligence which Miss Dease's text attributes to the subject. This little work might be taken as the forerunner of all the small masterpieces of draughtsmanship inspired by the life of the people which, not for reproduction or for exhibition but for his own pleasure, Healy was to go on producing up to the time of his last illness. (A few of them he transferred to glass panels which he gave to his more valued friends).

He had also begun painting in oils and in the August 1901 issue of The Irish Rosary there is a full-page reproduction of a Saint Lawrence O'Toole by him. It is not, in reproduction at least, as impressive as the best of the drawings, but it has distinction and it would be interesting to know what has become of the original, and of other religious paintings in oil which he is believed to have executed about the same time. I have been privileged to see some of the portraits and landscape's in oil, as also many watercolours, which he painted, again only for his own and his friends' pleasure, in later years, and I do not think I exaggerate when I say that they include a few minor masterpieces and a very high percentage of distinguished work.

It was about the time of Healy's return from Florence that, on the initiative of Edward Martyn and with the practical, material, and artistic assistance of Miss Purser, An Tur Gloine, The Tower of Glass, was founded for the production of works of stained glass art in Ireland. Those were the early years of the intensive national resurgence in all departments of life which culminated in the military rising of 1916 and the events that followed. During his absence, Healy was recommended to Miss Purser as a likely young artist by John Hughes, the distinguished sculptor, for, before the Italian journey, he had been a student at the Dublin School of Art where Hughes had a modelling class. Soon after he returned home, therefore, Healy accepted Miss Purser's invitation to enter The Tower of Glass. He had to study the stained glass technique under the late A. E. Child who had been brought in to teach it. For Healy, it meant mastering the richer idiom, the fuller means of expression, of thirteenth century France rather than that of the later phase of the mediæval spirit which is represented by [p.504] the fifteenth century painters of Florence, but being the man of genius he was, it came easy to him. With his mind fully matured, and knowing what he wanted to put into his art, he soon outstripped his teacher and was working out developments of stained glass technique, especially in the matter of the aciding I referred to earlier, that were to come to be regarded as peculiarly his own. And thus began the forty years career that was to be one of the richest in the annals of art in Ireland, the career which, all over the country, in every province, but particularly in Connaught, at Loughrea, and of his nine great windows at Loughrea, perhaps most especially in the magnificent three-light windows of The Ascension and The Last Judgment in the transepts, was to re-create in terms of art, the Vision of the City of God.

The Vision of the City of God is something that we associate particularly with Saint Augustine because of his book, De Civitate Dei. And it is therefore fitting that another of Michael Healy's greater masterpieces should be that at the Augustinian Church in Dublin, representing St. Augustine meeting St. Monica. The art-loving visitor to Dublin quite rightly makes a point of seeing Harry Clarke's east window of the Crucifixion out at Terenure. It is at least as important for him to visit the Augustinian Church in John's Lane, right in the heart of old Dublin, to see Healy's gravely beautiful procession of sacred figures, all most nobly imagined and set in an ambiance of deep rose-colour and green shot with gold. If it were possible, one would hardly be afraid to show this window to St. Augustine, himself, and to claim that the modest Irish artist had produced a not unworthy act of homage to his life, his ideas and his vision. (There is, incidentally, one difficulty about this window. It should be seen early in the morning for it is only then that the light is satisfactory).

The visitor will also, if he has time, try to see Healy's Annunciation and Visitation windows at Blackrock College. Less epic than the great Augustinian window, they have caught rather the spirit of the first happy phases of the story of the Redemption of the world as told in the Gospel of St. Luke. And then I think the visitor will certainly want to see the noble window at the Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook, representing St. Patrick baptising the chieftain's two daughters — we all know the story — and the lovely blue window of the Madonna with St. Catherine at Dundrum.

Finally to return to Clongowes. We buried Michael Healy at Mount Jerome. Father Fergal Magrath, who was Rector at Clongowes during the period of Healy's later work there, assisted [p.505] at the service. "Who is it?" the cemetery chaplain asked him when he arrived. "A stained glass artist," Father Magrath answered. "A good artist?" the chaplain queried. "Very good." And then, unconscious of the fact that he was uttering an epitaph, the chaplain remarked, "Ah! there's none of them as good as the man who did your windows at Clongowes." I can imagine Michael Healy smiling with shy pride at that little conversation.

P.S. Books on artists are expensive to bring out, and there is little hope that we shall have a worthy book on Michael Healy for a long time to come, but art-lovers will be glad to know that in the March, 1942, issue of Studies, an admirable and exhaustive article on the artist by another of his friends, Mr. C. P. Curran, has appended to it a complete list of Michael Healy's major works in stained glass, both in Ireland and overseas.