Qualla: Michael Healy (artist)

Michael Healy (artist): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NateBergin, CC BY 4.0. The child sat apart in a Dublin tenement, spending every penny he had on pencils and drawing without stop. His friend C. P. Curran would later write that "there was nothing in his parentage to turn him towards the arts." The boy taught himself anyway. By fourteen Michael Healy was out in the world earning his living, and by thirty he had walked into the new stained-glass cooperative An Tur Gloine on a January morning in 1903, picked up a brush, and discovered the medium that would absorb the next thirty-eight years of his life. The glass he made in those years - at Loughrea, at Letterkenny, at Clongowes Wood, at Mayfield in Cork - is among the finest stained glass produced anywhere in the twentieth century.

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Image: NateBergin | CC BY 4.0

Michael Healy (artist): From Tenement to Florence

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NateBergin, CC BY 4.0. Healy was born on 14 November 1873 in a Dublin tenement, and the first record of him at art school is from 1892, when he was eighteen. He thought briefly about becoming a Dominican lay brother and entered the noviciate at Tallaght for about two years before leaving. In 1895 he re...

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Image: NateBergin | CC BY 4.0

Michael Healy (artist): An Tur Gloine

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NateBergin, CC BY 4.0. An Tur Gloine - "the Tower of Glass" - opened in Dublin in January 1903, founded by the painter and philanthropist Sarah Purser to give Ireland its own stained-glass industry rather than buy from Munich or London. The other founding artists were London-born Alfred E. Child (also ...

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Image: NateBergin | CC BY 4.0

Michael Healy (artist): Loughrea Cathedral

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NateBergin, CC BY 4.0. If Healy's work has a centre, it is St Brendan's Cathedral in Loughrea, County Galway, where his windows accumulated across his entire career - from the Simeon installed in 1904 through to the great Last Judgement completed in 1940, the year before his death. The cathedral's inte...

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Image: NateBergin | CC BY 4.0

Michael Healy (artist): The Daily Recorder

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sailko, CC BY 3.0. Healy's reputation rests on his glass, but his daily eye was on something else. Between commissions he was constantly drawing the street people of Dublin - the barmen, the customers, the queues, the figures on benches, the labourers at corners - in rapid pencil and watercolour im...

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Image: Sailko | CC BY 3.0

Michael Healy (artist): Glass That Goes On Living

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sailko, CC BY 3.0. Healy died on 22 September 1941. His final window for Clongowes Wood, The Fourth Dolour: Christ meets His Mother, was completed by Evie Hone. The vast majority of his windows - and there are well over a hundred - still sit in the churches for which they were commissioned, scatter...

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Image: Sailko | CC BY 3.0