In a country where her type of woman was not uncommon, Lily Yeats (Fig. 1) was an unusual model of benevolent maternalism. Although without Lady Gregory’s wealth, Sarah Purser’s energy or Maud Gonne’s charisma she still had a significant effect, both as a William Morris disciple and as mentor of the young; though being of the retiring type of Irish Protestant, she did much good unseen. More than forty years after her death one of Lily’s ‘unseens’, by a happy accident,1 has come to light and with it three of her embroideries: two of them gifts to young protégés (Figs. 4 & 5). In the normal course of events Cuala embroideries, though supervised by Lily, were the product of a co-operative and unsigned; most unusually the three embroideries that have been rediscovered are all signed by Lily being her own personal work. (Anne Yeats owns two signed embroideries by her aunt: Three Musicians and Innisfree.) They date from the period of her retirement from the Cuala workshops due to ill-health in the early 1930s to her last accomplished embroidery, Apple Trees (Fig. 4), from 1940-41.2
Probably due to the arts and crafts revival immersing itself in the communal practices of medieval guildry, embroiderers worked in groups in workshops and infrequently emerged in person as the author or artist of a work. Of the seven works of embroidery that I illustrated in The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala not one is signed; indeed until recently the great Morris bed hangings (Fig. 2), originally at Kelmscott, had been claimed to be by Jane and May Morris, but it is now known that much of the work was by Lily.3 In London Lily was employed in the Morris workshops from 1888 to 1894 and when she came back to Ireland to work with the Dun Emer co-operative under Miss Gleeson in 1902 she taught her apprentice girls in the purest Morris tradition, five years before its wide dissemination in the manuals published by Morris disciples.
William Morris taught himself to embroider in 1857 when he was apprenticed to the architect G E Street who was an authority on medieval textiles.4 He bought, and learned from de-constructing, medieval English embroideries in the style called opus anglicanum. He encouraged the women of his family and his female friends in reviving decorative needlework, as he thought it was the art most practicable for house-bound women. Slowly, through Morris’s relations and friends, a revival of interest in the art began to show results. The Royal School of Needlework was founded in 1872. Mrs Morris’s sister, Bessie Burden, became chief technical instructor there in 1880.
After Morris’s death in 1896 his innermost circle of friends re-inforced his teachings with a splendid series of monographs: The Artistic Crafts Series of Technical Handbooks, edited by W R Lethaby who was in 1896 co-director of The Central School of Arts and Crafts, and its Principal from 1902-11. Grace Christie’s Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving was published in the same year, 1906, as that other seminal handbook in the series, Writing and Illuminating and Lettering by Edward Johnston. In his introduction to Mrs Christie’s volume the editor wrote of the high esteem in which English embroidery was held in the middle ages, and of the long apprenticeship of eight years common in the medieval trades guilds. Morris was never far from his thoughts: ‘of course the highest things of design, as well as of workmanship come only after long practice and to the specially gifted, but none the less every human creature must in some sort be a designer, and it has caused immense harm to raise a cloud of what Morris called “sham technical twaddle” between the worker and what should be the spontaneous inspiration of his work.’
Mrs Christie’s manual is a model of clarity, and in her section on stitches we see plain the nuts and bolts of Lily’s technique. Many of the stitching techniques still carried their Latin names, a survival from the days of the trades guilds, when all over Europe, whatever the mother tongue of the embroiderer, there was the common vocabulary of Latin technical terminology. The manual is illustrated with embroideries by Mrs W R Lethaby and May Morris, works against which Lily’s show well in comparison. As in opus sectile work, the embroiderer breaks the field of the design into areas with edging: stem stitches braiding over one another on curved outlines and chain and herringbone stitches for strong linear work. For rendering masses of colour there was satin stitch, like hatching, all in one direction to show the gloss of the silk, and as a development of that stitch a technique formerly called opus plumarium, feather stitch, where tones of colour were ‘feathered’ by degrees, fanning out from light to dark to give form and depth of field. This technique we can see clearly in Lily’s Apple Trees (Fig. 4) where she also uses most boldly a raised area of stitching called ‘French knots’ (or bullion knots) to represent the blossom.
Lily Yeats was a parishioner of the Church of Ireland Rector of Dundrum, Canon Gibbon, whose son William Monk Gibbon, the poet and novelist, was to write the first biography of W B Yeats.5 Canon Gibbon’s daughter, Mary Elinor, had married a merchant navy officer in 1924, but he had died young, leaving her a widow with two young sons, David and John, who were six and four at the time of their father’s death in 1931. This coincided with Lily’s retirement, and in her leisure she took under her wing the young widow and her sons, for they were connections. The Yeats and Gibbon families were related by marriage and Lily always identified herself as ‘your cousin Lily Yeats’ on her gifts of books.6 As schoolboys John and David were taken to visit Lily at Gurteen Dhas near the Bottle Tower about three times a year, once a term from their view. The postage stamps from around the world that came to the Cuala were kept for John, and also those many stamps from Australia that came from Lily’s voluminous correspondence with Ruth Pollexfen. Other treats included being taken to the Abbey Theatre, where the Yeats sisters had their reserved free seats: ‘Third row stalls left’. The boys were completely unaware of other members of the Yeats family, though later they were neighbours of Mrs W B Yeats in Palmerston Road. While at Gurteen Dhas itself, Elizabeth Corbet Yeats shared the house with her sister Lily until her death in early 1940. She worked in the Baggot Street print room until the very end and would not have been part of Lily’s social rounds. When I asked John Meredith if he had any memories of Elizabeth, he could not remember ever seeing her and was puzzled to recall that Lily never mentioned her.
In 1941 Lily gave to David Meredith the embroidery Cornfield with Poppies (Fig. 5) and to John Meredith the embroidery Apple Trees (Fig. 4). John Meredith inherited from his mother The Stone Wall (Fig. 3) embroidered for Canon and Mrs Gibbon in 1932. This was commissioned and presented by the Mothers’ Union of Dundrum. Lily took a particular interest in David, whose literary gifts she encouraged. She read, and commented on, his work, and influenced his reading. John, his brother, who was quite different in character, acknowledges Lily’s kindness and generosity to a young boy in his mid-teens. After taking a degree in English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, David was the schoolmaster on Achill Island for eight years, during which time he took a B.Litt. in Logic at Trinity under A A Luce and E J Furlong. He developed and published his research as a mathematical logician after his move to America, where he died in 1992. His brother says: ‘mathematical logic was his foremost love.’ John Meredith has presented Cornfield with Poppies to the Yeats Collection in the National Gallery of Ireland in memory of his brother.

(Anyone with knowledge of the whereabouts of examples of Lily Yeats’s work is asked to please contact the author or Hilary Pyle at the National Gallery of Ireland).
Gifford Lewis is author of The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala, (Dublin, 1994).

1. John Meredith, a retired headmaster living in Oxfordshire, had been unaware that my study of the Yeats sisters and their Cuala work was being compiled in the early 1990s. After its publication in 1994 he learned from Clare Craven, the wife of his cousin, Liam Gibbon, in the Seychelles, that I had been searching for examples of Lily’s work. He contacted me and brought to Oxford the three embroideries that had been but a few miles from me when the book was being written. A great deal of Anglo-Irish material in the form of art works and papers has spread all over the British Isles due to families re-settling in mainland Britain, making it worth while to request information on the whereabouts of such material in the British press as well as the Irish.
2. Letter from WB Yeats to Scroope, National Bank manager, 18 December 1937.
3. Letter from Lily Yeats to her father quoted in Gifford Lewis, The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala, (Dublin 1994), pp.112-13.
4. Fiona MacCarthy, in William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London 1994), charts his life-long involvement.
5. Canon Gibbon restored the church of St Nahi’s in Dundrum from a ruinous state, and commissioned works to beautify it. We find here a number of works that remind us of the large part played by the church, Catholic and Protestant, in placing orders that sustained the artists and crafts men of the crafts revival in Ireland: Evie Hone’s earliest work in stained glass (1933), three small panels: Ethel Rhind (1914) one panel; Catherine O’Brien (1917-47), five panels; a series of memorial embroideries by Lily Yeats over the altar. In the churchyard is the grave of Lily and Elizabeth Yeats.
6. The relationship is remote, the type of cousin described in Ireland as ‘far-out’. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a brother and sister called Taylor married, one to a Yeats, the other to a Gibbon. They were children of the Dublin Castle official, William Taylor. See William M Murphy, Prodigal Father, (New York 1978), pp.19-20, and Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland, 1958, under Gibbon.