16
Professional women artists were still very rare at the end of the nineteenth century – Sarah
Purser was an exception. She came from a family with both intelligence and business
acumen. She was educated in Switzerland before studying at the Metropolitan School of
Art in Dublin and later the Académie Julian in 1878. Elizabeth Coxhead remarked, “At
thirty she was the oldest and most serious, with no time to waste on cerebral love affairs
and agonies of the soul”.
3
After suffering a financial crisis in the family, she marketed herself as a portrait painter,
using her many social connections - famously commenting “I went through the British
aristocracy like the measles”. She was a great collector of pictures and an important patron,
and her forceful and determined personality drove the development of the place of women
in Irish art. From 1911 she held regular social gatherings for Dublin’s intelligentsia at
her home, Mespil House. In 1924 she founded the Friends of the National Collections
of Ireland and was instrumental in setting up the Hugh Lane Gallery. She was also the
first woman artist to be elected a full academician of the RHA in 1925, the year after
Thomas McGreevy complained that the lack of women allowed in the RHA by the male
establishment may lead the world to think “it is because the women are better artists than
themselves”.
4
In fact, Art History as a university subject owes its origins in Ireland to Sarah Purser, who in
1934 persuaded her cousin Sir John Purser Griffiths to join her in making money available
for a scholarship and prize to be given in alternate years by Trinity College Dublin and
University College Dublin, to the best candidates in an exam in the History of European
painting. This led to the two universities founding History of Art departments in the
1960s, facilitating generations of women to learn the history of art on a world scale.
From Sarah Purser in 1873 to Norah McGuinness and Nano Reid in the 1920s, most Irish
women artists of this period studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and came
under the tutelage of William Orpen, Patrick Tuohy, Harry Clarke and Seán Keating over
the years.
The School (still existing today as the National College of Art and Design on Thomas
Street, Dublin) traces its origin back as far as the year 1731, when the Royal Dublin
Society was founded for the improvement of husbandry, manufactures, and other useful
arts. In 1746 its members announced that, “Since a good spirit shows itself for drawing
and designing, which is the groundwork of painting, and so useful in manufactures, it
is intended to erect a little academy or school for drawing and painting, from whence
some geniuses may arise to the benefit and honour of this kingdom, and it is hoped that
gentlemen of taste will encourage and support so useful a design.”
3
Campbell, J., Art Students and Lady Travellers p.17-21. In: Irish Women Artists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Day. The National Gallery of Ireland & Douglas Hyde Gallery (1987)
4
Ibid. p.20
Cont. p20
