George William Russell (Æ)
One of the most remarkable figures of the Irish cultural renaissance, George W. Russell was born in Lurgan, Co. Armagh, in 1867 and moved with his family to Dublin in 1878. Attending the Metropolitan School there, he made the acquaintance of the young William Butler Yeats, who was to remain his friend through many differences of opinion and perspective until the end of his life. Russell used the pseudonym "AE", derived from the word "AEon”, a term used by the Gnostics. This reference to occultism reflected a trend among writers and painters throughout Europe at that time and found vivid expression in AE's writing and painting. Travelling far beyond the precincts of received Christianity, AE's spirit responded to the teaching of Theosophy, Celtic lore and Hindu scriptures among other bodies of enlightenment.
He was an active worker in the field of agricultural co-operation and edited the journal Irish Homestead from 1905 to 1923. From the latter year until 1930, he served as editor of The Irish Statesman. After the death of his wife the artist moved to Bournemouth, England in 1932, where he died three years later.
Throughout his career, AE's contemporaries were greatly impressed by his spiritual qualities. He could, if he wished, paint the seacoast of Donegal, where he loved to holiday, and cope with the earthbound pursuits of agricultural economics, but he was essentially a visionary, a mystic, whose eyes looked beyond the surfaces of Irish landscape and society. Yeats remembered how different AE's work at the art school was from that of the other students "He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember), and already he spoke to us of his visions".
In a passage from his Autobiographies, Yeats records his personal responses to AE and his art:
Men watched him with awe or with bewilderment; it was known that he saw visions continually, perhaps more continually than any modern man since Swedenborg; and when he painted and drew in pastel what he had seen, some accepted the record without hesitation, others, like myself, noticing the academic Greco-Roman forms, and remembering his early admiration for the works of Gustave Moreau, divined a subjective element, but no one doubted his word.
