Nothing more than an accident of timing lies behind one of the most stunning publications ever produced by an academic press in Ireland. It is hard to imagine how The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision would have been published at all had not Virginia Teehan, then an archivist at University College Cork (UCC) and now director of the Hunt Museum in Limerick, been given the month of August 1990 to catalogue whatever records and objects remained at the university's residential hostel, which was scheduled for demolition, writes Mary Leland
She was given free run of the building and during those hot and dusty weeks she worked her way through a maze of attics, store cupboards and outbuildings, until, astonished at what she had discovered, she reported that her work would take longer than a month.
"Now, over 10 years later, I feel almost confident in saying that the job is done," she says. Her work was eventually completed with the assistance of textile conservationist Elizabeth Wincott Heckett, who, with Teehan, is co-editor of this inventory of the Honan Chapel and its contents, supported by a series of eight papers from a UCC symposium four years ago. The contributors explore all aspects of the chapel - its conception, building, decoration, liturgical history and cultural significance - and in doing so reveal a unique coalescence of spiritual and architectural idealism, the Celtic Revival, and the Irish Arts and Crafts movement.
The chapel - still in use today - is astonishing proof of the force and focus of an extraordinary period in Ireland. The altar tapestries, for example, were the work of the Dun Emer Guild, set up in Dublin by Evelyn Gleeson and the Yeats sisters. William Scott, first professor of architecture at University College Dublin and responsible for the metalwork and enamelling designs, worked for W>B. Yeats at Thoor Ballylee. The window commissions were shared (somewhat to Sarah Purser's disapproval) between her artists at An Tur Gloine (the stained-glass works she founded) and Harry Clarke. Because the inventory describes in meticulous detail even such small items as the ceiling ventilation grille, there is no need to dwell on them here, except as examples of what Teehan and Heckett believe was a vision unified in purpose, right down to the stone quarry from which the chapel was to be built.
The Honan Chapel connects two remarkable men and one remarkable woman with a crucial era in Irish and world history. Isabella Honan was the last of a Cork merchant family enriched by the butter trade, and when she died in 1913 she left a bequest of £40,000 to be used at the discretion of her solicitor and executor, Sir John O'Connell. Already the prestigious Honan Scholarships and the Honan Home for the elderly had been established; O'Connell, supported by Sir Bertram Windle, then president of UCC, decided that the money should be used first to acquire what became the Honan Hostel for male students and then for the building of a chapel on college grounds. Under the Irish Universities Act of 1908, the college was non-denominational and no university funds could be used for a place of worship. O'Connell established the Honan Trust, with Windle as its first chairman, so that the chapel would be managed by a legal entity independent of the college.
But there was much more at work in the friendship between the two men, particularly in the patriotic pride they shared. John O'Connell, a Dublin solicitor who was later ordained a priest and ministered in the Westminster parish in London until his death in 1943, was a member of the Irish Arts and Crafts Committee, a fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. His deep spirituality was supported by strength of purpose. His convictions, writes Teehan, "ensured that Irish craftworkers were provided with a rare opportunity to express their various talents within one artistically harmonious unit - the Honan Collection".
Bertram Windle was the English-born son of an Anglican clergyman and related through his mother to the Coghills of Castletownshend. He trained in medicine at Trinity College Dublin and later became a Catholic in Birmingham, where he was involved in the founding of the university. From the time of his arrival in Cork as president of the then Queen's College, he was active in national educational affairs, especially in the passing of the Irish Universities Act and later in pursuit of his own ideal of a university for Munster. Just as this seemed possible, the general election of 1919 altered the political situation so drastically that Windle, despairing of his plans, accepted a professorship in Toronto, where he remained until his death in 1929.
To what degree Windle shared O'Connell's antipathy to the Italianate style of church architecture then flourishing in Ireland is now impossible to ascertain, because little or no correspondence between the two men has survived. (This is a complaint heard throughout the gorgeous pages of The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision - no records, patterns destroyed, letters, invoices, manifests all lost.) But without Windle's enthusiastic support O'Connell could hardly have achieved what Mairéad Dunleavy, in her introduction, describes as "a treasure-house, created of works from Ireland's 'golden age' of modern craftsmanship, works that in 1916 sought to express the new Ireland".
That new Ireland was in vigorous pursuit of its past, and the persuasive scholarship of Paul Larmour, Peter Lamb, Jane Hawkes, Elizabeth Wincott Heckett and Nicola Gordon Bowe are assembled here to explain how idealism, research and talent all combined to produce what could be seen, at a time of national and international crisis, as an expression of "a unique cultural language". From Byzantium to the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Tara brooch clasping a tapestry Virgin's blue cloak, the writers are meticulous in connecting time and people: the work on Loughrea Cathedral, the experience of Evelyn Gleeson at the workshops of William Morris in London, and the continental training of Barry Michael Egan as vestment-maker and silversmith.
Details, such as the source for the Irish poplin used, as well as the names of the items and their origins, are interwoven with the stories of enamellist Paul Reeves (responsible for the magnificent tabernacle), of calligrapher and artist Joseph Tierney, of Sarah Purser and Alfred Child of An Tur Gloine, of bookbinder Eleanor Kelly, and of the amazing mosaic floor by Oppenheimers of Manchester.
The chapel was built by John Sisks and Sons of Cork (whose little ivory nameplate can still be found on some of the pews) and attributed to architect James F. McMullen, although Paul Larmour believes that, in the design of the Honan, McMullen was "little more than a functionary for Sir John O'Connell".
The solicitor knew what he wanted, but it has to be wondered if that is what he got in the end. He wanted Hiberno-Romanesque simplicity, an aesthetic austerity which would visually enhance, but not distract from, the worship of God. At first glance, the stern cast of the church itself seems austere enough.
But somehow the carvings of the regular niches got a bit riotous, the tabernacle became a glory of colour and narrative, the altar-plate, the frontals and tapestries were filled with details of reference and ornament, and the 19 windows ranged in style from cool to volcanic.
Even O'Connell himself must have got a little carried away by it all. When the chapel was consecrated in 1916 it must have been seen as a profound statement of resurgence.
Designed by Kunnert and Tierney, with photographs by Andrew Bradley, The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision constitutes a history of a time, of a shared desire - both scholarly and spiritual - for the expression of a new nation through the resurrection of old patterns and skills by artists alive to the work of European contemporaries. But times change, and the book is also an act of restitution; for, just as many records of these transactions have been lost, so,to the public eye at least, has much of the Honan treasury.
The book is dedicated to the memory of the former dean of the chapel, Rev Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin, who was guided by architect Richard Hurley in the re-ordering of the chapel after Vatican II and who introduced several of the important new items by such artists as sculptor Imogen Stuart. In his own essay here, Ó Súilleabháin notes that the papal reforms represented a return to the older and more authentic tradition of church liturgy - although its implementation "has not always been characterised by sensitivity".
So the condemned Honan Hostel became a repository for the Honan Chapel and Virginia Teehan found herself dealing with the results of those reforms. Random storage meant that the magnificent sanctuary lamp (now back in its rightful place) was found in a bicycle shed. Again, times change, and a few of these wondrous things have even found a place in UCC's Glucksman Gallery. Now, at last, every one of them, from a little iron bell to the massive wrought-iron gate that was in storage for many years, has been properly, and proudly, reclaimed.
The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision, edited by Virginia Teehan and Elizabeth Wincott Heckett, is published by Cork University Press
