An Túr Gloine

Affiliated artists included Michael Healy, Evie Hone, Beatrice Elvery, Wilhelmina Geddes, Catherine O'Brien, Kathleen Quigly, and founder Sarah Purser.

[1] The original impetus for the project, spurred by the Irish cultural activist Edward Martyn, was the building of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Loughrea, County Galway, which was to become St Brendan's.

[1] A writer for The Studio, a magazine of fine and applied art, called the recently formed An Túr Gloine "perhaps the most noteworthy example of the newly awakened desire to foster Irish genius," describing it as "at once a craft school, where instruction in every detail connected with the designing and production of stained glass is given to the workers, and a factory from which some beautiful work has already appeared."

[4] The studio is regarded as part of the Arts and Crafts Movement,[5] but was infused also with the contemporary spirit of Irish revivalism[6] and drew on the artistic tradition of Celtic manuscript illumination.

[8] A commission for An Túr Gloine occasioned an outburst of criticism in Samhain magazine from the Irish poet W. B. Yeats on how the "bourgeois mind is never sincere in the arts": Galway convent a little time ago refused a fine design for stained glass, sent from Miss Sarah Purser's studio, because of the personal life in the faces and in the attitudes, which seemed to them ugly, perhaps even impious.