Sarah Cecilia Harrison — Portraitist and Dublin's First Woman Councillor
Irish Artist · 1863–1941
Sarah Cecilia Harrison
Portraitist of Dublin's cultural life — and the first woman ever elected to Dublin Corporation.
Self-Portrait — black dress, a spray of flowers at the throat, a level gaze out of a deep green ground. In the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.
The Story
Sarah Cecilia Harrison paints people as she finds them — closely, plainly, without a trace of flattery — and then spends a good part of her life arguing the case of the Dubliners nobody paints at all. She is one of the sharpest portraitists of the city's revival years, and the first woman ever elected to Dublin Corporation.
She was born on 21 June 1863 at Holywood House, Co. Down, into a family that remembered 1798. She was a grandniece of Henry Joy McCracken, the United Irishman hanged in Belfast, and of his sister Mary Ann McCracken, the reformer who walked with him to the gallows. From 1878 to 1885 she trained at the Slade School in London under Alphonse Legros, a teacher who put drawing before everything — and the discipline shows in every face she made.
In 1889 she settled in Dublin, working from a studio at 16 Fitzwilliam Place. Her sitters read like a roll-call of the city's cultural life: the Italian-born composer Michele Esposito; the Celtic scholar Richard Irvine Best, Joyce's "Mr Best" in the library chapter of Ulysses; and his wife, the pianist Edith Best, caught in a few certain lines of pencil. She painted her brother Henry, Parnell's aide in the bitter years after the split — and in 1926 she painted her great-uncle, Henry Joy McCracken, dead for nearly 130 years. That canvas is in the Ulster Museum, Belfast.
Her closest cause was Hugh Lane's. She served as secretary of the committee raising funds for a Dublin gallery to house his pictures, and after his death on the Lusitania in 1915 she campaigned for the Lane bequest — the unwitnessed codicil that left his paintings in dispute for decades. Her portrait of Lane is among her best-known works.
In 1912 she stood for Dublin Corporation as an independent and headed the poll in the South City ward — the first woman the Corporation had ever seated. She used the place to press the case of the city's poor, and lost it in January 1915. She died on 23 July 1941 in a nursing home in Drumcondra. Five of the works we print are in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Timeline
- 1863 — Born 21 June at Holywood House, Co. Down — a grandniece of Henry Joy and Mary Ann McCracken.
- 1878–85 — Trains at the Slade School, London, under Alphonse Legros.
- 1889 — Settles in Dublin; works from a studio at 16 Fitzwilliam Place.
- 1912 — First woman elected to Dublin Corporation, heading the poll in the South City ward as an independent.
- 1915 — Loses her Corporation seat in January.
- 1926 — Paints Henry Joy McCracken, her great-uncle, and the composer Michele Esposito.
- 1941 — Dies 23 July in a nursing home in Drumcondra, Dublin.
Her Ireland
From a Co. Down childhood to a Dublin studio and a seat in City Hall. Click a pin for the places that shaped her — and where her work is kept.
Holywood · 16 Fitzwilliam Place · Dublin City Hall · the National Gallery of Ireland · the Ulster Museum.
Featured Works
Collector's Guide
Start with the Self-Portrait — it is the key to the rest, the same unflattering honesty turned on herself. For a Joyce reader, Richard Irvine Best and his wife Edith Best hang well as a pair, scholar and musician side by side. For a wall of Irish history, Henry Joy McCracken and Henry Harrison put 1798 and the Parnell years in one family. Sir Hugh Lane marks the cause she fought hardest for, and the portrait of Rev. J.P. Mahaffy — attributed to Harrison — suits a Trinity graduate or a Wilde reader. More of the faces behind modern Ireland are in Irish Patriots & Historical Leaders.
The Harrison Gift Guide
Three ways into her Dublin, at three price points.
- Henry Harrison — art print · from €55
- Self-Portrait — art print · from €72
- Henry Joy McCracken (1926) — art print · from €75
Discover Similar Artists
Sarah Purser — the other great woman portraitist of her Dublin, and a fellow campaigner for Lane's pictures. · John Butler Yeats — portraitist of the Literary Revival. · William Orpen — another Slade-trained painter of Dublin faces.