6
This timely and wide-ranging exhibition illustrates and more importantly celebrates the
contribution of Ireland’s women artists within this period, not for the sake of their sex but for
their artistic ability.
While some of these very accomplished artists have been recognised for their contribution to
Irish art through solo exhibitions, retrospectives and publications, many have yet to be properly
acknowledged and appreciated. ‘Irish Women Artists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Day’ was both a comprehensive publication and an exhibition by the National Gallery of Ireland
and the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Trinity College in 1987, the same decade as two related groups
were formed - the Women Artists’ Action Group in the South and its Northern counterpart
NIWAAG – to raise the profile of women artists across the country. With the benefit of almost
thirty years since that significant exhibition, we can look again at the role played by Irish women
artists in this formative time and celebrate their talents, versatility and legacy.
The artists in Adams’s exhibition worked in a huge array of media, from gouache, watercolour and
oil to stained glass, bronze and wood engraving. At times the access to such materials as stained
glass and bronze and the physical capacity to work with them must not have been easy but these
artists persevered, at times in the face of indifference, and even hostility. The sheer variety of
subject matter, from Letitia Hamilton’s
Fair Day, Clifden
to Mainie Jellett’s
Abstract Composition
,
via Kathleen Fox’s
Ruins of the Four Courts
and Lady Beatrice Glenavy’s still life
WorldWar I
shows
that women were not confined to producing sentimental images of children playing, chocolate-
box landscapes or flower studies. The timescale of this analysis, 1870 to 1970, covers a period of
great change in the socio-political landscape of Ireland, starting when the country was still feeling
the effects of the Great Famine, and encompassing the War of Independence, Civil War, Easter
Rising and Creation of the Irish Free State, as well as two World Wars.
The circumstances under which women worked were different from those affecting men. In
1870 women were seen as amateurs in the art world and lacked the opportunities for training,
exhibition and sales. They were chaperoned by men and when in 1893 they were eventually
let into professional schools such as the RHA school, they were barred from life drawing and
anatomy classes. Visual arts were also connected with religious institutions and the aristocracy
and seen as a ‘genteel hobby’ rather than a genuine vocation.
Many of the female artists of this period shared similar family backgrounds and came from
well-off, if not always extremely wealthy, origins. These independent means enabled them to
pursue their artistic endeavours when they didn’t reap financial rewards, certainly not within
their lifetimes. A middle-class Protestant background was more likely to be an encouragement to
a female artist’s talents, rather than working class Catholic roots
1
. They also generally remained
single and only a few became mothers. Actively rejecting contemporary social conventions, these
women independently pursued their own goals as artists, educators and pioneers.
1
Finucane, P. and Connolly, M. Journeys through Line and Colour, p.iii, University of Limerick 2010
Irish Women Artists 1870 - 1970
