Provenance:
Leo Smith, Dublin
John Taylor, Dublin, acquired from the above in 1986
Private collection, USA
Evie Hone was one of the extraordinary group of woman painters whom Ireland produced in the first half of the 20th century. Together with her friend Mainie Jellett, she was one of the few artists from the British Isles to have played a significant part in the European modernist movement. This work is a classic Cubist Hone, in which theoretical rigour is combined with an exuberant painterly confidence: unlike Jellett, whose work at this time could be almost austere, Hone at her best brings a looser, more unbuttoned quality to her work, which Composition with Guitar perfectly exemplifies.
Evie Hone was born at Roebuck Grove, Co. Dublin, into an artistic family (she was a descendant of Nathaniel Hone the Elder), but illness meant that she spent much of her youth at various spas in Europe. Following a spell at the Byam Shaw School in London, and a brief time as a pupil of the English painter Walter Sickert, she and her friend Mainie Jellett traveled to Paris in 1921. They trained at first under the Cubist Andre Lhote, but the same year approached Lhote's fellow modernist Albert Gleizes, whose stricter interpretation of the rules of Cubism was to become the most important and lasting influence on the two painters. They showed together at the Dublin Painters’ Gallery and for the rest of the 1920s and 1930s travelled between Ireland and France holding exhibitions in Dublin, London and Paris. The pair initially excited scandal and scorn among Irish critics (reviewing an early show, the Irish Statesman described the Cubism at the root of their work as 'artistic malaria'), but gained gradual acceptance and praise.
In the early 1930s, however, as she was being recognized as a major painter, Hone unexpectedly gave up painting almost completely and turned to stained glass design: she had always been of a religious turn of mind, being received into the Catholic Church in 1937, and this may have played a part in this decision. In this field, too, she became a key figure and her best-known work is perhaps her 1952 windows for Eton College Chapel, which was featured on an Irish postage stamp in 1969.
