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Helen Mabel Trevor (1831-1900)
Children Playing in a Barn
Oil on canvas, 52 x 64cm (20½” x 25¼”)
Signed
Exhibited: “IrishWomen Artists 1870 - 1970” Summer loan showAdams Dublin and Ava Gallery July - Sept
2014 Cat. No. 5
Literature: “Irish Women Artists 1870 - 1970” 2014 illustrated p.7
Born in Loughbrickland, Co. Down in 1831, Helen Mabel Trevor showed a talent for drawing as a child,
and her father Edward Hill Trevor of Lisnageard House set up a studio for her. In the 1850s she exhibit-
ed portraits and animal studies at the Royal Hibernian Academy. After the death of her father, she began
to study art formally at the Royal Academy Schools, London 1877-1881.
With her sister Rose, she visited Brittany and Normandy c.1880-1883, working variously at the artists’
colonies of Pont-Aven, Doarnenez and Concarneau in Finistere, and at Trouville. Helen painted several
studies of elderly women and children in a Realistic manner, and landscapes in the open air.The Trevor
sisters lived in Italy 1883-c.1889, Helen copying Old Master paintings in museums and painting genre
scenes of Italian life. They then moved to Paris in 1889 and this became their base during the 1890s.
Trevor exhibited regularly at the RHA and at the Paris Salon, 1889-1899, gaining honourable mention
there in 1898.
Among the artist’s favourite subjects were paintings of children. Here, rather than showing the children
facing us, as in her other pictures such as ‘
The Young Eve’
1882 (Ulster Museum, Belfast) and ‘
Two Breton
Girls
’ (ex. ‘The Irish Impressionists 1984, no.3) Trevor is daring in her composition. The children face
away from us and prominence is given to their hob-nailed boots and rough clothes, suggesting they are
working children, yet they also appear clean and well fed.Their appearance suggests they might be Irish
or English, rather than Continental, children, perhaps observed at St. Ives in 1893.
The broad, loose style of the picture, with paint applied in bold swatches, suggest that this is a late work
by Trevor. Yet there are echoes in subject and pose of humble pictures of children by Realist artists of an
earlier generation, for example Francoise Bonvin’s
‘The Young Savoyard
’ 1845, and Pierre-Edouard’s ‘
The
Little Cook’
1858. Irish artist Walter Osborne also featured country children in rough working clothes
and boots, as for instance in ‘
The Poachers’
1884-5 and ‘
Primary Education’
1885. But Trevor eschews the
Social Realism of these earlier artists, and indeed of her earlier work, for a subject which she loved, a
gently observed scene of children.
Julian Campbell
€15,000 - 20,000