Evie Hone HRHA (1894-1955) Untitled Gouache, 60 x 37cm (23...

Hammer

€8,000

Evie Hone HRHA (1894-1955) Untitled Gouache, 60 x 37cm (23½ x 14½'') Although untitled this painting by Evie Hone depicts The Crucifixion and was completed in c.1928-1930. Its predominant decorative palette of pastel pinks and pale purples, grey-blues and pale yellow, its shallow pictorial space and distinctive round arched canopy all derive from specific medieval sources. A smaller version by Hone (almost half the size at 31.6 x 21.8cm) of the same picture is in the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI.7852). The NGI version is much darker in tone, dominated by greys and golds, strokes of red and rose pinks, and has an unprecedented and almost graphic use of black akin to the lead lines found in stained glass. Both paintings were made sometime after the spring of 1928 when Hone went to France to join Mainie Jellett and Albert Gleizes who had been painting at Moly-Sabata, the utopian art colony established by Gleizes in the department of Ardèche of the Rhône valley in eastern France the year before. Gleizes had first painted a Crucifixion scene in 1926, after an intense five years of experimentation in abstraction. However, the version he painted in 1930 is compositionally closer to Hone’s two versions of the subject. Like the NGI painting it is smaller, measuring 24 x 16cm; it is now in the collection of Musée national d’art moderne in Paris (AM 1357 D). Again, it is darker, composed of deep blues, browns, greens and ochre creams and has more patterns of stripes and dots than Hone’s more linear and lyrical versions. A further version by Gleizes from 1935 is in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI.2008.35). This is perhaps the largest of all the known versions (117.5 x 77.3cm) and is marked by stronger, more intense primary colours – predominantly blues, oranges and greens. Gleizes returned again to the theme in 1949 about the time he was completing etchings for an illustrated edition of the seventeenth century French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s Pensées sur l'homme et Dieu (published in 1950). When setting up his colony at Moly-Sabata, Gleizes had initiated a scheme of mural decoration for the Église Sainte-Blanches at nearby Serrières. This was to depict The Crucifixion, The Coronation of the Virgin and The Descent from the Cross in the format of a triptych. Gleizes and Jellett worked on the scheme for most of 1927, but the following year just as Hone arrived the project came to an abrupt end when the designs were rejected by the church. Hone’s two versions of The Crucifixion follow on from this scheme and subsequent variants by Jellett and Gleizes of which Jellett’s Coronation of the Virgin (Homage to Fra Angelico) (Private Collection) is perhaps the best known. The source for all these paintings by Gleizes, Jellett and Hone is more than likely Hone’s copy of André Jolles’s Fra Angelico da Fiesole: Acht Farbige Wiedergaben Berühmter Gemälde (published in Leipzig in 1926). Hone’s versions of The Crucifixion, as well as a number of pochoirs (limited edition colour prints), are among the few known works by her from this critical period. Dr. Joseph McBrinn, October 2024