Sarah Purser HRHA (1848-1943) Kathleen Oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm (24 x 20'') Signed, also signed and inscribed verso Two vivid personalities went into the making of this bravura picture, a final...

Sarah Purser HRHA (1848-1943) Kathleen Oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm (24 x 20'') Signed, also signed and inscribed verso Two vivid personalities went into the making of this bravura picture, a final expression of the empathy between Sarah Purser and Kathleen Kearney which resulted in a half dozen of the best paintings of Purser's closing decades. An early example of the group which is familiar to National Gallery of Ireland visitors is The Sad Girl, an emotive study of Kathleen's head, first shown in Purser's solo exhibition in May 1923 (NGI no.4188). Purser was still studying in Paris in 1879 when her genre painting of a 'roguish' urchin with a hank of onions gained favourable comment in a press review of the Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition. Over the next few years she earned a reputation with genre exhibits at the annual shows of various Irish exhibiting bodies, the press critics continually admiring her bold execution and down-to-earth subjects. These genre scenes often had just one figure, and in some cases the model can be identified - in effect, these pictures each portray an individual, though that person is there as a prop in a story. It was a short step from here to portraiture, and in 1883 one of the press critics declared that 'by common consent the portrait of the year' at the RHA was Purser's rendering of a popular Irish academic. For the next twenty years her position as the leading and most prolific portraitist in Ireland was secure, yet she continued to produce highly regarded genre scenes, and occasionally exhibited 'subject' pictures which were portraits in disguise, as for instance her 1891 RHA exhibit The New Pet, for which Maud Gonne posed (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin) The imaginative impulse behind such work was an essential part of Purser's artistic equipment when illustrating Irish short stories and when designing windows at the stained glass co-operative An T?r Gloine which she founded in 1903 and managed for forty years. Equally essential to these successes was her conviction that Ireland could and should recover its long-lost national self-sufficiency in arts and crafts. These feelings and her independent character put her in sympathy with some of the ideals of longtime friends such as the revolutionist Maud Gonne. And it was through Maud that Purser met the very republican Kathleen Kearney soon after she was widowed, about 1918-20. Maud tried to support Kathleen with odd jobs, and suggested to Sarah that the young woman would make a fine model with her boldly expressive character, hazel eyes, and heavy dark red tresses. Painter and model suited each other admirably, and Sarah's 1923 exhibition included at least two paintings for which Kathleen posed. Later came a joyously voluptuous full-length nude, Purser's very best rendering of that genre. And finally the present picture, laden with the mood of Kathleen's casual self-absorbtion, and caught with the painterly verve which had sustained a career spanning six decades; no wonder that Purser at eighty-seven years of age happily inscribe it with her modest enough claim to professional competence.

View more View less