Mildred Anne Butler: the garden at Kilmurry
Forty years after Mildred Anne Butler died, the contents of her studio at Kilmurry were sold at Christie's in London. Around four hundred works came out at once. A former director of the National Gallery of Ireland called it the phenomenon of the century. The Gallery bought seven watercolours that year, and a painter who had almost entirely dropped out of the story of Irish art was back in it.
One house
She was born on 11 January 1858 at Kilmurry, near Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny, and died in the same house on 11 October 1941, aged eighty-three. In between she painted, for roughly fifty years, what she could see from it.
Her father was Captain Henry Butler, of the Mountgarret branch of the Butlers — a junior line, not the Ormonde earls — and a capable amateur artist and naturalist who drew the plants and animals he met on his travels. Kilmurry itself has a seventeenth-century core enlarged in the mid-eighteenth, with a two-acre walled garden and, at that time, several hundred acres around it. She inherited it having outlived her siblings.
Training
She was not a naive painter and it is worth saying so, because the subject matter invites the assumption. She studied at the Westminster School of Art in London; took animal painting under W. Frank Calderon; worked in Paris under Henri Gervex alongside her friend Rose Barton; and trained under the Guernsey-born watercolourist Paul Jacob Naftel, whom she credited for her understanding of the medium. From 1885 she travelled through France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy.
Then, in the summers of 1894 and 1895, she went to Newlyn in Cornwall for Norman Garstin's classes — the moment that decided everything. The Newlyn painters worked directly from nature, out of doors, on French principles. Butler took that method home and pointed it at a garden.
What she actually painted
Doves on a wall. Hens. Cattle standing in a wet field. Rooftops in Thomastown. The flowerbeds. And above all rooks — wheeling, settling, arguing in bare trees. The High Court of Justice of 1892 is a parliament of them. A Preliminary Investigation of 1898 is two of them inspecting something on the ground with the air of officials.
Shades of Evening, painted in 1904, is the one most people know: crows gathering in a tree at dusk, watercolour on paper, ninety-seven centimetres tall. It is in the National Gallery of Ireland, bought in 1981 — which is to say it came out of the studio sale.
The plumage is exact because she worked from photography and taxidermy as well as from life. That sounds unromantic and it is exactly the point: the immediacy is the result of a great deal of preparation.
1896
Recognition came early and then stopped. In 1896 her watercolour Morning Bath was bought from the Royal Academy exhibition by the trustees of the Chantrey Bequest — one of the first works by a woman ever bought for the nation under it. It is at Tate.
That same year she was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours. Full membership took another forty-one years. It arrived in 1937, when she was seventy-nine and had largely stopped painting because of arthritis.
Two things worth correcting, because both circulate: she was never a Royal Academician — no woman was elected to the Royal Academy between 1768 and Laura Knight in 1936 — and it was Morning Bath, not Shades of Evening, that the Chantrey bought. She exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1889 to 1902, with the Society of Women Artists, with the Watercolour Society of Ireland from 1892 to 1938, and was made an academician of the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1930. She accepted a commission from Queen Mary in 1922 and is represented in Queen Mary's Dolls' House.
The forty-year gap
After 1941 she went quiet. Watercolour has always been undersold; a woman painting her own garden was easy to file as a hobbyist; and the work was nearly all still in the house, unseen.
It stayed there until her cousin Doreen Archer-Houblon, who had inherited Kilmurry, died. The studio contents went to Christie's on 13 October 1981. Kilkenny Castle mounted a show the same year. Since then she has been steadily reassessed: a place in Irish Women Artists: 1870–1970, a National Gallery of Ireland exhibition — At Home in Nature, sixteen watercolours — from September 2024 to January 2025, and a full biography by Tom Duffy launched in Thomastown that December.
The National Gallery's director wrote of her extraordinary technical skill as a watercolourist and her pioneering spirit as one of Ireland's first professional women artists. Back in 1897, The Athenaeum had said something more useful about the pictures themselves: they command attention by the massing and breadth of their chiaroscuro. That is a critic noticing that a garden painter was building weather.
Where to see her
Tate has Morning Bath. The National Gallery of Ireland has Shades of Evening and the six other watercolours bought in 1981. The Ulster Museum, the Hugh Lane, Fota House in Cork and the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny all hold her work.
The Mildred Anne Butler collection holds the rooks, the garden and the Kilkenny scenes as archival prints, framed or unframed, and the Mildred Anne Butler artist page follows her life at Kilmurry. Every print is open edition and made to order.