Marie Howet - A Belgian Painter on Achill Island, Mary J. Murphy & Antic-Ham

Born in Libramont on 24th March 1897, Marie Francoise Céline Howet, was a woman in a hurry right from the start. She began to walk at 8 months, and while musically gifted, she opted to devote her life entirely to painting at 16. In 1913 she began her studies under Constant Montald in the Academie Royale des beaux Arts in Brussels, who urged her to paint freely, with no restrictions. He was also a tutor to René Magritte, and Howet's other teachers included Charles Van Landuyt and Guillaume Van Strijdonck. When WW I broke out in August 1914, the Howet family moved to France where in 1915 Marie commenced studies in the Academy des Beaux Arts in Paris. There, the portrait specialist, Ferdinand Humbert, was one of her teachers, and so gifted was Howet that her fellow students called her 'little Renoir'.
Raised by her mother in the belief that she had Celtic ancestry, Marie Howet arrived at the door of St. Colmans Knitting Industries, Dooagh, on 4th August 1929, a Sunday, clasping a 'talisman' in her hand on which was written Eva O'Flahertys' name and address. She had come to paint pictures that would be the darker, 'Nordic', counterpoint to her sunnier Greek and Turkish work in 'Les Chansons d'Evangelia' (1927), and to explore what she thought of as the home of her forebearers. In Dooagh she painted Eva's portrait, and that of Annie McNulty and her sister Mary, and others, and mingled with Catherine Glynn - Eva's 'right hand woman' - and many artists/ visitors on the island. Little Annie, on Eva's instructions, carried Marie's painting stool up and down the mountains, and to Keem, Keel, Dooagh, Dugort, Slievemore and Corrymore. Marie, who rose at the crack of dawn, later described Eva as 'the spirit of Dooagh', and spent over three months on the island during that first visit, staying in 'Pat Macs' little house, right beside the knitting industries.
-Mary J. Murphy