60
Fig. 22. Estella Solomons painting
plein air Shankhill 1930
Fig. 23. Estella Solomons with her portrait of Jack B.Yeats
Born in Dublin in 1882. Estella attended the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools under Walter
Osborne, and entered the Metropolitan School of Art, where she became a pupil of William
Orpen. In 1906, she visited the Rembrandt tercentenary exhibition in Amsterdam, which was a
significant event for her. Despite being taught byWilliam Orpen, she was never a formula paint-
er and painted by inclination and sympathy, not by chequebook. She abandoned the Old-Mas-
terish and academician’s style of working because it weighed her feminine love of spontaneity.
Estella was no publicist, her talent was a refined, rather private one exercised more for her own
pleasure than for the public’s.
