184
196 Kathleen Fox (1880-1963)
Ruins of the Four Courts
Oil on canvas, 51 x 68.5cm (20 x 27”)
Signed and dated 1922
Provenance: Purchased from Leo Smith,The Dawson Gallery, Dublin 1943; by John P. Reihill SNR Deepwell, Blackrock
Exhibited: 1923
RHA Annual Exhibition
Cat. No. 243 priced £52.10.0
The Crawford Gallery, Cork, May - August 2006
Ireland: Her People and Landscape
The AVA Gallery, June - Sept 2012, Cat. No. 14
Irish Women Artists 1870 - 1970
, Adam’s, Dublin, July 2014, AVA Gallery, Clandeboye Aug-Sept
2014, Cat. No. 17
Literature:
Whipping the Herring
, published by The Crawford Gallery 2006. Full page illustration p209;
One Hundred Years of Irish Art - A Millennium Presentation
by Eamonn Mallie p222 Full page Illustration p223;
Ireland: Her People and Landscape
Exhibition Catalogue, full page illustration p21
Irish Women Artists 1870-1970
, full page illustration p.27
€4,000 - 6,000
The daughter of Captain Henry Charles Fox of the King’s
Dragoon Guards, Kathleen Fox came of an Irish Catholic
upper middle class family with a British Army tradition. She
was brought up at Glenageary Hall, Co. Dublin and went to
school at St. Mary’s, Ascot and Loreto Abbey Convent, Dalkey.
She entered the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1903, a
decision which, given her background , was probably opposed
by her family, but she was independent-minded, a characteristic
which became particularly pronounced when later she earned the
nick-name “the little rebel”, because of her sympathies with those
involved in the 1916 Easter Rising.
While at the Metropolitan School, she was at first attracted by the
crafts of fine metalwork and enamelling. Under the guidance of
Oswald Reeves she won top prizes for her metalwork in London
at the National Competitions of 1908 and 1909. She also worked
on painted china, carved wood, silver, costume design and stained
glass, which were aspects of the strong arts and crafts revival in
Ireland. However, her interest in painting was to be fired by the
teaching in Dublin of Sir William Orpen, only two years her
senior, who encouraged her and for whom she had a high regard.
It was Orpen’s style of tonal realism acquired at the Slade School
of Art, which he passed on to her. In 1910 she was admitted to the
RHA Life School. She exhibited for the first time at the RHA in
1911 with Science and Power (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery),
sometime after which she left to paint in Paris and Bruges. She
was back in Dublin in 1916 and became known as the “Artist of
the Rising”. She went openly into the most dangerous centres in
Dublin to capture in her paintings the spirit and personalities of
the Rising. She also carried messages between the leaders.
During the First World War Kathleen Fox kept a studio in London
where she met her husband Lieutenant Cyril Pym who was killed in
action.There a daughter was born in 1918. Later she moved to Nice
where she continued to paint and exhibited in France, London and
Dublin. In 1921 her work was shown at the New English Art Club,
the National Portrait Society, the Royal Academy and the Royal
Hibernian Academy. She returned to Dublin in the early twenties
and later inherited the family home in Milltown, Dublin where she
painted many interior views. For the next twenty years she worked as
a highly successful portrait painter in Ireland and England but made
not further submissions to the RHA until 1944.
In her later paintings there is a significant and enduring
transformation in terms of subject matter. Gone is the spirited work
of some twenty years earlier, to be replaced by highly competent
flower-studies which she exhibited throughout the 1940s and 50s
and for which today, perhaps unfairly, she is best known. She died
in 1963.
The artist painted this view of the Four Courts shortly after its
sacking in 1922 by the artillery fire of the Pro-Treaty forces during
the War of Independence. Kathleen Fox must have found it bitterly
ironic that the men and women who fought on the side of Pearse
and his companions and whom she had portrayed six years earlier
had now divided into two warring factions. Interestingly, there exists
another, larger “View of the Four Courts”, (UCD Newman House),
undated, but painted by the artist prior to the the destruction of the
building. Whereas that picture is tight and academic with a strong
emphasis on tonality, this view, depicted after a heavy shower of rain,
is painted in a spontaneous, “impressionistic” manner full of moist
atmosphere.
