82
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Mary Swanzy took classes at the RHA and Metropolitan School of Art in her home town of
Dublin before travelling to Paris to work in various artists’ studios. Although mainly based in
Dublin in her early career, she spent much of her time travelling around Eastern Europe and
North America. In 1926 she moved to London but continued to show in Ireland at the Dawson
Gallery and Royal Hibernian Academy, and in 1949 was elected an Honorary Member of the
RHA.
Fig. 34. Mary Swanzy
Fig. 35. Mary Swanzy at her exhibition at the Dawson Gallery
March 1974
Dublin Painters Society
The 1920’s saw the establishment of the Dublin Painters’ Society, whose founding
members included Grace Henry, Mary Swanzy and Letitia Hamilton. The Society
was soon to be dominated by women artists, so much so that by the Spring of
1935, as Dr. S.B. Kennedy points out, an Irish Times reviewer noted that this was
“the first time there was a women artist’s exhibition, as this show is virtually taken
to be”. In 1942 the critic Stephen Rynne described the group as “the liveliest of the
living painters, the explorers, the experimentalists”.
