Born in Loughbrickland, Co. Down in 1831 Helen Mabel Trevor showed a talent for drawing as a child, and her father Edward Hill Trevor of Lisnageard House, set up a studio for her. In the 1850s she exhibited portraits and animals studies at the Royal Hibernian Academy.
In her forties, after the death of her father, she began to study art formally at the Royal Academy Schools, London, 1877-1881. Then began a long period of travel and residence on the Continent with her sister Rose. They visited B
rittany and Normandy c.1880-1883, working variously at the artists’ colonies of Pont-Aven, Douarnenez and Concarneau in Finistere, and at Trouville. Helen painted several studies of elderly women and children in a Realistic manner, and landscapes in the open air. The Trevor sisters lived in Italy, 1883-c.1889, visiting Florence, Assisi, Perugia,Venice and Rome, Helen copying Old Master paintings in museums, and painting genre scenes of Italian life.
The Trevors moved to Paris in 1889, and this became their base during the 1890’s. Now nearly sixty, Helen attended classes in the ateliers of Carolus-Duran and Jean-Jacques Henner, and in 1894 of Luc-Olivier Merson. She painted in the artists’ colony of St. Ives in Cornwall, c.1893 and Concarneau, in Brittany 1895-96, and at Antibes in the South of France, 1897.
Trevor exhibited regularly at the RHA and at the Paris Salon, 1889-1899, gaining honourable mention there in 1898. After her death in Paris in 1900, two of her paintings, of Breton or Normandy peasant subjects, were bequeathed to the National Gallery of Ireland, and Rose presented a Self-Portrait by Helen. Another Breton painting ‘The Young Eve’ is in the collection of the Ulster Museum, Belfast.
Helen Mabel Trevor's work was included in 'Irish Women Artists: 1870-1970' exhibition (2014). Please click here to view the catalogue.
Read more