ADAM'S - Important Irish Art Auction - 31st May 2017 (Click Lot title for more images and to Place Bid)

Oil on canvas, 34 x 27.5cm (13.5 x 10.75”)

Signed. Title inscribed on label verso

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 exhibited portraits and animals studies at the Royal Hibernian Academy.

In her forties, after the death of her father, she began to study art formally at the Royal Acad-

emy Schools, London, 1877-1881. Then began a long period of travel and residence on the

Continent with her sister Rose. They visited Brittany and Normandy c.1880-1883, working

variously at the artists’ colonies of Pont-Aven, Douarnenez 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, visiting

Florence, Assisi, Perugia, Venice and Rome, Helen copying Old Master paintings in museums,

and painting genre scenes of Italian life.

The Trevors moved to Paris in 1889, and this became their base during the 1890s. Now

nearly sixty, Helen attended classes in the ateliers of Carolus-Duran and Jean-Jacques

Henner, and in 1894 of Luc-Olivier Merson. She painted in the artists’ colony of St. Ives in

Cornwall, c.1893 and Concarneau, in Brittany 1895-96, and at Antibes in the South of France,

1897.

Trevor exhibited regularly at the RHA and at the Paris Salon, 1889-1899, gaining honourable

mention there in 1898. After her death in Paris in 1900, two of her paintings, of Breton or

Normandy peasant subjects, were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland, and Rose

presented a Self-Portrait by Helen. Another Breton painting ‘The Young Eve’ is in the collec-

tion of the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

€ 1,000 - 1,500