The Honan Collection

The fundamental approach to the design of the Honan Chapel, lies in the belief that no church can be regarded as a beautiful and worthy whole unless all those things which are needed for the service of the altar are designed and fashioned for it as part of a thought-out scheme based on one guiding ideal – the same idea which appears in the building and the decoration also inspires and moulds the architecture, all the furniture, the altar plate and the vestments, and everything which is used in the service of the chapel.

The Honan chapel was created as a treasure–house of works from Ireland’s ‘golden age’ of modern craftsmanship, works that in 1916 sought to express the new Ireland. The Honan has become a monument to the Irish Arts and Crafts movement and to the Celtic Revival. The founders sought to achieve an overall effect of simplicity and restfulness, making sure that “such few essential things that are allowed are the best and most suitable of their kind for the purpose – and are, in themselves, ‘things of extraordinary beauty’”.

This selection of works on display here only gives a sense of the 165 recorded objects in the Honan Collection. The Chapel which is situated on the south – eastern boundary of the UCC campus is open to the public daily. A book The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision, edited by Virginia Teehan and Elizabeth Wincott Heckett will be published by Cork University Press in November 2004.

Virginia Teehan, Curator