Professional Women Artists Were Still Very Rare at the End of the Nineteenth Century – Sarah Purser Was an Exception

16 Professional women artists were still very rare at the end of the nineteenth century – Sarah Purser was an exception. She came from a family with both intelligence and business acumen. She was educated in Switzerland before studying at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and later the Académie Julian in 1878. Elizabeth Coxhead remarked, “At thirty she was the oldest and most serious, with no time to waste on cerebral love affairs and agonies of the soul”. 3 After suffering a financial crisis in the family, she marketed herself as a portrait painter, using her many social connections - famously commenting “I went through the British aristocracy like the measles”. She was a great collector of pictures and an important patron, and her forceful and determined personality drove the development of the place of women in Irish art. From 1911 she held regular social gatherings for Dublin’s intelligentsia at her home, Mespil House. In 1924 she founded the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland and was instrumental in setting up the Hugh Lane Gallery. She was also the first woman artist to be elected a full academician of the RHA in 1925, the year after Thomas McGreevy complained that the lack of women allowed in the RHA by the male establishment may lead the world to think “it is because the women are better artists than themselves”. 4 In fact, Art History as a university subject owes its origins in Ireland to Sarah Purser, who in 1934 persuaded her cousin Sir John Purser Griffiths to join her in making money available for a scholarship and prize to be given in alternate years by Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, to the best candidates in an exam in the History of European painting. This led to the two universities founding History of Art departments in the 1960s, facilitating generations of women to learn the history of art on a world scale. From Sarah Purser in 1873 to Norah McGuinness and Nano Reid in the 1920s, most Irish women artists of this period studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and came under the tutelage of William Orpen, Patrick Tuohy, Harry Clarke and Seán Keating over the years. The School (still existing today as the National College of Art and Design on Thomas Street, Dublin) traces its origin back as far as the year 1731, when the Royal Dublin Society was founded for the improvement of husbandry, manufactures, and other useful arts. In 1746 its members announced that, “Since a good spirit shows itself for drawing and designing, which is the groundwork of painting, and so useful in manufactures, it is intended to erect a little academy or school for drawing and painting, from whence some geniuses may arise to the benefit and honour of this kingdom, and it is hoped that gentlemen of taste will encourage and support so useful a design.” Cont. p20 3 Campbell, J., Art Students and Lady Travellers p.17-21. In: Irish Women Artists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day. The National Gallery of Ireland & Douglas Hyde Gallery (1987) 4 Ibid. p.20.

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