Michael Healy Personal Reminiscences

A Machine-Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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[p.113]
By Thomas MacGreevy

Michael Healy was born in Dublin in 1873. He died at Mercers Hospital, Dublin, in September, 1941. Outside a very small circle his name is hardly known. And 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 the three centuries of the Penal times 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 times, go into churches, and look at stained glass widows 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 draughtsmanship and a splendour of colour that were only rarely surpassed in the works of the great stained glass artists of medieval 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. They are there in nearly every county from Cork to Antrim, from Wexford to Donegal, at Mayfield, 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 draughtsmanship, 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 my contemporary and friend, and I used sometimes to borrow his bicycle in order to [p.114] 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 under a cluster of trees, and the donkey grazing a little way off. I did not know who had designed the window, but apart altogether from it 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 gentleness as to make it evident that the artist who had imagined and projected 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 county-man of my own, and gave me the kindest of welcomes. He was gratified by my interest in the window and 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 saw 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 breath 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 much mind my having used his bicycle to discover the work of Michael Healy. Harry was not that kind [p.115] of man. He knew 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, 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 I shall come to that.

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 "AE", the editor of The Irish Statesman. It was published the following Saturday. And for a week or so I lay low and went near none of them. Then somebody told me that at The Tower of Glass, they — Mr. Healy's name was not specified and it might just mean Miss Geddes, Miss Rhind, Miss O'Brien and Mr. Goldrick — they were rather pleased than otherwise. However 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 came home and 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 think 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 figures, the Holy Child, Mary, Joseph, 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 Christchild 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 [p.441] man of the people. Though religious subjects might arise in connection with his work, he never told me that 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 make it unlikely that he would ever be able to follow in the steps of the cloistered 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 La 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 illustrating 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 forbears were, and to grow familiar with the temper, the attitude of mind, that would make it possible for him to recreate the great tradition in terms of his own Irish experience and environment.

It was about that same time that on the initiative of Edward Martyn and with the practical and artistic assistance of Miss Purser, An Túr 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 Healy had been a student at the Dublin School of Art where Hughes had a modelling class. Soon after he returned home therefore he 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 mediaeval spirit which is represented by 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 teachers and was working out developments of stained glass technique, especially in the matter of the aciding I referred to earlier, that were to 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 Judgement in the transepts, was to recreate 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 St. 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 no less important for him to visit the Augustinian Church in John's Lane, right in the heart of Old Dublin — he should go early in the morning for it is only then that the light is satisfactory — to see Healy's less tragic but not less gravely beautiful procession of sacred figures, all most nobly imagined and set in an ambience of deep rose-colour and green shot with gold. Were it 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.

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 McGrath, who was Rector at Clongowes during the period of Healy's later work there, assisted at the service.

"Who is it?" the cemetery chaplain asked him when we arrived. "A stained glass artist," Father McGrath answered. "A good artist?" the chaplain queried. "Very good." "Ah," said the chaplain, "he couldn't be as good as the man who did your windows at Clongowes." I can imagine Michael Healy smiling with shy pride at that little conversation. Lux perpetua luceat ei.