By Marie Bourke
Sarah Purser, painter, illustrator and stained-glass artist, was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1848 to Benjamin and Anne Purser of Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. She was related to the artists Frederic Burton and Walter Osborne. Although she had a comfortable upbringing and was educated in Switzerland, a decline in family fortunes resulted in a move with her mother and brother to Dublin, where it is thought that she attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. In 1872 she began exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and in 1875 was awarded a certificate in still life by the Royal Dublin Society. In 1878 she travelled to Paris, enrolling at the Académie Julian, where she spent six months training, making friends and discovering modern trends in art, notably Impressionism.
In 1879 Purser returned to Dublin determined to develop a career in painting. While drawn to landscape and figure studies, she moved into portraiture, which enabled her to paint every major figure in Irish society, including Maude Gonne and Roger Casement, followed by the British aristocracy. She became Ireland’s first successful woman portrait-painter, making annual visits to exhibitions in London and Paris to keep her work fresh and vigorous. A genuine activist, she became involved in every aspect of Irish cultural life, using her resources to promote important causes, while undertaking commissioned portraits. For over 50 years she exhibited in Ireland and overseas, including the RHA, where her portraits predominated. In 1924, aged 76, the RHA elected her an Academician, the first woman accorded that honour. Although this modern portrait by her friend Mary Swanzy is subdued, the sitter’s alert face predominates; her characteristically direct gaze is infused with a softness not usually associated with Purser and enhanced by a bowl of delicate blossoms.
The artist’s career included exhibition organisation, which was critical to the development of Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (Hugh Lane Gallery). She was a founding member of the Dublin Art Club in 1866 and of the Irish Artists’ Guild in 1910. In 1899 she was on the exhibition committee introducing French Modern Painters to Dublin, and in 1906 was on the organising committee of the first Oireachtas Art Exhibition. In 1901, the retrospective exhibition that she organised of the work of John Butler Yeats and Nathaniel Hone was visited by Hugh Lane, setting in motion plans for his gallery of modern art, which she supported. In 1904 Lane organised an exhibition of Irish art in London’s Guildhall Gallery, and later that year showed works at the RHA destined for his gallery. The Municipal Gallery opened in 1908. Following Lane’s death on the Lusitania in 1915, Purser worked tirelessly to find a permanent home for the Gallery, sourcing Charlemont House, its present site, where she attended the opening in 1933. She actively campaigned for the return of the 39 paintings from the Lane Bequest (the subject of a dispute since 1915 between the Hugh Lane Gallery and the National Gallery, London). The paintings are now shared and rotated in a partnership agreement between the galleries.
In 1903 Purser established An Túr Gloine (‘The Tower of Glass’, 1903–44), a pioneering co-operative studio founded to develop Irish stained glass. It involved many leading artists, including Michael Healy, Wilhelmina Geddes, Catherine O’Brien, Alfred E. Child, Hubert McGoldrick, Ethel Rhind and Evie Hone. The studio advanced the international reputation of Irish stained glass as a major achievement of the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement. Visit the National Gallery of Ireland to see An Túr Gloine exhibition.
Between 1914 and 1943 Purser was on the board of the governors and guardians of the National Gallery of Ireland, becoming the longest-serving woman in that role. She kept the Gallery informed, providing continuity during the early years of the Irish Free State. Meanwhile, the salons she held at Mespil House on the second Tuesday of each month were another aspect of her activism. While key figures in Irish cultural circles gathered to discuss everything from politics and literature to music, she promoted Irish art, remaining a perceptive, engaging hostess into her nineties.
In 1924, frustrated with the lack of funding for public collections, Purser founded the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland (FNCI) to acquire works of art and historic items to donate to public institutions, and to give them grants to purchase works. Since 1925 the FNCI has donated or assisted the acquisition of c. 750 artworks, enriching 82 Irish cultural institutions across the island. This voluntary body is a registered charity, audited annually, without staff or premises, and is funded by members’ subscriptions and occasional gifts or bequests. This year (2024) marks its centenary. In 1934, in a further philanthropic gesture, resulting from her desire to make art appreciation more widely known, Purser and her cousin John Griffith endowed the Purser–Griffith lectures in the History of European Painting at University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin, which continue to this day.
Purser died in 1943, aged 95, after an extraordinary life. Her epitaph, Fortis et strenua, is appropriate, considering how brave and active she was in initiating developments that led to a more visually and culturally enriched society. The Hugh Lane Gallery’s current exhibition amply demonstrates that Sarah Purser was one of the most influential figures in Irish art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Marie Bourke is a cultural historian formerly of the National Gallery of Ireland.