Sarah Cecilia Harrison, artist and the first woman to serve on Dublin City Council, is born to an affluent family in Holywood House, in Holywood, County Down, on June 21, 1863.

Harrison, who goes by the name Cecilia, is the third child of Letitia (née Tennent) and landowner Henry Harrison JP. One of her brothers is the politician and writer Henry Harrison, a supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell. Her maternal grandfather is Robert James Tennent, a liberal MP for Belfast. She is the great grand-niece of United Irishman and industrialist Henry Joy McCracken and the social reformer and anti-slavery campaigner Mary Ann McCracken. At the age of ten her father dies and she and her family relocate to London.

Harrison studies at Queen’s College, London where she is awarded a silver medal by University College London, for painting from the antique style. She studies under Alphonse Legros at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1878 to 1885 and wins the Slade scholarship. She travels widely on the continent as part of her studies including Paris, Italy and Amsterdam.

In 1889, Harrison moves to Dublin and establishes herself as one of Ireland’s foremost portrait artists. She submits sixty paintings to the Royal Hibernian Academy‘s annual exhibition and numerous other works to the Royal Academy of Arts in London during her career. She is an honorary academician of the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts.

Harrison’s brother, Henry, is a supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell and a Member of Parliament for Mid Tipperary. She herself becomes the first female city councillor for Dublin Corporation in 1912. She campaigns to have poor relief extended to the able-bodied unemployed and works to promote women’s rights. She is closely involved in Hugh Lane‘s efforts to establish a gallery of modern art in Dublin.

For some 30 years Harrison is part of social reform and women’s rights in Ireland. In 1912 she is the first woman to be elected to the Dublin City Council. Here she works closely with Alderman Alfie Byrne. She is also recognised for her prominent place in the suffrage victory procession and escorting Anna Haslam to vote in the Williams Street Courthouse, Dublin, in the 1918 United Kingdom general election.

Following Hugh Lane’s death on the RMS Lusitania in 1915, Harrison claims that they had been engaged to be married. Her 1914 portrait of Lane is one of her best-known works. She never marries.

Harrison dies on July 23, 1941, in Drumcondra, Dublin. She is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, the inscription on her gravestone reads “Artist and Friend of the Poor.”

Harrison’s artistic style is precise and realistic. There are examples of her work in the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Lane Gallery, the Office of Public Works, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the Ulster Museum and National Museums Northern Ireland. On November 24, 2014, her Portrait of a Young Lady Reading sells at auction for €6,600.

(Pictured: Sarah Cecilia Harrison self portrait, 1889, Dublin City Gallery)