Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25th September 2024

Important Irish Art | 25 September 2024 www.adams.ie 33 21 LILIAN LUCY DAVIDSON ARHA (1879-1954) Picking Cockles, Arklow Oil on canvas, 60 x 84cm (23½ x 33”) Signed with monogram Originally from Bray, Co. Wicklow, Lilian Davidson studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where she won prizes in 1895 and 1896. In 1897 she won the RDS Scholarship which carried a free studentship - it didn’t come too soon as that was the year of her father’s death. She began exhibiting at the RHA in 1914 and did so virtually every year until her death in 1954. When in Dublin she taught painting privately in her studio in Earls- fort Terrace. She travelled extensively and did so for most of her life, painting landscapes in Belgium and Switzerland and in various parts of Ireland. She exhibited regularly at the Watercolour Society from 1912, also with the Dub- lin Painters Society (1939-54) and the Munster Fine Art Club, and also abroad. The influence of Paul Henry’s figurative paintings from his Achill period are evident in much of her work but the main influence on her work was Jack Yeats, in his representational phase. Hilary Pyle notes that she laid a similar emphasis on line, though she never developed colour as he did. She tended to be interested mainly in the abstract effects of light, though continuing to paint in a realist manner. Numerous paintings in and around Wicklow and Arklow towns are recorded including a work from 1944 entitled ‘The Bridge of the Seven Arches, Wicklow ’, the subject of the present work and which was exhibited at the RHA that year. € 8,000 - 12,000