Power is born to Henry Power, a watchmaker, and Mary (née Atkins), an embroideress. He has one older brother, and one younger sister. He attends a Christian Brothersnational school in North Brunswick Street. As a child he plays in local clay brickyards and sculpts busts of his friends. After finishing his primary school education, he trains with a firm of sculptors run by Edward Smyth. In 1884, he enrolls as an evening pupil at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (DMSA), later attending as a full-time student from 1906 to 1911. During his time at the DMSA he is taught and strongly influenced by John Hughes, Oliver Sheppard and William Orpen. He wins a number of prizes during his time at the DMSA, including medals, three scholarships, book prizes, and the national gold medal for the best modeling of a nude figure, in Ireland, Scotland, and the Channel Islands in 1911.
Power marries Agnes Kelly in 1903. The couple has ten children, four daughters and six sons, including May and James who also become sculptors.
Power establishes his own stone-carving business in 1912 from his new home at 18 Geraldine Street, Phibsborough, Dublin. As the firm grows, it moves to premises nearby at 15 Berkeley Street from 1930. He executes a wide range of works, including monuments and architectural features in bronze, marble, and stone. Among his notable works are the figure of “Science” designed by Sheppard from the façade of the new Royal College of Science for Ireland (later Government Buildings) on Merrion Street, Dublin, carved motifs and sphinxes for the Gresham Hotel, O’Connell Street, and four statues on the dome of Christ the King church, Carndonagh, County Donegal.
Power is considered the leading Irish sculptor of the 1920s and 1930s. He is a nationalist and promotes the use of Irish materials such as limestone from Durrow and Connemara marble. He is noted for his academic realist style. He exhibits regularly with the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1906, becoming an associate member in 1911, and a full member in 1919. Among those he models sculptures for are James Stephens (1913), W. B. Yeats (1918), and Lord Dunsany (1920). Among his patrons are Oliver St. John Gogarty, and through Gogarty he is commissioned to model a number of prominent Irish nationalists. Gogarty asks him to carve a portrait of Terence MacSwiney in 1920, while MacSwiney is on hunger strike in HM Prison Brixton, London. Smuggled into the prison to do a thumbnail sketch, Power then carves a portrait in the form of a life mask.
On Gogarty’s recommendation, Power is commissioned by the Irish Free State government to create portraits of a number of leading politicians including Arthur Griffith (1922), Michael Collins (1936), and Austin Stack (1939). He is also privately commissioned to execute a portrait of Éamon de Valera in 1944. Among his monumental works are sculptures of Tom Kettle (1919) at St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, Christ the King in Gort, County Galway, (1933), Pádraic Ó Conaire (1935) at Eyre Square, Galway, and W. B. Yeats (1939) at Sandymount Green, Dublin. He is one of the artists invited to submit designs for the new coinage of the Irish Free State in 1928.
Power dies in Dublin on July 10, 1945, following complications from a double hernia. His is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
Whelan is awarded many prizes in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) Taylor art competitions, including one in 1912 for a portrait of his sister Lena, entitled On the Moors, rendered in a strongly academic technique. In 1916, he wins the Taylor scholarship for the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) schools for his finest early work, The Doctor’s Visit, an adroitly executed composition of contrasting shadows and light. Typical of many of his genre interiors, the painting depicts a room in the family home, with relatives as models: Whelan’s mother sits by the bed watching over his ill cousin, while his sister, dressed in a Mater hospital nurse’s uniform, is in the background opening the door for the doctor. The subtly evoked atmosphere of restrained emotion foreshadowed a hallmark of his mature style.
Whelan exhibits annually at the RHA for forty-five years (1911–56), averaging six works per year. He is elected an RHA associate in 1920, becoming a full member in 1924. He participates in the Exposition d’art irlandais at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris in 1922. A visiting teacher at the RHA schools in 1924, he also teaches in the DMSA for a time. He has studios at 64 Dawson Street (1914–27) and 7 Lower Baggot Street (1931–56). Beginning in the 1910s, he receives regular commissions for portraits, constituting his primary source of income. Having become the family’s main breadwinner following his parents’ deaths in the 1920s, he concentrates most of his production on this lucrative activity, portraying numerous leading figures in the spheres of politics, academia, religion, society, medicine, and law.
Situated securely in the academic tradition, in most of his portraits Whelan favours a sombre, restricted palette, with the sitter placed, in grave demeanour, against a monotone background with few accessories. In a 1943 interview he asserts that twentieth-century portraiture suffers from the drabness of modern costume, for which the artist must compensate by careful rendition of the subject’s hands. He tends to depart from his prevailing portrait style when painting women, whom he characteristically depicts in meticulously observed interiors, a notable example being his portrait of Society hostess Gladys Maccabe (c.1946; NGI).
Whelan’s commercial concentration on portraiture notwithstanding, he expresses his true talent in genre compositions, especially kitchen interiors, in which he emulates the technique of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Two of the most accomplished of these depict his sister Frances in the basement kitchen of the family home: The Kitchen Window (1927; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork) demonstrates a particularly skillful use of light, while Interior of a Kitchen (1935) is notable for the dexterous handling of objects of varied shapes and textures. His genre works include both urban and rural scenes, with a distinctive interest in portraying occupations and other activities. Gypsy (1923), an Orpenesque composition of a shawled woman in a west-of-Ireland landscape with a caravan in the background, receives wide contemporary critical acclaim. Jer (c.1925), depicting a man seated by the fire in a cottage interior, is reproduced in J. Crampton Walker’s Irish Art and Landscape (1927). The Fiddler (c.1932), a naturalistic, sensitively characterised study, is first shown at an Ulster Academy exhibition at Stranmillis, Belfast. A Kerry Cobbler is reproduced in Twelve Irish Artists (1940), introduced by Thomas Bodkin, as among the works denoting the development of a distinctively Irish school of painting.
In 1929, Whelan designs the first Irish Free State commemorative stamp, a portrait of Daniel O’Connell for the centenary of Catholic emancipation. Commissioned by the Thomas Haverty trust to paint an incident from the life of Saint Patrick for the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, he executes The Baptism by St. Patrick of Ethna the Fair and Fedelmia the Ruddy, Daughters of the Ard Rí Laoghaire, a work highly conservative in style. He rapidly completes an oil study of the papal legate, Lorenzo Lauri, also for the Eucharistic Congress. He is represented in the art competitions at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. His depiction of Saint Brigid, shown at the Academy of Christian Art exhibition (1940), becomes a familiar image owing to the wide circulation of reproductions.
Whelan’s political portraits are influential in creating a strong, assured image of the newly formed Irish state, and thus retain an historical significance. His posthumous portrait, The Late General Michael Collins, exhibited at the RHA in 1943 and now held in Leinster House, is an iconic, heroic image of the fallen leader. His portraits of Arthur Griffith and Kevin O’Higgins – commissioned posthumously, as is the Collins, by Fine Gael – also hang in Leinster House, while that of John A. Costello, exhibited at the RHA in 1949, is now held in the King’s Inns, Dublin. He paints two presidents, Douglas Hyde and Seán T. O’Kelly, both works currently in Áras an Uachtaráin. A portrait of Éamon de Valera, painted in 1955 when the sitter is Leader of the Opposition, is in Leinster House. In 1954, he designs a second commemorative stamp, picturing a reproduction of a portrait bust of John Henry Newman, to mark the centenary of the Catholic University of Ireland.
Whelan is elected an honorary academician of both the Ulster Academy of Arts (1931), and the Royal Ulster Academy (1950). He becomes a member of the United Arts Club in 1934. As a representative of the RHA, he sits on the board of governors of the National Gallery of Ireland for many years, and is on the advisory committee of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. Unmarried, he resides until his death at the Eccles Street address, with two sisters who continue to manage the family hotel. He dies on November 6, 1956, from leukemia at the Mater private nursing home in Dublin. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
(From: “Whelan, (Michael) Leo,” by Carmel Doyle, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Morrow is born on April 26, 1863, in Comber, County Down, the second son of George Morrow, a painter and decorator from Clifton Street in west Belfast. Of his seven brothers, four, George, Jack, Edwin, and Norman, are also illustrators and all but one are artists. He is a keen ornithologist in his youth. In later life he is a keen walker and paints landscapes for leisure.
While studying under T. M. Lindsay at the Government School of Art in 1880, Morrow is awarded a £10 prize for drawing from the eminent publishers Cassell, Petter and Galpin. In 1881, while still learning his trade, he paints a mural of Belfast for the Working Men’s Institute in Rosemary Street, where his father is chairman. Later in that same year he exhibits a watercolour sketch of a standing figure entitled Meditative at the gallery of Rodman & Company, Belfast.
Morrow then wins a three-year scholarship worth £52 per year which he takes to the National Art Training School at South Kensington in 1882, where he begins a lifelong friendship with the British sculptor Albert Toft. In 1883, while still attending South Kensington, he joins the staff of The English Illustrated Magazine in preparation for the launch of the first edition. Two of his works are published in the Sunday at Home magazine in September of the same year.
J. Comyns Carr, first editor of TheEnglish Illustrated Magazine, commissions Morrow to complete a series on English industry when he has yet to complete his studies at South Kensington.
In 1890, Morrow begins illustrating for Bits and Good Words. He exhibits nine works at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1890 and 1904, all of which are watercolours, and another in 1917, and an offering in chalk at the 159th Exhibition, in the year of his death.
Morrow becomes a member of the Belfast Art Society in 1895, exhibiting with them in the same year. In 1896, a Morrow print is published in Volume 2 of the limited-edition print-collection Les Maîtres de l’Affiche selected by “Father of the Poster” Jules Chéret. In the same year he shows a watercolour of a Gurkha at the Earls Court in the Empire of India and Ceylon exhibition. In 1900, he exhibits with two Ulster artists, Hugh Thomson and Arthur David McCormick, at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, who along with Morrow had contributed to the early success of TheEnglish Illustrated Magazine.
Morrow is one of the founders of the Ulster Arts Club in November 1902 along with five of his brothers, an organisation that has a nonsectarian interest in Celtic ideas, language and aesthetics. In November 1903, he exhibits at the first annual exhibition of the Club when he shows alongside John Lavery, Hans Iten, James Stoupe and F. W. Hull. He exhibits The Itinerant Musician, a watercolour that he had previously shown at the Royal Academy in 1902. Honorary membership is conferred upon him the following year. Three years later he is honoured with a solo exhibition of sketches and posters in conjunction with the Ulster Arts Club, at the Belfast Municipal Gallery.
In 1908, Morrow joins his brothers in an exhibition at 15 D’Olier Street, Dublin, an address which is later registered to the family business in 1913. Among his contributions to the family exhibition is his painting of Brandon Thomas, The Clarionette Player, which had previously been exhibited at the Royal Academy, and a poster entitled Irving in Dante.
In 1917, Morrow joins his brother George and 150 artists and writers, in petitioning the British Prime MinisterDavid Lloyd George to find a way of enacting the unsigned codicil to Hugh Lane’s will and establish a gallery to house Lane’s art collection in Dublin. Among the 32 notable artists who sign this petition are Jack B. Yeats, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, and Augustus John.
Morrow illustrates books for children and adults, but he is best known for the hundreds of posters he designs for the theatre, with the bulk of his commissions coming from just one lithographical printer, David Allen and Sons. As a cartoonist he draws for children’s annuals, and contributes three cartoons to Punch in 1923, 1925 and posthumously in 1931.
Morrow dies at his home in West Hoathly, West Sussex, on October 26, 1927, at the age of 64. He is survived by his wife and two children. His headstone in the local churchyard at All Saints Church, Highbrook is designed by his friend, the sculptor and architect, Albert Toft.
Geddes is born on her maternal grandparent’s farm at Drumreilly Cottage in Leitrim, County Leitrim, on May 25, 1887. She is the eldest of four children, three girls and a boy, of William Geddes and his wife Eliza Jane Stafford. The family, who migrates to Ireland from Scotland, has mainly been farmers. Her father, a Methodist, who is born near his father’s farm at Tandragee, County Armagh, emigrates to the United States as a young man, working as a labourer for the railway construction business. This serves a useful purpose as he had worked as a site engineer at the Cavan, Leitrim and Roscommon Railway Company. When she is still an infant her parents move to their native home in Belfast, so her father can set up in business as a building contractor.
Geddes begins drawing subjects from life and nature from the age of four. She learns first how to draw from the school mistress in Ayrshire, where her father occasionally goes shooting. She begins her studies at Methodist College Belfast along with her three younger sisters. She later moves to the Belfast School of Art. She is encouraged by Rosamond Praeger, a sculptor from County Down, to continue with her studies. She is accepted as a student to study at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. This is where she adapts and improves her style and is introduced to a professional standard of art work.
While still studying at the Belfast School of Art, Geddes takes part in the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland‘s fourth exhibition. For this exhibition, she contributes a glowingly coloured illustration of the book Cinderella Dressing the Ugly Sister (Dublin City Gallery), which she had created. It is at this exhibition that her work is spotted by Sarah Purser, a well established painter seeking newly trained students to introduce to stained glass artistry. Purser, who goes on to be her lifelong mentor, invites the young Geddes to join her in Dublin, working under the established stained glass artist William Orpen.
Geddes contributes a watercolour illustration of a Ballad Seller with the Belfast Art Society in 1907. She is elected as an Associate of the Belfast Art Society’s successor, the Ulster Academy of Arts, in 1933 before promotion to Honorary Academician in 1935. She shows five illustrations in the 1911 Oireachtas Exhibition. It is some twenty-one years before she returns to the Oireachtas when she exhibits three cartoons and three sketches for stained glass in 1932.
Geddes joins Purser at the acclaimed stained glass workshop called An Túr Gloine in 1910. The workshop is held in Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art. It is here that she discovers her passion for the craftsmanship of stained glass artistry and creates her most important works.
During her early years at An Túr Gloine, Geddes’s originality shines, and important commissions come from St. Ann’s Church, Dawson Street, Dublin and the Presbyterian church in Rathgar. Dogged by illness, she returns to Belfast before 1916 and lives between there and Dublin until moving in 1925, as she has long wanted, to work in London at The Glass House, Fulham. While working at The Glass House, she instructs the Irish painter and stained glass artist Evie Hone.
Geddes’s work is considered pioneering and represents a rejection of the Late Victorian approach. She creates a new view of men in stained glass windows, portraying them with close-shaven crew cuts. The muscularity and tension of her portraiture is matched by the radical design of her constructions. Ambitious large-scale projects, as at the cathedral in Ypres, are equalled by the drama of smaller-scale work at Wallasey (Lancashire) and Wallsend (Northumberland), or war memorial windows in obscure country churches.
Despite the hardships of living in London during World War II, poverty, and ill health, Geddes designs seventeen full-scale stained glass masterpieces, sixteen of which she completes.
Geddes dies on August 10, 1955 in London of a pulmonary embolism. She is buried in CarnmoneyCemetery, County Antrim, along with her mother and sister Ethel. Even after moving to London, she claims that her native identity never wavered as she says she was always “a Belfast woman.”
O’Brien is one of five children of Pierce O’Brien, a gentleman landowner, and Sophia Angel St John O’Brien. Her first cousin is woodcarver Sophia St John Whitty. She attends the Mercy Convent in Ennis, going on to win a scholarship to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. While there she studies under William Orpen and Alfred E. Child who teach her the art of stained glass.
Among O’Brien’s first commissions is the St. Ita window for St. Brendan’s cathedral in Loughrea, County Galway, in 1904, which is designed by Sarah Purser. She joins An Túr Gloine in 1906, beginning her career there by designing Angel of the Annunciation window in the Enniskillen convent chapel. For a window in the Wilson private chapel at Coolcarrigan House, Naas, County Kildare, in 1912, she incorporates Celtic design, some drawing on the Book of Durrow. In 1914, she tours the cathedrals of Paris, Rouen, and Chartres with Purser and Wilhelmina Geddes. She designs three windows depicting St. John, St. Flannan, and St. Munchin, for the Honan Chapel at University College Cork in 1916. Her 1923 design of the centenary memorial window in St. Andrew’s church, Lucan, represents the parable of the Good Shepherd. When in 1925 An Túr Gloine becomes a cooperative society, she becomes a shareholder along with Ethel Rhind, Evie Hone, and Michael Healy.
O’Brien’s 1926 lunetteThe Spirit of Night represents night, twilight, and dawn, and is for the private home of Keng Chee in Singapore, which is later demolished. The window of St. Catherine of Siena for the Sacred Heart convent chapel in Newton, Massachusetts dates from 1927. Her 1931 St. Patrick window, for the De La Salle school, East Coast Rd., Singapore, commissioned by architect Denis Santry, is the only extant stained-glass work by an Irish artist in that country. Much like Rhind, O’Brien also employs opus sectile, such as in her 1936 Mass in Penal Days in the Franciscan friary, Athlone, County Westmeath. She contributes two windows, Pelican and Lamb and Host and Chalice: Wheat and Grapes, to the ten windows An Túr Gloine produces for Brophy College Chapel, Phoenix, Arizona in 1937. From 1937 until 1947, she works on 22 opus sectile panels for the Protestant Church in Ennis.
Purser retires from An Túr Gloine in 1940, and O’Brien succeeds her as director, going on to purchase it and the contents in 1944. She rents a section of the premises to fellow stained-glass artist Patrick Pollen from 1954 onwards. She exhibits at the 1953 Irish Exhibition of Living Art, and the 1958 exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. When the An Túr Gloine studios are damaged by fire in 1958, she rebuilds them and reopens by 1959. She is an active member of the Soroptimists and the Guild of Irish Art Workers. The last work she completes is a three-light window for the Church of St. Multose, Kinsale, County Cork, in 1962. A commission for two windows for the private chapel of Áras an Uachtaráin for PresidentÉamon de Valera is left unfinished at her death.
O’Brien dies in Dublin on July 18, 1963, and is buried in Whitechurch Parish Graveyard, County Dublin. She is commemorated in a window designed by Pollen in St. Laurence O’Toole chapel, Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, where for forty years she made floral arrangements. Over 150 of her An Túr Gloine drawings from notebooks are now in the National Gallery of Ireland.
(Pictured: Stained glass window in the south wall of Ferns Cathedral, Ferns, County Wexford)
Solomons is born to Maurice Solomons and poet Rosa Jane Jacobs. Her father is an optician whose practice in 19 Nassau Street, Dublin, is mentioned in Ulysses. Her father is also the Vice-Consul of Austria-Hungary. The Solomons family, who came to Dublin from England in 1824, are one of the oldest continuous lines of Jews in Ireland.
Solomons grandmother, Rosa Jacobs Solomons, who is born in Hull in England, is the author of a book called Facts and Fancies (Dublin 1883). Her brother, Bethel Solomons, a renowned physician, a master of the Rotunda Hospital and Irish international rugby player, is mentioned in Finnegans Wake. Her brother Edwin is a stockbroker and prominent member of the Dublin Jewish community. Her younger sister Sophie is a trained opera singer. A portrait of Sophie, by her cousin the printmaker Louise Jacobs, survives in the Estella Solomons archives in the Library of Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
In 1898, at the age of 16, Solomons enters the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where she wins a significant prize. Her classmates include future Irish artists including Mary Swanzy, Eva Hamilton and William J. Leech. She also attends the Chelsea School of Art from 1903 to 1906. A visit to the tercentenary exhibition of the work of Rembrandt in Amsterdam in 1903 impacts her creative practice and possibly influences her adoption of printmaking as her principal vehicle of expression. She studies under two of Ireland’s leading artists, Walter Osborne, who is another major influence, and William Orpen. With her friends Cissie Beckett (aunt of Samuel Beckett) and Beatrice Elvery, she goes to study in Paris at Académie Colarossi. On her return she exhibits in Leinster Hall, Molesworth Street, with contemporaries such as Beatrice Elvery, Eva Hamilton and Grace Gifford. Her work is also included in joint exhibitions with other artists at Mills Hall and the Arlington Gallery, London. She also exhibits at her Great Brunswick Street studio in December 1926.
Solomons illustrates Padraic Colum‘s The Road Round Ireland (1926) and DL Kelleher’s The Glamour of Dublin in 1928. Originally published after the devastation of the 1916 Easter Rising, the later edition features eight views of familiar locations in the city centre including Merchant’s Arch and King’s Inns. Her etching “A Georgian Doorway” is included in Katherine MacCormack’s Leabhar Ultuin in 1920. This publication features illustrations by several prominent Irish artists and is sold in aid of the new Saint Ultan’s Children’s Hospital in Charlemont Street, Dublin, that had been founded by two prominent members of Cumann na mBan, Dr. Kathleen Lynn and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen.
Solomons is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in July 1925, but it is not until 1966 that she is elected an honorary member. Her work is included in the Academy’s annual members’ exhibition every year for sixty years.
Solomons is married to poet and publisher Seumas O’Sullivan, whose birth name is James Sullivan Starkey. Her parents oppose the relationship as O’Sullivan is not of the Jewish faith. They marry in 1925, when she is 43 and he 46, after her parents have died. She collaborates with her husband on The Dublin Magazine (1923–58), the renowned literary and art journal, of which O’Sullivan is editor for 35 years. She provides vital financial support to the magazine, particularly in sourcing advertising, which is difficult in the tough economic climate of the new Free State. She is helped in this endeavour by poet and writer, Kathleen Goodfellow, a lifelong friend. When Solomons and O’Sullivan are looking to move from their house in Rathfarnham because of a damp problem, Goodfellow offers them the house beside her own on Morehampton Road for a nominal rent. Two of Solomons’ portraits of Goodfellow are in the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo.
Solomons joins the Ranelagh branch of Cumann na mBan at the same time as Goodfellow. They are taught first aid, drilling and signaling by Phyllis Ryan. She is active before and during the Irish War of Independence. She conceals ammunition in the family vegetable garden before delivering it to a Sinn Féin agent. Her studio at Great Brunswick Street is used as a safe house by republicanvolunteers. During this time, she paints the portraits of a number of revolutionaries, some of which she has to later destroy to avoid incriminating them. Her work includes a portrait of Frank Aiken when we was chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Solomons takes up a teaching position at Bolton Street College, Dublin. In 1939, she organises an exhibition in Dublin to help refugee artists from Europe.
Solomons dies on November 2, 1968, and is buried in Woodtown Cemetery, Rathfarnham. Her friend Kathleen Goodfellow gifts the Morehampton Road Wildlife Sanctuary, where Solomons liked to paint, to An Taisce. Two plaques have subsequently been erected there, one in memory of Solomons and one for Goodfellow.
Some of Solomons works are held in the Niland Collection, at The Model gallery in Sligo and in the National Gallery of Ireland. Her archives, which include artwork and photographs (and prints by Louise Jacobs), and the archives of The Dublin Magazine are in the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
Orpen wants to pursue painting, but “for family reasons” he becomes an architect. He spends eleven years with Thomas Drew, initially as a pupil, and later as a managing assistant from 1885 to 1892. From around 1884, he attends the annual excursions of the English Architectural Association. Around 1890, he establishes his own architectural practice in Drew’s offices at 22 Clare Street, Dublin. In 1896, he moves his office to 7 Leinster Street. In 1888 he is elected as a member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), serving as a council member from 1902 to 1910, as honorary secretary from 1903 to 1905, and as president from 1914 to 1917. He designs the institute’s official seal in 1909. In 1904, the Irish Builder describes him as the “originator of the bungalow in Ireland.”
From 1888, Orpen exhibits with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), with watercolours and architectural drawings. He continues to exhibit with them until 1936. He collaborates with Percy French on a number of projects, including illustrating Racquetry Rhymes (1888) and The First Lord Liftinant and Other Tales (1890). He provides cartoons for French’s periodical, The Jarvey. His architectural illustrations are included in H. Goldsmith Whitton’s Handbook of the Irish Parliament Houses… (1891). He is one of the original members of the Architectural Association of Ireland, serving as its first president in 1896, and as vice-president in 1910.
Orpen is appointed the architect to St. Columba’s from 1897 to 1938, following a fire at the college in 1896. He becomes a fellow of the college, and the sanatorium becomes known as the Orpen building. He is an active member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland, serving as secretary in 1895, on the committee in 1904, and in 1917 sits on the organising committee for the fifth exhibition. In 1906, he is a founding member of the Arts Club. In 1906 he moves his architectural practice to 13 South Frederick Street, and moves into a house he designed, Coologe, Carrickmines, County Dublin.
From 1910 to 1914, Orpen is in an architectural partnership with Page Dickinson, with the two collaborating on plans for the new Dublin municipal gallery and conversion of the Turkish Baths, Lincoln Place. Lane rejects his and Dickinson’s gallery plans, leading to him refusing to work with Lane’s choice of architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens. In 1914, he is appointed a guardian of the National Gallery of Ireland, and lectures at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art on architectural history in 1914 and 1915. He is involved in the design of a number of memorials including the setting for a bronze relief by Beatrice Campbell for the members of the Royal Irish Regiment killed in the Second Boer War and the war memorial at the Rathgar Methodist church. He serves as president of the arts and crafts section of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). He is also a governor of the Royal National Hospital for Consumption for Ireland in Newcastle, County Wicklow.
Orpen features as one of the many portraits in Seán Keating‘s Homage to Sir Hugh Lane. St. Columba’s College holds a portrait of Orpen by his brother, William, as well as a memorial stained-glass window to him by Catherine O’Brien.
Orpen is the fourth and youngest son of Arthur Herbert Orpen (1830–1926), a solicitor, and his wife, Anne Caulfield (1834–1912), the eldest daughter of the Right Rev. Charles Caulfield (1804–1862), the Bishop of Nassau. Both his parents are amateur painters, and his eldest brother, Richard Caulfield Orpen, becomes a notable architect. His nieces are Bea Orpen and Kathleen Delap. The historian Goddard Henry Orpen is his second cousin. The family lives at “Oriel,” a large house with extensive grounds containing stables and a tennis court. He appears to have a happy childhood there.
Orpen is a naturally talented painter, and six weeks before his thirteenth birthday is enrolled at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. During his six years at the college, he wins every major prize there, plus the British Isles gold medal for life drawing, before leaving to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1897 and 1899. At the Slade he masters oil painting and begins to experiment with different painting techniques and effects.
While at the Slade, Orpen becomes engaged to Emily Scobel, a model and the subject of his painting The Mirror (1900). She ends their relationship in 1901, and he marries Grace Knewstub, the sister-in-law of Sir William Rothenstein. He and Knewstub have three daughters together, but the marriage is not a happy one. By 1908, he has begun a long-running affair with Evelyn Saint-George, a well-connected American millionairess based in London, with whom he also has a child.
Orpen first exhibits at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1899, becoming a member in 1900. In 1901, he holds a solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in central London. His portraits, which establish his reputation, show the influence of the Realist artist Édouard Manet. He also becomes known as a painter of group portraits such as Homage to Manet (1909), in which he portrays members of the contemporary English art world sitting in conversation beneath a famous portrait by that artist.
At the start of World War I, a number of Irish people living in England return to Ireland to avoid conscription. Among them is Orpen’s studio assistant and former pupil, Seán Keating. Keating encourages him to do likewise, but he refuses and commits himself to supporting the British war effort. In December 1915, he is commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps and reports for clerical duty at London’s Kensington Barracks in March 1916. Throughout 1916 he continues painting portraits, most notably one of a despondent Winston Churchill, but soon starts using both his own contacts and those of Evelyn Saint-George, to secure a war artist posting.
He is the official painter of the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. Throughout 1919 he paints individual portraits of the delegates to the Conference and these form the basis of his two large paintings, A Peace Conference at the Quai d’Orsay and The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors. In both pictures, the architecture overwhelms the gathered politicians and statesmen who’s political wranglings and vainglory diminish them in Orpen’s eyes.
Orpen becomes seriously ill in May 1931, and, after suffering periods of memory loss, dies at the age of 52 on September 29, 1931, in South Kensington, London, of liver and heart failure. He is buried at Putney Vale Cemetery in southwest London. A stone tablet in the Island of Ireland Peace Park Memorial at Mesen, Belgium, commemorates him. He is posthumously regarded as a facile and prolific, but somewhat superficial, artist who nevertheless achieves great popularity in his day.
(Pictured: “Self-portrait” (1913), oil on canvas by William Orpen, Saint Louis Art Museum)
Hamilton is the daughter of Charles Robert Hamilton and Louisa Caroline Elizabeth Brooke. She attends Alexandra College. She and her sister Eva are great-granddaughters of the artist Marianne-Caroline Hamilton, and cousins of watercolouristRose Maynard Barton. The sisters’ father can only afford one dowry, so the sisters remain unmarried, with their artistic careers helping to support the household. Both she and her sister study at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art under William Orpen. She studies enameling there also, winning a silver medal in 1912 by both the School and the Board of Education National Commission. Her work shows elements of Art Nouveau, foreshadowing her later modernist leanings. She also studies in Belgium with Frank Brangwyn and the Slade School of Fine Art.
Hamilton first exhibits in 1902 and goes go on to become a prolific painter of the Irish countryside, exhibiting more than 200 paintings at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). Both sisters travel widely in Europe, with Letitia being influenced by modern European artistic trends of the early 20th-century. She is internationally exhibited, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington Gallery and Kensington Art Gallery in London, in Scotland, and Paris. Her exposure to impressionism comes from studying with Anne St. John Partridge in France. Her style matures in the 1920s. That year, she is one of the founding members of the Society of Dublin Painters, along with Paul Henry, Grace Henry, Mary Swanzy, and Jack Butler Yeats. It is around this time that she changes her signature from MH (May Hamilton) to LMH, reflecting her full name. She works on small oil sketches, which later develop into finished works. Her style is rapid, with loose, fluid brush strokes. In the early 1920s, she travels to Venice, painting on a gondola studio loaned to her by artist and friend Ada Longfield. The works from this trip are considered among her best, with her exploring light effects, pastel shades, and strong outlines. She later employs these elements into her works on Irish landscapes.
Hamilton becomes a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1943. In 1948, she becomes the last person to win a bronze medal at the art competitions at the London Olympic Games. She serves as president of the Society of Dublin Painters in the late 1950s. Despite her failing eyesight later in life, she continues to paint, mounting her final exhibition in 1963, a year before her death at the age of 86 in Dublin on August 11, 1964. She is also a committee member of the Water Colour Society of Ireland.
Crilley is born in Newry, County Down, (present-day Northern Ireland), on August 1, 1884, one of six children of Patrick Crilley. Her date of birth is often given as July 29, 1888, though local records do not support this, suggesting she is born four years earlier. Having initially trained at Newry technical school with her sister Mary, intending to become a teacher, in 1905, she wins a scholarship to attend the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. There she studies under William Orpen, who regards her as one of his most promising students. She completes her studies in 1911 attaining an Art Teacher’s Certificate and begins working as Orpen’s assistant.
In 1914, Crilley marries her fellow student Harry Clarke, much to the surprise of their family and acquaintances. The couple moves into a flat at 33 North Frederick Street. They have three children, Michael, David and Ann. Harry’s brother, Walter, marries Margaret’s sister, Mary, in 1915.
Clarke first exhibits with the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1913 and goes on to exhibit over 60 artworks in the forty years until 1953, the majority being portraits. Among the portrait commissions she receives are ones for Dermod O’Brien, President Éamon de Valera, ArchbishopJohn Charles McQuaid, and Lennox Robinson. She spends a great deal of time on the Aran Islands with fellow artist Seán Keating and her husband, from which she produces a number of landscapes and smaller studies.
Clarke becomes the director of the Harry Clarke Stained Glass Studios following the death of her husband in 1931.
A critic notes in 1939 that Clarke produces “remarkable drawings in which individuality is caught in a few swift economical lines.” Over her lifetime she wins many awards including the Tailteann gold, silver and bronze medals in 1924, and another Tailteann bronze in both 1928 and 1932. She is elected an Associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (ARHA) in 1926, and a full RHA member in 1927. Upon the founding of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943, she is appointed a member of the executive committee.
Clarke dies in Dublin on 31 October 31, 1961, and is buried in the Redford Cemetery, Greystones, County Wicklow. She is commemorated with a blue plaque at her birthplace in Newry.
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