Caroline Scally (1886-1973)
The Palace at Versailles
Oil on canvas, 59 x 73cm (23¼ x 28¾'')

Provenance: With The Frederick Gallery, Dublin, March 2005, catalogue no.3.

Exhibited: The Frederick...

Caroline Scally (1886-1973)
The Palace at Versailles
Oil on canvas, 59 x 73cm (23¼ x 28¾'')

Provenance: With The Frederick Gallery, Dublin, March 2005, catalogue no.3.

Exhibited: The Frederick Gallery, Dublin, Caroline Scally Retrospective, March 2005, cat. no. 3.

 

Caroline Scally was born on 29th October 1886 at 7 Corrig Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, Co.Dublin.

Her father Robert Stein was an engineer, and in 1889 the family moved to Blackrock, where Caroline was educated at the Dominican Convert, Sion Hill. After a period studying at the English Institute at Nymphenburg, Germany she returned to Dublin and enrolled as a student at the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools and at the Metropolitan School of Art where, amongst her fellow students were James Sinton Sleator and Sean Keating.

 

Dr SB Kennedy, writing about the artist in an essay for the 2005 Frederick Gallery Retrospective exhibition catalogue, noted that 'As a student in Dublin in the early 1900s Scally encountered a strict academic approach to picture making, notably at the Metropolitan School where her teachers included the celebrated William Orpen, although his influence on her was not as forceful as it was on Sleator, Keating and other of her contemporaries.'

 

Having won a Taylor Prize in 1911 and a scholarship she set off to the Continent and immersed herself in the art of the great museums and galleries. The present work, The Palace of Versailles was painted at this time and as Dr Kennedy notes 'indicated an early interest in landscape and architectural subjects, themes that remained with her throughout her career.'

 

By 1913 she was back in Ireland and the following year she married Gerald Scally, a Dublin businessman and proceeded to have five children together. Domestic life, inevitably for the time, interfered with her output and exhibiting became more sporadic. She had her first one-woman show at the Dublin Painters Gallery in 1930 and by 1938 she returned to the Academy and continued exhibiting there until the late 1950s. After a number of decades living in the north of the county the Scally's settled in number 81 Upper Leeson Street, Dublin, and as Dr Kennedy writes ... 'These movements are reflected in the titles of many of her paintings and thus serve as a guide to dating her works.'

 

'....... By 1930 she had adopted a more modernist approach, placing emphasis on a lyrical compositional technique with at times an almost Fauvist use of bright colours. In this development she was at one with many exhibitors at the Dublin Painter's Society and was part of a small, but influential coterie of Irish Women artists - Norah McGuinness, Nano Reid, Harriet Kirkwood, Frances Kelly, Joan Jameson, Sylvia Cooke Collis, Elizabeth Rivers come to mind - who had been influenced by recent French painting and had adopted a similarly modernist style placing emphasis on the expression of personal feelings rather than on more philosophical or syntactical issues.

 

'That Scally had aligned herself with the avant-garde painters of the time is borne out by her participation in the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art, held during September and October 1943. This was one of the two or three seminal art exhibitions held in Ireland during the 20th century and arguably the most consequential exhibition held during the first half of the century.

 

'Looking at her work, besides her dexterity with paint, her lyricism, her sense of colour and her eye for the often-quirky details of an architectural piece, it is the sheer pleasure that she obviously derived from painting that we respond to with such delight.'

 

We would like to acknowledge, with thanks, the writings of Dr SB Kennedy and to David Britton for his assistance with this note.

 

 

 

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