129 / 184
129
www.adams.ieImportant Irish Art | 28th September 2016
129 HARRIET HOCKLEY-TOWNSHEND (1877-1941)Seated Girl in a Blue Dress with Flowers
Pastel, 60 x 91cm (23¾ x 35¾’’)
Signed with initials
Harriet Hockley Townsend is best known today through the fact that one of her pastels was used as the front cover image of the National Gallery catalogue “Irish women
artists: From the 18th century to the present day” in 1987. This work was at the time on loan to The Castletown Foundation.
She was born Harriet Hockley Weldon in Co. Kildare, daughter of Major General Walter Weldon. Very little is known about her training but she did attend the Metropolitan
School of Art in Dublin where she would have been influenced by Sir William Orpen; and it has been recorded she also studied in Paris and Florence. She first exhibited
at the RHA in 1903 showing a total of 35 works between then and 1935.
She married Thomas Loftus Uniacke Townsend on 8th June 1910 and thereafter signed with her married initials “H.H.T.”
€ 3,000 - 5,000