ADAM'S IRISH OLD MASTERS 14 MAY 2026

48 38 MARIA SPILSBURY TAYLOR (1776–1820) Family Group: A Mother with her Chilren Dancing and Playing the Tambourine Oil on canvas, 38 x 30cm € 3,000 - 5,000 Outside a cottage orné covered in climb- ing roses, a young mother seated on a rustic wooden chair and with her baby on her lap watches her middle daughters dance, while the eldest provides rhythm by beating a tambourine. The scene is at once an idyllic evocation of the inno- cence of childhood but also questions different approaches to the education of the young which was ‘a recurrent theme in [the artist’s] genre paintings’ (Nicola Figgis, in A.A.I.). Maria Spilsbury Taylor was the most sig- nificant female artist to work in early nine- teenth-century Ireland. The daughter of the artist Jonathan Spilsbury, she was an accomplished painter particularly of children and genre scenes and exhibited at the Royal Academy (from 1792 to 1808), the British Institution and the Hibernian Society of Artists. She won distinguished patronage for her art including from the Prince Regent who honored her with a studio visit. On 1808 she married John Taylor (1784-1821), evangel- ical and inventor, with whom she had five children. Five years later the Taylors moved to Ireland and enjoyed a close relationship with the Tighes of Woodstock, County Kilkenny and Rossana, County Wicklow, painting portraits of their extended family including Sarah Tighe’s daughter, the artist Caroline Hamilton of Hamwood. She also painted Henrietta, wife of Henry Grattan M.P. (National Gallery of Ireland). Among her subjects were John Hatch Synge’s Pestalozzi School and religious scenes – she was much influ- enced by her upbringing in the Moravian church – notably John Wesley Preaching in the Open Air at Willybank, on the Estate of William Tighe (1815, London, Museum of Methodism) while her best known works include The Wedding Dance at Rossana, County Wicklow and Patron’s Day at the Seven Churches, Glendal- ough (National Gallery of Ireland). This charmingly characteristic work illustrates the qualities for which the artist won contempo- rary praise. In 1814, the ‘Monthly Museum’ described how ‘Mrs Taylor’s pictures exhibit a taste and delicacy of execution rarely to be met with’. For more information see Charlotte Yeldham, ‘A Regency Artist in Ireland: Maria Spilsbury-Taylor (1776–1820)’ in Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies (2005), and Charlotte Yeld- ham, Maria Spilsbury (1776–1820): Artist and Evangelical (2010).