Una Watters: Everywoman Caught in the Rain

Abstract

Una Watters:Everywoman Caught in the Rain Mary Morrissy (bio) girl going by trinity in the rain started it all. Painted in 1959, it shows a woman in profile dressed in a red coat, gripping an umbrella, passing in front of the stone façade of Trinity College Dublin. In the top left-hand corner of the painting the plinth of the statue of the eighteenth-century poet, playwright, and dramatist Oliver Goldsmith is just visible, but the rain is the focus of the work. Jagged, almost two-dimensional slashes with geometrical shadows vividly create the impression of a torrential downpour that the girl of the title has to battle against, giving the modest subject matter, a woman walking in the rain, a bold, modernist appeal. You can sense the physicality of the driving rain, sharp as razor blades, flinty and unforgiving like the austere frontage of Trinity. Apart from the young woman's bright red coat and umbrella, the only other departure from the somber palette is a band of luscious kelly green that bisects the canvas two-thirds of the way down. This band serves to emphasize the driving diagonals of the rain, as if the elements are literally bearing down and oppressing the figure of the woman. And yet she's pressing on, a stoic expression on her stylized face. She is Everywoman caught in the rain. But who is the artist? She is Dublin painter Una Watters, someone you've probably never heard of. How do some artists secure a place in the pantheon while others fade after death, their paintings lost from public view? Is it talent, accident, or luck that secures an artist's fate? In Una Watters's case, she certainly had the talent, but unlucky circumstances worked against her gaining a public reputation. Since 2018, I've been engaged in a campaign to restore—or perhaps to properly establish—the reputation of Una Watters (1918–1965) and to rescue her from what I think is unfair neglect. With the help of Una's family, particularly her niece Sheila Smith, we set out to locate the thirty-seven oil paintings that [End Page 39] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Una Watters, Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain (1959; oil on canvas, 78.74 x 56.42 cm), private collection If the "girl" in Watters's painting references the Danaë myth, then this Danaë is suited and booted and shielding herself against the Irish-style shower—read steely, icy-gray rather than golden—that seems to emanate from Goldsmith. [End Page 40] were shown in a posthumous exhibition of Una's work at the Dublin Painters Gallery in November 1966, the last time her art was on public display. This exhibition was arranged by her widower, the Irish-language novelist and poet Eugene Watters (Eoghan Ó Tuairisc), as a monument to Una's talent and a kind of artistic wake. We're hoping to re-create that exhibition with twenty-seven of Una's recovered oils in Dublin in spring 2022. Our quest has taken us all over the country—from a disused ballroom in Ballinasloe (pace Derek Mahon) to attics and living rooms in Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and beyond. We have not traced all her work—and along the way we've discovered paintings we didn't know existed—but we're hoping that the collation of a body of Una's work in one place for the first time in over fifty years will have a transformative effect on her reputation, alerting art scholars and the public to a singular artistic talent. Let me say from the start that I'm not an art historian by training, so resurrecting Una, as I like to think of it, is a personal crusade inspired solely by a deep admiration of her work rather than any professional expertise. I never met Una; I've come to know her only through her paintings, perhaps the purest relationship one can have with an artist. But I've been in the lucky position of living for the past twenty years with Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain (oil on canvas, 78.74 x...