Portrait of an artist – Oliver O’Hanlon on pioneering Irish painter Estella Solomons

Vivid colours and pensive faces were among the main features of a recent exhibition of Estella Solomons’s work at the National Gallery of Ireland. It was the first such exhibition in decades and reminds us of the role played by artists of her generation in keeping the artistic flame alight while also modernising Irish art.

Estella (Stella) Solomons was born in Dublin in 1882 to a family steeped in the Jewish faith. As well as being closely involved in founding the Adelaide Road Synagogue, her optician father, Maurice, and her poet and musician mother, Rosa, were prominent philanthropists in the capital.

Her brother, Bethel, was a leading gynaecologist who played rugby for Ireland and acted at the Abbey Theatre. After attending Alexandra College, Stella, who has been described as tall and “strikingly beautiful” in appearance, studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where she was taught for a time by Walter Osborne and William Orpen.

There followed several years of study at London’s Chelsea School of Art and the Académie Colarossi in Paris. She was also greatly influenced by the Rembrandt tercentenary exhibition that she attended in Amsterdam in 1906.

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Stella made etchings of parts of Dublin city that have since been effaced by the wrecking ball and painted landscapes of Ireland’s rugged natural beauty. In Donegal, Muckish, Narin and Breaghy Head were among the places featured in her works, while in Kerry, she was inspired by Ballinskelligs, Tralee Bay and Castlegregory.

While she also did illustrations for Padraic Colum’s The Road Round Ireland, portraits were her main area of expertise. Subjects ranged from close friends and family to figures from the independence movement, such as the journalist and author Frank Gallagher and the Sinn Féin politician Seán Milroy.

Her studio, located on Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street), was a meeting place for a range of political, social and artistic gatherings.

During the Civil War, her studio became a safe house for anti-Treaty republicans who were on the run. Some of these men were painted by Stella in the studio, which was subsequently raided by Free State troops. So as not to incriminate any of her sitters (or indeed herself), she destroyed some of the portraits.

As well as painting friends and family, Stella painted some of those at the cutting edge of Ireland’s literary revival. The writer and political activist Alice Milligan, the poet Austin Clarke, and the painter and poet George Russell (AE), all sat for her. James Stephens, who occupied a room below Stella’s studio, was also among her sitters.

In a recent article in the Irish Arts Review examining Solomons’s artistic legacy, Hilary Pyle said that her work was “never overambitious or wilfully imposing”. Rather, Pyle suggests that Stella’s paintings “draw the viewer in for their directness and physicality” and that in her portraits, she “aimed for living likenesses”.

This “directness” can be seen in the portrait of her great friend, Kathleen Goodfellow, in which the viewer is met squarely with the sitter’s gaze. Goodfellow’s electric blue eyes stare out from the painting and are made all the more striking by the pale blue blouse she wears underneath her jacket and overcoat.

Together with Goodfellow, Stella became involved in the independence struggle. She enlisted in the Ranelagh branch of Cumann na mBan in 1917 and was taught first aid, drill and signalling by Phyllis Ryan, who would later marry Seán T O’Kelly. Stella hid ammunition in the garden of the family home on Waterloo Road and was taught how to fire a revolver.

In January 1922, she was one of the artists chosen to exhibit at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, an exhibition which coincided with the Congress of the Irish Race, which was taking place in the city at the time. Other Irish female artists whose work was on display include Mary Swanzy, Sarah Purser, and Eva Hamilton.

In July 1925, Stella was elected as an Associate at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and exhibited there for over 60 years. Also in 1925, she married the poet Seumas O’Sullivan, whose birth name was James Sullivan Starkey. They were both in the forties but he was a couple of years older. After working in his parents’ pharmacy on Rathmines Road, he decided to devote himself to literature full-time.

As editor of the Dublin Magazine, he championed young writers such as Patrick Kavanagh and Mary Lavin. Stella painted and sketched her husband many times both before and after they were married. A good friend of fellow writer Oliver St John Gogarty, it is said that Stella’s husband gave James Joyce a pair of trousers and shoes before Joyce left for the continent. The couple’s weekly “at-home” was attended by many of the leading writers of the day, including Samuel Beckett, whose aunt, Frances (Cissie), was one of Stella’s contemporaries.

Estella Solomons died in 1968.