9
Irish Women Artists 1870 - 1970
Summer 2014
5. Helen Mabel Trevor (1831-1900)
Children Playing in a Barn
Oil on canvas, 52 x 64cm
Signed
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Born in Loughbrickland, Co. Down in 1831 Helen Mabel Trevor showed a talent for drawing
as a child, and her father Edward Hill Trevor of Lisnageard House, set up a studio for her. In
the 1850s she exhibited portraits and animals studies at the Royal Hibernian Academy. In her
forties, after the death of her father, she began to study art formally at the Royal Academy
Schools, London, 1877-1881.
Then began a long period of travel and residence on the Continent with her sister Rose.
They visited Brittany and Normandy c.1880-1883, working variously at the artists’ colonies of
Pont-Aven, Douarnenez and Concarneau in Finistere, and at Trouville. Helen painted several
studies of elderly women and children in a Realistic manner, and landscapes in the open air.
The Trevor sisters lived in Italy, 1883-c.1889, visiting Florence, Assisi, Perugia,Venice and Rome,
Helen copying Old Master paintings in museums, and painting genre scenes of Italian life.
The Trevors moved to Paris in 1889, and this became their base during the 1890’s. Now
nearly sixty, Helen attended classes in the ateliers of Carolus-Duran and Jean-Jacques Henner,
and in 1894 of Luc-Olivier Merson. She painted in the artists’ colony of St. Ives in Cornwall,
c.1893 and Concarneau, in Brittany 1895-96, and at Antibes in the South of France, 1897.
Trevor exhibited regularly at the RHA and at the Paris Salon, 1889-1899, gaining honourable
mention there in 1898. After her death in Paris in 1900, two of her paintings, of Breton or
Normandy peasant subjects, were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland, and Rose
presented a Self-Portrait by Helen. Another Breton painting ‘TheYoung Eve’ is in the collec-
tion of the Ulster Museum, Belfast.
Julian Campbell
