THOUGH feminists may often seem unaware of the fact, Irish art of this century could scarcely have taken shape as it did, or have found its bearings, without a core of remarkable women to help it out and, when necessary, to fight its battles and skirmishes. In the 1920s French Modernism was largely pioneered here by Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, and in the depths of the second World War, Hone and Jellett were influential in the founding of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, which gave Ireland's still-endangered modernists their chief forum.
In turn, the Living Art was well served by two other women artists who were both talented and able (the two do not always go together): Anne Yeats and Norah McGuinness. Without people such as this, the IELA would have found it hard to keep its show on the road. In fact, the history of Irish art over the last hundred years (at least) is filled with women who were able, hardworking committee members, efficient secretaries and organisers, canvassers of patronage and funding, hunters-up of publicity, seekers-out of new talent. Some posed in the limelight, others hid from it, while others again were content to work away at the essential chores which most people either did nor want, or lacked the time to carry out.
The prototype of all these women was undoubtedly Sarah Purser, who died in 1943 (the very year the Living Art was founded) aged 95. She was unmarried, stubbornly self-sufficient up to the end, quite clear in her mind, and strong as ever in her opinions. In fact, a few days before she died, she had phoned Aras an Uachtarain to protest to the aged President, Douglas Hyde, about a new postage stamp which had just been issued to commemorate 50 years of the Gaelic League. The stamp bore an image of Hyde, its founder, and Purser thought that the portrait was "bad art". (She herself had painted him years before).
Whatever about the stamp, the fuss and argument finished Purser, who had fussed and argued through most of her long life. She suffered a stroke - a very small one, it seems, but still too much for somebody within sight of a century. She died on August 7th and was buried in Dublin three days later. On her gravestone the words Fortis et Strenua were inscribed, and not even surviving enemies disputed that she had earned them.
Purser was born in Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown) in 1848, a year of revolution and famine, though naturally she was too young to know it. Her father's family had been brewers for generations, and her mother was of Huguenot blood. Sarah grew up in a prosperous home, but her father later failed both as a brewer and in business of his own, eventually emigrating to America. She learned fluent French at a school in Switzerland and when she decided to become an artist (apparently it was a toss-up between that and teaching music) she made her mark quickly, exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy in her early twenties. Then, finding Dublin art teaching either inadequate, or closed to women, she headed for Paris and the famous Academic Julian, where George Moore had studied (abortively) only a few years before.
Here she made friends and "contacts" (including encounters with Degas) some of which lasted her lifetime, but her mother fell ill and she came home after six months. She never studied in Paris again, though she visited it many times and always had the entree there to homes, studios and influential salons. Compared with Paris, Dublin was a backwater in art, but the stodgy mediocrity of the RHA was being challenged by major new talents, chiefly those of Nathaniel Hone and John Butler Yeats. Purser, too, quickly began to establish herself as a painter, and in 1882 she painted (on commission) the portraits of Constance Gore-Booth (later Countess Markievicz) and her sister Eva which still hang in the dining room at Lissadell in Co Sligo. She also had works hung in the Royal Academy in London and at the "greenery-yallery," ultra-fashionable Grosvenor Gallery.
Her studio in Harcourt Terrace, just off the Grand Canal, soon became a calling-place or meeting-place for intellectual Dublin, since Purser was a born hostess and also loved conversation and argument. Years later, the writer Stephen Gwynn recalled that it was "a place where a young man thought it a great privilege to have his wits sharpened."
Hyde, W. B. Yeats, "AE", the women writers Jane Barlow, Susan Mitchell and Katherine Tynan, the patriots Michael Davitt and John O'Leary, Maud Gonne, and the great sculptor John Hughes were all among her regular callers. Many of these people were painted by her. Purser was a famous disputer, and her rationalist outlook often clashed with the mood of the time, when spiritualism was in vogue and a certain "otherworldliness" helped to create the mood of the Celtic Twilight.
In 1886 she was one of the founders of the Dublin Art Club, along with Hone, Yeats the Elder and Walter Osborne. When Yeats went back to London the following year, it was a loss to Irish art but a professional gain to Purser, whose portrait practice continued to grow. As John O'Grady says in his new book on her: "portraiture suited Purser's temperament, letting her indulge her passion for conversation while she earned her living, and bringing ever more interesting sitters to her studio as her popularity grew." Sadly, many of her portraits are untraced, since the heirs of the sitters are unknown.
INEVITABLY, given her personal dynamism and wide range of contacts, she became heavily involved in attempts to open up the provincial Dublin art world to wider horizons. In 1899 she was one of a select group which arranged a major loan exhibition for the city: it included works by Corot, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Monet, Whistler, etc. This exhibition was a genuine trail-blazer for Ireland, and some of the works shown remain here in public collections.
This venture, into which she put much hard work, established her credentials as an organiser and propagandist. Purser became a key figure in the Irish art revival, helping to mount a major exhibition by Hone and J. B. Yeats and a momentous event - playing a leading part in setting up An Tur Gloine, the enterprise which gave Ireland probably the most gifted school of stained-glass artists in the first third of this century. Typically, she was not content to tell stained-glass makers what to do: she mastered the (very difficult) craft herself and designed windows in her own right.
Meanwhile, she propagandised and lobbied on behalf of Hugh Lane and his plan for a modern art gallery, with a strong representation of the Impressionists. About this time, too, she gave up the Harcourt Street studio and moved to Mespil House, across the Grand Canal, where she held her "at homes" every second Tuesday. Lane was largely responsible for getting her elected to the Board of the National Gallery, and when Lane was lost on the Lusitania in 1915, she and her colleagues had the task of finding a successor to him as director there; she was also heavily involved in the controversy later known as the Lane Pictures which bedevilled Anglo-Irish relations for decades. Lane's eventual successor, Robert Langton Douglas, turned out after a few years to be a bad choice, and he resigned some years later.
There was no stopping Purser's energy: she founded the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland (it still exists) and, faithful to Hugh Lane's memory, was largely responsible for siting the Dublin Municipal Gallery in Charlemont House, thanks to the backing of the Cosgrave government (previously, the municipal collection had been housed in rather makeshift premises in Harcourt Street).
She also worked hard to lay the ground for art-history courses in UCD and TCD, which have since turned out respected scholars and directors. And always she painted - not only portraits, but genre pieces, interiors, landscapes, flowerpieces, even nudes. Her style was formed by late 19th-century realism, but she never became ossified mentally and was open to new developments in painting.
For Purser's 90th birthday on March 22nd, 1938, she was entertained to a celebratory dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel, with a special menu card designed by her good friend Jack Yeats. Her last act of public service was to annotate a list of works in the National Gallery to be moved safety during the "Emergency" - Civil Service jargon for the second World War. Wartime fuel shortages kept Mespil House chilly, and lack of a petrol ration restricted her movements in the last few years.
Sarah Purser was a major personality without a doubt, and a fine painter too, though gifted and efficient rather than great. John O'Grady stresses her charm and kindness and social adaptability; but tradition remembers her as sweet-and-sour, with a tart tongue when she chose to use it, which was quite often (she once publicly rebuked George Moore for "passing off my mots as yours"). Purser had to move mountains, or at least Irish hills, and to do she needed to be trenchant and tough as well as tactful and wooing.
Though a great talker, see was an even greater doer and Dublin at that time generally preferred talkers to doers. No doubt her businesslike, anti-cant, no-nonsense approach to problems and challenges, the legacy of generations of hardheaded Anglo-Irish business folk, was not what either polite society or the artists themselves expected from a woman. Above all, Purser laid down unflinching professionalism in all she did, both in her painting and her life, and an adequate retrospective exhibition of her work is overdue. In particular, Irish women artists owe her a debt for fighting the good fight during the years when most art institutions, including the RHA, seem to have felt that a woman's place was in the home and not the studio.
