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The concrete artistic legacy of the 1966 Easter Rising commemoration is still plain to see, particularly in Dublin – Oisín Kelly’s monumental Children of Lir and Daithí Hanly’s Iron Age weapon mosaics in the Garden of Remembrance, for example. But the official symbol of the Rising’s 50th anniversary year, once intended to supplant the Easter Lily, is now all but forgotten.
The “Sword of Light” image was ubiquitous in the 1966 golden jubilee year. If we were to apply today’s parlance we’d say it was the signature brand. It appeared on badges, brooches and tie pins, it was stamped on all official publications, showed up in hallmark form on special silverware struck by the Assay Office, featured on first-day cover stamps and adhesive stickers and perhaps most memorably on blue and yellow wooden plaques pinned to the fronts of buses.
The symbol was designed by the Dublin artist Una Watters (1918-1965) and won her an Arts Council award when it was chosen following an open competition.
The Sword of Light (also known as An Claidheamh Soluis) has deep resonances – it was the weapon with magical properties used by King Nuada of the Tuatha de Danann to slay giants, according to Celtic mythology.
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Its image was later adopted by scholars of the 19th-century Gaelic revival to symbolise both armed rebellion and cultural renaissance, and in the early 20th century the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) called its weekly newspaper, edited by Patrick Pearse, An Claidheamh Soluis.
According to the 1966 Commemoration Committee, the winning Sword of Light motif was meant to represent “intuitive knowledge, education and progress”.
In fact, the search for a new Rising logo was part of a government attempt to replace the Easter Lily emblem, which the republican movement, proscribed at the time, was selling door to door in order to raise funds. Ironically, Una Watters’ winning design – a sleek, stylised depiction of the Sword – subliminally references the pure, clean lines of the lily.
Winning the competition was a high point for Watters, and a showcase for her refined design aesthetic.
Born Una McDonnell in 1918, she attended the National College of Art at the encouragement of Maurice McGonigal. She juggled classes with her day job as a librarian. One of her paintings, The Four Masters, still hangs in Phibsboro branch library where she worked; another, The People's Gardens, is in the Hugh Lane collection in Dublin City Gallery.
Hugh Lane curator Logan Sisley gave me a sneak view of The People's Gardens (1963) in the gallery's stores since the painting is not on show. It's a witty pastoral depiction of the Phoenix Park with distinct echoes of Seurat's La Grande Jatte. There are the same rolling green swards but they're less populated than Seurat's and full of angular shadows and geometric trees. Instead of ladies with high bustles and dainty umbrellas, there are rugged-up couples and in the foreground a burly, golden-haired child chasing a ball.
Most of Una’s work was completed at an easel set up in the kitchen of the small cottage at Cappagh Cross in Finglas which she shared with her husband, the Irish language novelist and poet Eoghan Ó Tuairisc.
Devoted to their art, they made a striking couple, honeymooning in a horse-drawn caravan which Eoghan had built himself, and summering in Ballinasloe (Ó Tuairisc’s home town) where Una painted and fished in the river Suck.
Una was also a jobbing artist. A superb draughtswoman and calligrapher, she created greeting cards and did illustrations for journals and annuals. She designed and scribed a series of exquisite booklets of religious meditations in the 1960s, written by her uncle, poet and Sinn Féin activist Brian O’Higgins, which drew on the Celtic manuscript tradition.
She exhibited frequently in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s alongside Louis le Brocquy, Sean O'Sullivan (who was her cousin), Harry Kernoff, William Leech and Muriel Brandt and featured in numerous Royal Hibernian Academy and Oireachtas shows. Working primarily in oils, she was eclectic in her range – rural landscapes, semi-naive depictions of the new suburb of Finglas, religious subjects, and in her latter years paintings that moved towards abstraction. Her 1959 Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain, for example, though figurative – showing a woman in a proper Irish downpour – is decidedly abstract in the way Watters depicts the sheets of rain in jagged, almost solid slashes that run left to right diagonally across the canvas, giving the work a three-dimensional aspect and a bold modernist appeal.
It suggested a new direction in her work, one that she never got to explore fully. Nor did she live to enjoy the acclaim her winning Rising logo design might have brought her. According to her sister, Sheila Byrne, the Arts Council award arrived on the same day that her coffin left Dublin for burial in Ballinasloe, following her sudden death at the age of 47.
A posthumous exhibition of her oil paintings was organised by a grieving Ó Tuairisc a year after her death. The biographical note lists among her influences Botticelli, Velasquez, Celtic illuminations, the poets Chaucer, Dante and Keats, Irish skies and stonework and Greek myth. The show featured 37 works, many of them scattered now or in private hands. In Una Watters’s centenary year (she was born on November 4th, 1918), it would be a fine thing to see them united once again to celebrate an artist regarded by many of her admirers as unjustly overlooked.