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Cuala Press among friends

Billy Shortall.

Elizabeth Corbet Yeats’s private press was an important cultural and social enterprise, it operated under the Dun Emer imprint from 1903-1908 and thereafter as The Cuala. The last book was published five years after ECY’s death in 1946. The Press frequently exhibited their publications at home and abroad in arts and crafts exhibitions and these positioned their output among other members of the international private press and the wider Arts and Crafts movement.

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Two Cuala Press Visual Artists

This blog presents the work of two Cuala Press artists, Eileen Greig and Anne Price, about whom the TCD Schooner Foundation Cuala Press research project is seeking more information on their work and careers. It is an objective of the Project to acknowledge and recover overlooked artists who worked for the Press, and to associate the better-known artists with their often-overlooked Cuala design work.

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Loose Book Illustrations in the Fagel Map Portfolios

by Emily Monty

Dr Emily Monty was the Fagel Collection Visiting Research Fellow in autumn 2022. She was hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute at Trinity College Dublin. You can view a conversation between Emily and Ann-Marie Hansen, Project Manager of Unlocking the Fagel Collection here.

The Fagel Collection holds important material history for the study of publishing and collecting in the Dutch Republic of the eighteenth-century. The map portfolios alone contain over 1600 sheets and represent an extraordinary collection of rare and unusually well-preserved materials. Such collections of loose print and manuscript images in their original portfolios rarely survive intact, making the Fagel examples all the more important from the perspective of material and cultural history.

During a three-month Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), I came across a series of illustrations for an eighteenth-century travel narrative of the Caribbean in Portfolio XXII. These precious fragments of a larger illustration project reveal material evidence about practices in book publishing and collecting in The Hague, and give insight into the other discoveries that are waiting to be made as scholars continue to study the portfolio prints and related books held in the Fagel collection. In the following blog post, I describe my research methods and conclusions in hopes of promoting future research on the contents of these portfolios.

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Cluna Studios. A competitor for Cuala Press art prints

Billy Shortall.

While this blog series focuses on the Cuala Industries, it is interesting to look to their Irish contemporaries working in craft printing.  With its establishment in 1922, Cluna Studios emerged as the main competitor to the Cuala Press and Industries, most noticeably in the profitable line of hand coloured art prints and cards.

In ‘Announcements by Members of the Guild of Irish Art-Workers’ published in the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland and Guild of Irish Art-Workers Seventh Exhibition catalogue of 1925, notices for the Cuala and Cluna studios faced each other. Both advertised their hand-coloured prints, cards, calendars, embroidery, and painted wood items such as, candlesticks, bowls, boxes, hairbrushes, and so on. Cuala alone sold hand-printed books. Like Cuala, and the Dun Emer studies, the Cluna Studio was an arts and crafts enterprise established by women craftworkers, namely Gertrude (Gertie) Grew and Margaret (Daisy) O’Keefe, when Ireland was on the cusp of independence.

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