Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, two artists celebrated in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin were Christian Modernists, and that wasn’t an oxymoron. If you include the pioneer Cubist Albert Gleizes, under whom they studied in Paris, that made three of them – Modernists imbued with a profound faith. Gleizes returned to his baptismal faith in middle age (the Catholic revival in France at the time very much included artists); the two Irishwomen came from prosperous (which isn’t to say rich) Dublin Protestant backgrounds, and Evie Hone was later to try her vocation at an Anglican convent in Truro. She became a Catholic in 1939, received into the Church at Blackrock College by the redoubtable John Charles McQuaid. Mainie Jellett remained in the Church of Ireland, though she was, like Evie, profoundly influenced by the art of the early Renaissance.