ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 27 MAY 2026

86 45 SARAH PURSER HRHA (1848 – 1943) Woman with Fan Oil on canvas, 85 x 66cm (33½ x 26”) Provenance: The Collection of the Artist; Her Estate Sale, Mespil House, Dublin, 1943; Private collection; ‘The Sarah Purser Sale’, these rooms, 12 December 2006, lot 9; Irish & British Art, Whytes 12th March, 2012, Lot 42, where purchased; thence by descent Exhibited: Thought to have been exhibited at ‘Pictures Old and New by Sarah Purser ARHA’, Engineers Hall, Dawson Street, Dublin, 1923, catalogue no. 80 [price £50-0-0] € 20,000 - 30,000 Though not a portrait in the strictest sense, in that we do not know the identity of the sitter, the work is evidence of Purser’s immense ability to capture likeness and imbue a work with a strong sense of character. This work was origi- nally sold in the estate sale of her home on Mespil Road in 1943, where she held her ‘Second Tuesday’s’ gatherings, bringing together a mix of cultural figures from Ireland’s artistic and literary circles. Her home was not only a reposit for her own work but also for that of other artists and she was important advocate of for the visual arts in Ireland throughput her life. By the late 19th century, she had established a lucrative portrait practice and was regularly commissioned by patrons. In this work a woman stands, looking off to the side, her dark hair piled on top of her head, loose strands framing her face, she wears a lace trimmed velvet cloak over a pale pink gown, the neckline gathered by a delicate silk bow. There is incredible softness in the work, the paint is applied in thin layers, building up the colours and textures of the clothes. In her right hand she holds a silk fan, a common ac- cessory of the time for women. Purser manages to capture the angular folds of the fan with light brushstrokes of white paint almost giving it a transparent quality and extenuated with marks of bright red and blue highlights. The back- ground is left quite loose; the attention focused entirely on the figure. Purser often painted portraits that fit more within a genre theme, women playing a game of chess, sitting in a n arm- chair reading, eating breakfast. Often, they hold a distant expression, looking away from the artist, lost in their own thoughts. This work is reminiscent of another example, A Lady Holding A Rattle , painted in 1881 in which a woman sits wearing an elaborate headdress while holding the child’s toy. These works can be viewed more as moments from daily life as in the Le Petit Dejeuner (1881, NGI) or Seated Lady Playing Chess (1895, Private Collection), or as staged scenes in which the women are holding props, such as another earlier work A Visitor from 1861 (Private Collection) which also sees a female friend of Pursers hold- ing a flat woven fan while she relaxes on a settee. There is a natural quality to these portraits, they feel at ease with the artist and in turn Purser maintains her sitter’s sense of personality even while they adopt character within her pictorial narrative. Niamh Corcoran, April 2026