Art: Evie at Eton

Still catching up on Battle-of-Britain bomb damage, Eton last week dedicated a splendid new window for its cherished 15th century chapel, but it was hardly the kind of window old Etonians might have expected.

It was a huge (33 by 45 feet) dazzling array of dancing lights and colors considerably more suggestive of the Byzantine east than of the Gothic north. The lines were angularly primitive, the colors warm turquoise blues, smoldering crimsons, emerald greens, rich topaz yellows. The figures and scenes had an oriental look—a dark-haloed Judas, a grey, long-armed figure of Christ on the Cross, a group of stiff, formalized saints seated at a round table for the Last Supper. Wrote Critic John Russell in the Sunday Times: it “is not the turbulent board meeting of Leonardesque tradition, but a starlit gathering of saintly rustics. [The window’s qualities] put it at once in the company of the great European windows.”

Don’t Be Silly. The maker of Eton’s new window was no Eastern craftsman, but a frail, schoolmarmish Dublin spinster named Evie Hone, who, at 58, is considered one of the top stained-glass artists of her time. Evie started out as a painter of fair-to-middling abstractions, but quit when she decided “it was leading nowhere.” One day she visited a Dublin stained-glass works and asked if she could do a window. “They told her not to be silly. Evie Hone stamped angrily home, did one on her own for a rural church, and has been at it ever since.

Today her windows glitter in churches all over the British Isles, and she has turned out everything from a somber, Rouaultish window for a Dublin Roman Catholic military chapel, to a greenish-gold abstract for the Irish Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. A Catholic in a Protestant family, she lives alone, ventures out seldom. “I have to save what energy I have for my work,” she explains. Her one extravagance is Paris (“My excuse is to buy glass”), and twice a year she can be seen rambling around Montparnasse, a tiny figure in mannish tweeds puffing on French cigarettes.

A Final O.K. The rest of the time, Evie Hone works intently in her bare-floored, glass-littered studio, sketching out her windows, painting the glass with her own color formulas, finally supervising the glazier who leads in the thousands of pieces. Her Eton window was so big (40,000 pieces) that she never saw it together until workmen set it in the grey-ribbed chapel. For the best part of a fortnight, Evie sat in the chapel, stared fixedly at her window, considered and rejected a change or two. Finally, she pronounced it O.K.

For the most part, Eton agreed with Evie and the critics. A few hard-shelled old-liners thought the colors “a bit loud.” But mostly, Eton found its brilliant new window a refreshing change from tradition. Evie had wanted to do two more small windows for the chapel to balance her big piece. By last week Eton had told Evie to get to work.