Postal Stained Glass Window Design of St. Gobnait

Though not well known in the United States unless her alternate names--St. Abigail or St. Deborah--are used, St. Gobnait of Ballyvourney is an immensely popular and much-loved saint in her native Ireland. A 6th-century Irish nun, St. Gobnait is the female patron saint of bees and beekeepers par excellence. + This artwork is a preliminary study for a stained-glass window by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), submitted along with four others to the Honen Chapel Project in 1914. The sketches, executed in five weeks, won Clarke a commission for eleven of the chapel’s seventeen windows, launching his distinguished professional career. (The contract for the other windows was already being filled when Clarke was asked for submissions.) Clarke’s windows, especially his St. Gobnait window, are considered masterpieces of 20th-century Irish art. + Two small subsidiary scenes—St. Gobnait Drawing a Plague Line and St. Gobnait Driving Off a Cattle Raider with Bees—frame a monumental figure of St. Gobnait at the top and bottom. Gobnait herself is shown as a tall, thin, ascetic figure with sharp features, a pale complexion, and long, dark golden yellow hair. Her whitish veil is patterned with light blue flowers; her sleeves, with aqua and cream-colored diamonds; her gown, with multicolored lozenges in dark pinkish beiges, blues, and greens. She holds a model of her abbey’s church and a wooden staff with a hook tip very much like a shepherd’s crook as her crosier of office as abbess. Oversized bees hover around her face, and a beehive appears at her feet. Changes were made to the actual window that was installed. Most notably, St. Gobnait was reimagined as a redhead, the bees around her face were reduced from 4 to 2, her veil was silvered, and her gown was rendered in a color palette reduced to dark blues. + Both the preliminary sketch and the finished window are highly representative of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. + ImageCredit: Stained glass window design of St. Gobnait in pencil, pen and inks, and watercolor on board for Honan Chapel, University College, Cork, Ireland, by Harry Clarke, 1914, approximately 21.5 in high by 4.5 in wide (54.6 cm by 11.5 сm), Collection of the Rakow Research Library, The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, Public Domain. + St. Gobnait’s Feast: February 11