Gladys Maccabe, MBE HRUA FRSA MA(Hons) ROI (5 June 1918 – 22 February 2018) was a Northern Irish artist, journalist and founder of The Ulster Society of Women Artists.
Early life
Gladys Moore Maccabe was born in Randalstown, County Antrim on 5 June 1918. Her mother Elizabeth was a designer in the linen business, and her father George Chalmers, a Scot, was a former army officer and artist specialising in calligraphy and illumination. One of her ancestors was the 18th-century Scottish painter, Sir George Chalmers.
Maccabe received a general education at Brookvale Collegiate in Belfast. She had a picture published in the Royal Drawing Society's magazine when she was 16 years old and went on to study sculpture and commercial art at the Belfast School of Art. She declined an invitation to study in London after her father died. In 1941 she married fellow artist, musician and childhood friend Max Maccabe. She and Max exhibited together on many occasions, starting with a group show at Robinson & Cleaver's department store in Belfast, 1942. The couple held their first joint exhibition in 1949 at London's Kensington Art Gallery. In the same year they also had a joint exhibition at the Dawson Gallery in Dublin. In 1958 the couple had a show at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery and another at the Richie Hendriks Gallery in Dublin in 1961.
In 1945 Maccabe and her husband Max joined the Campbell brothers Arthur and George, the Henry sisters, Olive and Margaret, Colin Middleton, Tom Carr, Maurice Wilks, James McIntyre and others, in the only official exhibition from the Ulster branch of the Artists' International Association sponsored by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (NI) at the Belfast Museum.
The MacGaffin Gallery at Pottinger's Entry in Belfast was the venue for a group exhibition of experimental and modernist works with her husband, Nevill Johnson, Aaron McAfee and Olive Henry in 1946. Maccabe was one of seventy-three exhibitors when the Cultural Relations Committee took a touring exhibition of Contemporary Irish Painting to Rhode Island, Boston and to Ottawa. She was represented at the Royal Ulster Academy 's annual show in 1950 by a portrait of Her Majesty the Queen at Balmoral, July 1950. Maccabe showed in the 1956 Artists of Fame and Promise exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London.
Gladys and Max were members of the group of artists known as The Contemporary Ulster Group, which included Dan O'Neill, George Campbell, and Gerard Dillon, all of whom she had met during WW2. William Conor was also an associate and Maccabe painted his portrait in 1957. With the assistance of Olive Henry, Gladys formed the Ulster Society of Women Artists in 1957 with ten invited artists, as she felt that there was an untapped wealth of talent among the women artists of Northern Ireland. Maccabe served as the Society's first President. The Society's first major exhibition was in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery in 1959. Maccabe’s son, Christopher Maccabe CB, a prominent ex-civil servant, attended the society's sixtieth anniversary exhibition in 2017 as her representative. Maccabe showed a stained glass work with a poem by Anne Ruthven entitled the Crooked Cross at the USWA annual exhibition at the Bell Gallery in 1965.
During the 1960s Gladys was a fashion and arts correspondent working for newspapers and television. She was Northern Ireland Art Critic for the Irish Independent and the Irish News and wrote columns for the Sunday Independent, Leisure Painter and the Ulster Tatler. She was also fashion correspondent for the Belfast News Letter and BBC Northern Ireland.
Maccabe had a one woman show at the Emer Gallery, a commercial gallery in Belfast city centre, in the autumn of 1993.
Work
Much of Gladys' work is concerned with the depiction of gatherings of people, whether at race meetings, a fair or market, on the beach or in a shop. She has also painted flowers, still lifes, and a variety of abstract works. Both Gladys and her husband were skilled musicians who travelled across Ulster delivering lectures, combining live painting with live music. Gladys played piano whilst Max played violin.