Sarah Purser: the woman who built Irish art's institutions

“I went through the British aristocracy like the measles.” Sarah Purser said it about her portrait practice, and it is the line everyone quotes. It undersells her by a distance. Purser painted well for sixty years; she also founded a stained-glass studio that made Ireland internationally famous, founded the body that has since given some 750 works to Irish public collections, and talked a government into handing over a Georgian mansion so that Hugh Lane's pictures would have somewhere to hang.

The mill that failed

She was born on 22 March 1848 at Kingstown — Dún Laoghaire — and raised largely in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, where her father ran brewing and flour-milling businesses. The Pursers had come from Gloucestershire in the eighteenth century and prospered through Guinness; two of her brothers became Trinity professors.

In 1873 her father's milling business failed. She was in her mid-twenties. She moved to Dublin with her mother and a brother, and from that point painting stopped being an accomplishment and became an income. Almost everything she did afterwards has the flavour of a woman who has watched money disappear and does not intend to be dependent again.

Montmirail, Dublin, Paris

At thirteen she had spent two years at the Moravian institute at Montmirail in Switzerland, where she learned French and started to paint. She studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and in 1878–9 spent six months at the Académie Julian in Paris alongside Louise Breslau, who became a lifelong friend and later painted her, and Marie Bashkirtseff. She went back to Paris nearly every year until 1889 and saw Degas, Manet, Whistler and Bastien-Lepage at first hand.

Le Petit Déjeuner is from that moment — 1881, not 1885 as it is often given, a small canvas now in the National Gallery of Ireland. The sitter is Maria Feller, an Italian music teacher who shared her Paris apartment. It is not a formal portrait at all: a woman at breakfast, caught between thoughts, with an expression the Gallery describes as suggesting ennui rather than contemplation. Degas and Berthe Morisot are in it.

The measles years

From 1887 to 1909 she worked from a studio at 11 Harcourt Terrace. In 1888 the Viceroy commissioned her to paint his children and the aristocratic market opened. She exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy for roughly fifty years, mostly portraits, and became the painter Ireland's intellectual and political class sat for.

Her Roger Casement of 1914 is in the National Gallery of Ireland; so is her Portrait of Jack B. Yeats, bought in 1974, and her Portrait of Kathleen Behan, given by the Friends of the National Collections in 1976. Her Miss Maud Gonne of 1890 is in the Hugh Lane: Gonne full length with her pet monkey Chaperone, an animal she used to travel unchaperoned and stay respectable. It was shown at the RHA in 1891 under the title The New Pet and failed to sell at eighty pounds, the highest price Purser had ever asked.

1901: the exhibition that made a gallery

In 1901 Purser organised a joint show of John Butler Yeats and Nathaniel Hone in Dublin, and invited a young dealer named Hugh Lane. That visit is generally credited with setting Lane's gallery in motion — which is to say that the Hugh Lane Gallery exists partly because Sarah Purser hung two of her friends' pictures and made the right person come and look.

An Túr Gloine

In January 1903, prompted by Edward Martyn and the need for Irish glass for the cathedral at Loughrea, she founded An Túr Gloine — the Tower of Glass — at 24 Upper Pembroke Street, with A. E. Child as manager and instructor.

Its founding rule was the whole point of it: each window was to be the work of one artist, who made the sketch and the cartoon and selected and painted every morsel of glass. No production line, no anonymous hands. Michael Healy, Wilhelmina Geddes, Evie Hone, Catherine O'Brien, Beatrice Elvery, Ethel Rhind and Hubert McGoldrick all worked there. The Studio called it, in 1904, perhaps the most noteworthy example of the newly awakened desire to foster Irish genius.

Purser ran it until 1940. Catherine O'Brien kept it going until it wound up as a co-operative in 1944. Purser made windows herself: St Ita at Loughrea in 1904, The Good Shepherd at St Columba's the same year.

Second Tuesdays

In 1911 she moved to Mespil House, a Georgian mansion on the Grand Canal, and began the gatherings known as her Second Tuesdays — the second Tuesday of every month, where young artists met the people who might buy from them or employ them. For thirty years it was a fixture of Dublin life. The house was demolished in the early 1950s.

The Friends, and Charlemont House

In 1924 she founded the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, to buy work and place it in Irish public collections. Since 1925 it has given or helped acquire around 750 works across 82 institutions, roughly 150 of them to the Hugh Lane. One of them, in 1944, was her own portrait of Maud Gonne.

That same year, aged seventy-six, she became the first woman elected a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. The sequence matters: honorary member in 1890, because that was all the Academy then offered women; associate in 1923; full member in 1924. She sat on the Board of Governors of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1914 until her death, only the second woman to do so.

In 1928 she learned that Charlemont House on Parnell Square was about to fall vacant, and lobbied W. T. Cosgrave's government to hand it to Dublin Corporation as a permanent home for the Municipal Gallery. It opened there in 1933. She attended.

She died in Dublin on 7 August 1943, aged ninety-five, after a stroke, and is buried at Mount Jerome.

Where to see her

The National Gallery of Ireland holds twenty-one works, including Le Petit Déjeuner, A Lady Holding a Rattle of 1885 and the life studies from her Paris year. The Hugh Lane has Miss Maud Gonne and her portraits of Jane Barlow, Edward Martyn and W. B. Yeats. The Ulster Museum has An Irish Idyll. She had a room to herself at the National Gallery in 2023 and a show at the Hugh Lane in 2024 for the Friends' centenary.

The Sarah Purser collection holds her portraits and figure studies as archival prints, framed or unframed, and the Sarah Purser artist page maps the Dublin she painted and ran. Every print is open edition and made to order.