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Making beautiful things accessible: The Cuala Press Project Angela Griffith, assistant professor in History of Art, looks at an extraordinary Irish printing press and how Trinity Virtual Library and the Schooner Foundation, are opening it up to the public T he making of beautiful things and the celebration of the craftsperson were the creative driving forces behind the Arts and Crafts movement which originated in Britain in the late 19th century as a reaction to the industrial revolution and its mechanisation of art and decoration. The movement, which spread to Europe and north America, stood for traditional craftsmanship and deployed designs inspired by a range of sources from an imagined romantic chivalric past to the flamboyance of art nouveau and modernist subjectivity, while advocating economic and social reform to bring about more egalitarian societies. In Ireland, the Arts and Crafts movement found expression in a number of seminal initiatives including internationally renowned stained-glass companies such as the Harry Clarke Studios and An Túr Gloine, the cooperative where Wilhelmina Geddes and others created masterful, innovative designs. The female-run initiatives of the Dun Emer Industries and later The Cuala Industries dominated their respective fields in weaving and needlecraft, and it was there that Elizabeth Corbet Yeats revived and sustained the practice of hand- printing and book design in Ireland.
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The prints, bookplates and illustrated materials produced by the Cuala Press are among the most important Irish graphic works ever made. From its foundation in the early 1900s, until Elizabeth’s death in 1940, the Cuala Press employed Irish artists to illustrate the works of Irish writers and to produce individual prints. It was an extraordinary period in Irish arts and letters. Elizabeth’s brother Jack Yeats is the most celebrated contributor to the press but other contributors include leading artists Dorothy Blackham, Beatrice Moss Elvery Campbell (Lady Glenavy) and Hilda Roberts, while Elizabeth’s eldest brother, the poet William Butler Yeats, was the Press’s editor and primary writer. Following donations from the Yeats family in the 1980s, and other subsequent family bequests, Trinity Library holds the Cuala Press Archive which includes both the print collection and the business archives. In 2017, the collection was augmented by a donation from Vincent Ryan, founder of the Boston-based Schooner Foundation, of over 100 hand- coloured prints spanning Cuala’s history. Now the Schooner Foundation is supporting The Cuala Press Project , under its Education & Economic Empowerment programme, to enable open access to this rich seam in Irish visual culture. As part of Virtual Trinity Library - the college’s initiative to digitise and make accessible its outstanding library holdings - and in partnership with the Trinity Irish Art Research Centre, The Cuala Press Project will catalogue, conserve, research and digitize the Cuala Press collections. Since early 2022, an expanding collection of Cuala prints and administrative records have been made digitally accessible to the wider public for the first time, providing an exciting and germane cornerstone for new scholarship in Irish cultural studies. The Cuala Press is significant in the history of printing in Ireland and Britain, not only for its artistry, but for its political and social agenda. Its visual and textual productions reflected the agendas and aesthetics of Irish Revivalism, a movement centred on Irish nationalism and the revival of interest in Gaelic heritage. Cuala Press images frequently showcased the distinctiveness of Irish landscape and represented ancient Irish society as heroic and self- determining. Crucially, the Cuala Press was run by women. In keeping with the ideals of the Arts & Crafts movement, its mission was to provide skills and training for women to allow them to live independent lives. Its creative outputs, alongside its archives, provide valuable insights into the social and economic status of working women in the first half of the twentieth century, and into the agency of women in art and design production. The Cuala Press Project, supported by the Schooner Foundation is helping to ensure this vitally important historical material is visible and accessible to all those interested in Irish history and literature, the Arts & Crafts movement, and visual and material culture. It is enabling scholars to revisit and revaluate the contribution of the press and its artists to Irish identity formation, and is shining a light on Cuala’s enterprising women and artists, providing further perspectives on political, social, and cultural life in twentieth century Ireland. View The Cuala Press Project collection here
