Deposition

Artist Mainie Jellett (1897 - 1944)

Date1939

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions121.4 x 68.9 cm

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Donated by the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, 1945.

Object number991

DescriptionMainie Jellett has earned her place in the history of Irish art, along with her fellow artist Evie Hone, as one of the first Irish painters to exhibit abstract art in Ireland. Such abstract paintings were based upon rigorous teachings of the French artist Albert Gleizes. She worked for a number of years in this manner but gradually found it too confining and she wished to reintroduce recognisable subject matter without what she called 'the materialism of the so-called academic tradition. In 1935, she visited an exhibition of Chinese art at the Royal Academy in London and she found in this a combination of recognisable subjects incorporating the rhythmic forms of abstract painting.

As a very religious person, Mainie Jellett applied this new manner of working to the traditional canon of church art. The background of the image is entirely abstract, however, the figures, which are the real subject matter of this work, are clearly defined despite their highly simplified forms. Her choice of colour owes nothing to naturalism, and the composition is painted using flat tones of red, grey and blue. The composition is highly formal, the figures grouped within an oval format set in front of the symmetrical forms of the schematised background.

(Catalogue Entry [44]: A Century of Irish Painting - Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1997, pp. 155-156)

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