Collection: Mainie Jellett

The artist who changed Irish art forever.

Mainie Jellett (1897–1944) brought Cubism to Ireland at a time when almost no one here was ready for it. Trained in Paris under André Lhote and Albert Gleizes, she returned to Dublin with a radical visual language built on rhythm, structure and spiritual depth — and refused to compromise it through twenty years of critical hostility. In 1943, the year before she died, she founded the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and became its first president. A pivotal figure in Irish modernism, and one of the great painters of twentieth-century Ireland.

Browse the full collection of Mainie Jellett art prints — abstract compositions, cubist paintings and the religious works of her last years — on archival 250gsm matte paper, framed or unframed, with free worldwide shipping.

Hanging them as a set

Jellett went to Paris in 1921 with Evie Hone and worked under André Lhote, then Albert Gleizes, who had never taken pupils before. What Gleizes gave her was not a style but a procedure: take a shape, translate it across the picture, rotate it, repeat. Every one of these is that procedure run again. Alone they read as decoration; together they read as the working-out. She showed the first of them at the Society of Dublin Painters in 1923, and the Irish Times critic wrote that “to me they presented an insoluble puzzle.”

Part of our full Irish Art Prints collection — over 600 works by Ireland's greatest artists.

Read the full story: how she argued Ireland into modern art — or the illustrated guide, with a map of the places she painted.