Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Friendship That Shaped Irish Modern Art
In 1920s Paris, two Dublin women sat in the studios of the Cubist painters Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes, learning a way of building a picture that nobody back home had seen before. One of them, Mainie Jellett, would go on to become the public face of Irish abstraction, defending it in the press against furious critics. The other, Evie Hone, would carry that same training into stained glass and become one of the most important window makers Ireland has produced. They stayed close friends until Jellett's death in 1944, and their story is one of the more remarkable friendships in Irish art history.
In 2025, the National Gallery of Ireland brought their work together for the first time since 1924, in a major exhibition called Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship. Ninety works spanning both women's careers went on public view, tracing everything from their shared Cubist beginnings in Paris to the very different paths their art took afterward. The exhibition has since closed, but the story it told, and the works it reintroduced to a wider audience, are well worth revisiting.
Two Dubliners in Paris
Jellett and Hone had known each other since childhood, taking painting classes together in Dublin under Elizabeth Yeats, sister of the poet W.B. Yeats. In the early 1920s they travelled to Paris together and studied under Lhote and later Gleizes, absorbing a systematic, almost mathematical approach to composition that neither had encountered in Ireland. When Jellett brought this new abstract work home and exhibited it in Dublin, it caused a genuine scandal. One well known critic dismissed her canvases outright. Jellett, unusually for a woman artist of her generation, defended her work publicly and in detail, and in doing so became one of the key figures who dragged Irish art into the twentieth century.
Where Their Paths Diverged
For all they shared in Paris, Jellett and Hone developed in different directions. Jellett kept returning to abstraction throughout her life, though her later work moved toward more figurative and openly religious subjects, drawing on Celtic and early Christian Irish imagery. Hone, meanwhile, largely set aside painting from the 1930s onward and devoted herself to stained glass, becoming a central figure in Ireland's stained glass revival and completing major commissions still seen in churches around the country today. The exhibition placed their work side by side precisely to show this: a shared foundation in Cubism, and two very different artistic lives built on top of it.
Watch: Curators on the Exhibition
The National Gallery's co-curators, Dr Brendan Rooney and Niamh MacNally, discuss the exhibition's key themes and some of its highlights in the video below.
Bring Their Work Home
Both artists are part of our permanent collection at Buy Irish Art, spanning Jellett's Paris-period Cubism through to her later devotional work, and Hone's own early abstract paintings. Each print is made to order and available unframed, framed, or on canvas.
See the full range of Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone prints, canvases, and framed pieces in our Irish Modernism collection.