Eva Sydney Hone ('Evie') as an Irish painter and stained-glass artist, born 22 April 1894 at Roebuck Grove, Clonskeagh, Co. Dublin, youngest among four daughters of Joseph Hone, prominent maltster and director of the Bank of Ireland, and Eva Hone (née Robinson), who died two days after Evie's birth. Evie came from a family with a long tradition of painting, being related to the eighteenth-century portrait-painter Nathaniel Hone. At the age of 12 she became a victim of poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis), and although she was eventually to regain a certain degree of mobility, she was left a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. Initially educated by a governess, she was sent to see a specialist in Ouchy, Switzerland, where she stayed for six months, and also visited Italy and Spain before moving to London in 1913 to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Bernard Meninsky. Her early career became inextricably linked to that of her close friend Maine Jellett. They both studied in London under Walter Sickert and then moved to France, persuading the cubist painter Albert Gleize to take them on as students, and becoming the effective pioneers of the modern movement in Irish painting. When examples of their abstract and cubist work were exhibited by the Dublin Painters Society in Dublin (1924) they were derided by certain art critics, one of whom commented that the paintings were 'no better and no worse than the productions of the average uninspired art student in her teens'; although others maintained that while Jellett had the firmer vision, Hone was the purer artist.

While Jellett launched a vigorous campaign to educate Irish people on the subject of modernism, the deeply spiritual Hone found herself drawn towards a religious vocation, and in 1925 joined a community of anglican nuns at Truro, Cornwall. She stayed there for nearly a year, but eventually decided she had no vocation, writing to Jellett that 'I feel quite at peace now about it and as certain as one can be of anything' (Arnold, 127). She returned to Dublin to live with her sister at Lucan and continued to travel each year to the south of France with Jellett, resuming her contact with Gleize, who was instrumental in teaching her about the value of shape and colour in the stimulation of vision. Her cubist-derived abstraction was seen in gouaches such as 'Seated woman' (1928), and she exhibited in London and Paris as well as Dublin.

At the beginning of the 1930s her interest in abstract art began to wane. The work of the French painter Georges Rouault had a deep impact on her, as did her religious convictions, and she began to turn her attention to stained glass. She was a regular exhibitor at the RHA (1931-7) and was also a founder member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art.In 1933 she joined An Túr Gloine, where she was to remain for ten years. One of her first pieces was 'The annunciation', in Taney church, Dundrum, Co. Dublin. 

In 1944 An Túr Gloine was dissolved as a co-operative and Hone opened her own studio at Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin. In 1947-8 she was engaged in work for St Mary's church, Kingscourt, Co. Cavan, and also found time to travel to Italy, where she absorbed many new influences. She then commenced work on perhaps her best-known piece, the east window in Eton College chapel, Windsor, completed in 1952, which brought her international fame. In 1953 she was represented at the Contemporary Irish Art exhibition at Aberystwyth, Wales, and at the Tate gallery in London,  and in 1954 was elected an honorary member of the RHA. Unmarried, she died 13 March 1955 .

(c) Stella Frost, A tribute to Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett (1958);