NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
0.00EUR+ applicable fees & taxes.
This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2005 Nov 29 @ 18:00UTC
Sarah Henrietta Purser HRHA (1848-1943) A VISITOR, 1885 signed with initials lower left oil on canvas 76 by 51cm., 30 by 20in. Provenance: Artist's collection; Her sale, Mespil House, Dublin, 1943; Mrs V. Ganley; Gorry Gallery, Dublin, May 1988; Whence purchased by the present owner Exhibited: Dublin Sketching Club, December 1885, catalogue no. 233 (NFS); ’Irish Women Artists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day’, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, July-August 1987, catalogue no. 36; ’An Exhibition of 18th, 19th and 20th Century Irish Paintings’, Gorry Gallery, Dublin, 22 April - 5 May 1988, catalogue no. 17 Literature: Daily Express, 15 December 1885; John O'Grady, Sarah Henrietta Purser, Ph.D thesis, National University of Ireland, 1974; John O'Grady, catalogue entry for A Visitor in Irish Women Artist's from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 1987, page 98 (illustrated); Gabrielle Williams, ‘Some Remarkable Irish Exhibitions’, The Irish Times, 23 April 1988 (review of the Gorry Gallery show in which mention is made of the Purser, comparing it stylistically to Tissot); John O'Grady, The Life and Work of Sarah Purser, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1996, listed as catalogue no. 137, pages 193-4, illustrated colour plate 17; also discussed pages 48 and 50; Eamonn Maillie (ed.), One Hundred Years of Irish Art: A Millennium Presentation, private publication, Dublin, 2000, pages 245-5 (reproduced in colour) Seeing A Visitor once more and experiencing its mystique are pleasures in themselves, and at the same time its reappearance is an opportunity to unravel facets of Sarah Purser’s early career not previously elucidated in published accounts of her life and work. A personable model, an inspirational pose, an evocative ambience, and she can manage to immortalize a mood, a moment, creating one of those “graceful and easy” figure subjects admired by the press, one in a series stretching from Le Petit Déjeuner (NGI) painted in Paris in 1880 to Kathleen, painted at Mespil House in 1935 and briefly exhibited last year in Dublin. In each case the model is an identifiable acquaintance of the painter, but in these works her interest is in personality, a matter of the spirit, and mere identity belongs to the more mundane arena of portraiture. Portraiture had not been the starting point of her professional career, which was still in its opening decade when she painted A Visitor. Her first priced work is an outdoor scene of figures in the ruins of Muckross Abbey, Killarney, a watercolour signed S.H.P. 1876. A genre picture in oils of a “roguish” urchin with a hank of onions, sent from Paris to the 1879 RHA Spring Exhibition, earned her earliest favourable press reviews. A year later the critics were admiring the “power and vigour of treatment” and “crisp and decisive use of the palette knife” in her flowerpieces as well as genre scenes. She liked variety. Then in 1881 she emerged as a portraitist, when her RHA exhibits included portraits of four named sitters. One was a commission from the City of Dublin Working-men’s Club and portrayed a founder and patron of that club, Jane L’Estrange. Jane would make it her business to promote Sarah Purser as a portraitist among her own aristocratic connections both in Ireland and in Britain, not least those of the de la Poer Beresford bloodline. This project may have begun at once; the women were together in Surrey in July, as a portrait of Jane and a drawing of a garden at Caterham are both inscribed 5/7/81 in one of Sarah’s sketchbooks. And Jane introduced Sarah to the Gore-Booths of Lissadell, Co. Sligo, Jane and Lady Georgina being first cousins, whose maternal grandmother Charlotte de la Poer Beresford, a niece of the first Marquess of Waterford, was wife of the heir to the Earl of Scarborough. This introduction led to the splendid and informal double portrait of the Gore-Booth girls Constance and Eva which, incidentally, changed hands in 2003 for an enormous sum. Sarah did not neglect her genre practise in those years, working in the open at various Co. Cork resorts each autumn and selling the pictures successfully at the spring exhibitions. Still, the highest praise she received from the press at the 1883 RHA was for her likeness of a well-known Dublin academic, “by common consent the portrait of the year”. At that show too, her Portrait painted in the open air was said by the same journal to be “another example of Miss Purser’s originality and careful avoidance of anything savouring of the conventional portrait”– again a friend features in figure-subject guise. By then Sarah was well into the campaign which her Swiss fellow-artist Louise Breslau facetiously called illustrating “l’armorial de la Grande Bretagne”. As John Butler Yeats wrote to Sarah on 14 January 1884, he had “just got your letter and I am very glad about the Earl. …I suppose now you will become a kind of portrait painting peddler moving from one magnificent castle to the other …”. Later that year a major commission led to three life-size works for a patrician English family; a pastel of their four children’s heads, and two full-length double portraits of them in oils. That of the younger pair, a soon-to-be baronet and a future viscountess, brought Sarah’s career to a new crest by appearing in the 1885 Royal Academy Spring Exhibition in London. “I do rejoice with my whole heart in your success” wrote J. B. Yeats on 30 April, “… success at the RA is a real test particularly where the painting is honest like yours…”. And in the afterglow of this, she went back in July to Surrey where the ex-Bostonian Sturgis family wanted a portrait of “the madre”. They got it, and portraits of her two novelist sons, and gifts for both men, a painting of wildflowers for Howard, and for his brother the bravura Lady with a child’s rattle inscribed in raillery “à M. Julian Sturgis hommage respectueux! S. H. Purser. 1.8.85.” (NGI). And once again a seeming figure-subject hides an identifiable person, in this case Mary Maud, daughter of Colonel Marcus de la Poer Beresford, and a relative of Archbishop Marcus Beresford of Armagh at whose cathedral she and Julian had married in 1883. By now they had a son; perhaps the rattle was his. Both brothers wrote to Sarah at that time sending cheques, and both refer to Mary Maud as Pussy. Glimpses of Sarah emerge when Mary Maud wrote that “…I found some specs and said at once they were yours, there is an outward bend of the sticks that I well remember gave your veil a peculiar cock at each side – I will send them to you tomorrow. We all missed you very much and now we frequently quote you”. Sarah habitually wore pince-nez, but no doubt a veil required more stable spectacles. Whatever about specs and quotable bon-mots, what Sarah did not leave behind was a second picture for which Mary Maud had posed, in the same chic hat and walking-dress, and this was shown as A Visitor at the annual exhibition of the Dublin Sketching Club in December 1885. One press reviewer found the picture “remarkably cleverly painted with a firm yet pliable brush. A young lady, dressed in a light gown, is seated in the shadow of a window on a sofa, the light falling on her dress. The position is easy, yet very much foreshortened, and the tone that pervades the penumbra of the room is exceedingly true, if a little bleak and cold.” He made no mention of the brilliant handling of the palette-knife to create the three-dimensional effect of the skirt, nor did he note the verve with which the parasol and striped sofa are swept onto the canvas, nor the able and economic rendering of details from a ring to scarlet boot-buttons. And the fact that a “subject” exhibit by a professional bore no price escaped comment too. Not offering A Visitor for sale was, to judge by Sarah’s like treatment of Le Petit Déjeuner, surely a mark of the painter’s affection for their models, and her lasting regard for both pictures, which remained in her possession all her life. A Visitor was hanging over a doorway in Mespil House when Sarah Purser’s goods were auctioned after her death. As it was unsigned, and black with age, the auctioneer used it to re-focus attention, distracted by the selling of some notable item. As recalled in 1974 by the purchaser, Mrs. V. Ganley, he put the picture up, asked what he was bid, and when she immediately bid £1 he as quickly knocked it down to her. Now someone else will have the opportunity to possess themselves of one of the treasures of 19th century Irish painting, and the happiness that will flow daily from its loveliness! John O'Grady, UCD, National University of Ireland, Dublin
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Previewing Details:
Exhibition: Saturday and Sunday November 26 and 27, 10am to 6pm; Monday November 28, 10am to 9pm; Tuesday, November 29 (day of sale) 10am to 2pm. NO VIEWING AFTER 2pm ON DAY OF SALE.
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Buyer's Premiums:
| From (Incl.) | To (Excl.) | Premium |
| 0.00 |
999.00 |
15% |
| 1,000.00 |
9,999.00 |
15% |
| 10,000.00 |
Infinite |
10% |
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