The Women Artists Who Turned Ireland's Saints Into National Icons

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Lily and Lollie Yeats Helped Stitch and Print a Modern Ireland - A New Exhibition Reframes Their Legacy

At the turn of the 20th century, Irish cultural identity was being argued not only in parliament and on the page, but in thread, ink, and design. A new exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art is placing two often under-credited figures at the center of that story: Lily and Elizabeth“Lollie” Yeats, whose work helped shape the visual and literary language of the Irish Revival.

Titled“Collaborating in Conflict: The Yeats Family and the Public Arts,” the wide-ranging multimedia show is curated by Marjorie Howes, Christian Dupont, and Diana Larsen at the McMullen Museum of Art. While the Yeats name is frequently tethered to the poet W.B. Yeats, the exhibition foregrounds the sisters' roles as cultural producers and organizers, and traces how their collaborations helped define what“Irish” could look like in public life.

Central to the exhibition is the sisters' involvement in Dun Emer Industries, an Irish Arts and Crafts cooperative founded in 1902 with textile designer Evelyn Gleeson. Dun Emer encompassed both Dun Emer Press and the Dun Emer Guild, aligning itself with a broader movement that fused nationalist politics with renewed attention to medieval Irish design, craft traditions, and Gaelic literature.

Like other Arts and Crafts collectives of the period, Dun Emer linked aesthetics to social purpose. Its stated mission was to train and employ Irish women and, as its prospectus put it, to“find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things.” Even its name carried symbolic weight: it referenced Emer of Irish myth, the wife of the hero Cú Chulainn, who in one story teaches girls to embroider.

Within the enterprise, the sisters' responsibilities were distinct but mutually reinforcing. Dun Emer Press, led by Lollie Yeats, focused on publishing Irish authors, including books by W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde, and Katharine Tynan. Dun Emer Guild, led by Lily Yeats alongside Gleeson, produced textiles - rugs, embroidery, and tapestries - using Irish materials such as linen and silk.

The exhibition also highlights the sisters' wider network of women artists. Over their lives, they worked with figures including May Morris, daughter of William Morris, and Pamela Colman Smith, the illustrator of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck - collaborations that underscore how the Irish Revival's public face was built through collective labor as much as individual genius.

Among the show's most striking objects are rarely exhibited embroidered banners of Irish saints - including Saint Patrick, Saint Brigid, Saint Ita, and Saint Kevin - made for St. Brendan's Cathedral, Loughrea, in County Galway, Ireland. The banners were produced through Dun Emer Guild and point to a moment when religious imagery, craft, and nationalism converged.

The commission emerged from a broader push to see Irish culture reflected in sacred spaces. In 1902, St Brendan, Loughrea was built by architect William A. Scott, a project that became a flashpoint for Irish Revivalist decoration. Scott and the church's major benefactor, Edward Martyn - an ardent Irish nationalist - wanted the new cathedral adorned in a style that spoke to contemporary cultural aspirations, particularly among Irish Catholics seeking public recognition of their own traditions.

In 1903, Dun Emer Guild secured a major commission to create 29 banners for the cathedral. Intended to adorn pews, several were also used in processions to mark different sodalities - lay groups devoted to particular saints. Lily Yeats oversaw the hand embroidery, guiding a complex project that brought prominent Irish artists and intellectuals into the design process.

The banners also register a larger historical shift. As art historian Lyndsey McDougall has written, by the early 20th century Irish Catholics were leveraging growing social and political strength to assert independence, supporting Irish industry and crafts. In that climate, rising nationalism and renewed admiration for handmade objects created especially fertile ground for the Arts and Crafts Movement.

“Collaborating in Conflict” positions Lily and Lollie Yeats within that fertile ground - not as supporting characters in a famous family, but as architects of a public aesthetic. In their hands, the work of nation-building was not only written. It was printed, woven, and carried through the aisles.

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