Collection: Sarah Cecilia Harrison

Sarah Cecilia Harrison (1863–1941) was one of Ireland's foremost portrait artists and a pioneering figure in Irish public life — the first woman elected to Dublin City Council, in 1912.

Born in Holywood, County Down, into a family with deep roots in Irish reform and resistance — she was great grand-niece of United Irishman Henry Joy McCracken and social reformer Mary Ann McCracken — Harrison studied at the Slade School of Fine Art under Alphonse Legros from 1878 to 1885, winning the Slade scholarship. She travelled extensively in Paris, Italy and Amsterdam before settling in Dublin in 1889.

Over the course of her career she submitted sixty paintings to the Royal Hibernian Academy's annual exhibition and was made an honorary academician of the Royal Ulster Academy of Fine Arts. Her 1914 portrait of Hugh Lane — the arts patron lost on the Lusitania in 1915 — is among her most celebrated works.

On Dublin City Council, Harrison campaigned to extend poor relief to the able-bodied unemployed and worked throughout her life to advance women's rights. In 1918 she escorted suffragist Anna Haslam to vote in the General Election — one of the defining images of the Irish suffrage movement. She is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, her gravestone inscribed: Artist and Friend of the Poor.