Michael Healy

Michael Healy (14 November 1873 – 22 September 1941) was an Irish stained glass artist, one of a small number which included Wilhelmina Geddes, Evie Hone, and Harry Clarke, who achieved international recognition for their work in this medium in the first half of the 20th century. He also achieved some distinction as an illustrator and cartoonist early on in his artistic career, and as an ongoing recorder (in rapid pencil and watercolour impressions) of Dublin street characters going about their daily business. Healy also occasionally painted in oil, both portraits and landscapes, exhibiting a small number of the latter during his lifetime. Early life and education Michael Healy was born in a tenement in Dublin's inner city and according to his friend of later years, C.P. Curran, "there was nothing in his parentage to turn him towards the arts, but nonetheless the child spent all his pennies on pencils and sat apart incessantly drawing" and by fourteen he was out in the world earning his livelihood. The first record of Healy attending the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (now National College of Art and Design) occurs in 1892 when he was eighteen years old. Around this time he felt he had a religious vocation which led him to present himself as a postulant lay-brother at the Dominican noviciate in Tallaght, Dublin, but he left after about two years. In 1895 he reenrolled in the DMSA and remained a student (part-time) for three years. According to Curran, Healy's peers were struck by his capacity for drawing and he considered a career in book illustration. In 1897 he secured a job as an illustrator on a new Dominican publication, The Irish Rosary, and subsequently due to the good offices of the editor, Fr Stephen Glendon, he ended up travelling to Florence where he attended the Life School of the Accademia di Belle Arti for eighteen months, an experience that was to have a profound influence on his artistic development. In the spring of 1901 Healy returned to Ireland and was appointed art master at Newbridge College, County Kildare, where he found time to paint some portraits, though by the end of 1902 he had resigned. As C.P.