Helen Mabel Trevor — The Irish Painter of Breton Fisherfolk
Irish Artist · 1831–1900
Helen Mabel Trevor
An Ulster-born painter who made her career in Paris and Brittany — and sent five fishermen up a staircase to look at their mother.
The Fisherman's Mother (La Mère du Marin), 1892, oil on canvas — an old woman, a walking stick, a rosary wound round it. In the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.
The Story
Helen Mabel Trevor paints old women and fishermen's kitchens the way a good portraitist paints a head of state — straight on, with nothing softened. The faces she chose were the ones a Salon crowd would usually walk past, and she gave them the best wall in the room.
She was born in 1831 at Loughbrickland, Co. Down, and made her working life abroad. By the late 1880s she was in Paris, studying in the ateliers of Carolus-Duran, Jean-Jacques Henner and Luc-Olivier Merson — three of the leading teachers of the day. Carolus-Duran told her there were great qualities in her work, and her pictures of these years show firmer drawing and less sentiment than those of the 1880s. In a letter to her correspondent Emmeline Halse she mentions meeting an Irishman in Paris who suspected her of being an "Orange-woman" — her biographer suggests it was Roderic O'Conor, and the two may well have been friends.
Portraits were the backbone of her practice. In 1889 she sent a portrait of the Reverend Canon Green to the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, then to the Royal Hibernian Academy, then on to the Paris Salon in 1890. A portrait of the French sculptor Frédéric Bogino followed at the 1891 Salon. She also drew: pen-and-ink studies of Venice went to the 1890 Blanc et Noir exhibition in Paris, and a sketch dated August 1889 shows the new Eiffel Tower from her studio window, a balloon drifting past its top.
Then came Douarnenez. This was the Breton sardine port near Pont-Aven, a working town of boats and cottages, and Trevor was struck by it at once — she wrote that the sea was grand and the town very ancient, and that she had never seen blue so intense. There she painted La Mère du Marin, the picture we know as The Fisherman's Mother. The sitter was an old woman with five sons, every one of them a fisherman. When the painting was finished, all five climbed the stairs to the studio to see their mother on canvas — tall, weathered men, Trevor reports, nodding their approval.
The Salon of 1893 hung it in Salle 9, and a critic in The Morning Post singled it out for praise when he argued with the jury president that the year's show was no weaker than its predecessors. Two years later it was at the Royal Academy in London. Writing about the National Gallery in his history The Story of Dublin, David Alfred Chart noted that the type was one you could find in every Irish village and street: an old woman not broken, her face deeply lined, her eyes still keenly interested in life. The Breton woman and the Irish one are the same woman — and that, more than any technique, is why the picture works in a Dublin hallway.
Trevor never joined the avant-garde at Pont-Aven. Henner once accused her of being influenced by the Impressionists, but set beside O'Conor's colour-driven canvases of the same years, her dark, patient Breton interiors are hardly Impressionist at all. Her loyalty was to observation. She showed only occasionally at the Royal Academy in London and dreaded its season; in one letter she wonders, half-joking, whether she will ever have "an exhibition of all my pictures." The National Gallery of Ireland now holds her Self-Portrait, La Mère du Marin and Interior of a Breton Cottage — three pictures that go a good way towards it.
Timeline
- 1831 — Born at Loughbrickland, Co. Down.
- 1889 — Paris. Studies with Carolus-Duran, Henner and Merson; sends a portrait of Canon Green to Birmingham and the RHA; sketches the Eiffel Tower from her window in August.
- 1890 — Canon Green portrait at the Paris Salon; Venice studies shown at the Blanc et Noir exhibition, where she is invited to the opening.
- 1891 — Portrait of the sculptor Frédéric Bogino at the Paris Salon.
- 1892 — Paints La Mère du Marin at Douarnenez; her Breton cottage interior dates from the same year.
- 1893 — La Mère du Marin hangs in Salle 9 at the Paris Salon and is praised in The Morning Post.
- 1895 — Shows La Mère du Marin at the Royal Academy, London.
- 1900 — Dies.
Featured Works
Collector's Guide
Start with The Fisherman's Mother — it is the picture the Salon hung and the one the rest of her work leads to. Its deep blues and dark ground suit a hallway, a staircase or a quiet study. An Interior of a Breton Cottage is warmer: amber light, a figure absorbed in her work, a green glimpse of garden through the window — a natural kitchen or dining-room picture, and a good companion to the Fisherman's Mother. The Self-Portrait — painter's smock, teal headscarf, a steady look — is the one to give anyone who paints. To see her in company, read Irish Artists in Brittany and Seven Irish Women Artists.
Discover Similar Artists
Sarah Purser — another Paris-trained Irishwoman who built her career on portraits. · Aloysius O'Kelly and Roderic O'Conor — the Irish painters who worked in Brittany in the same years.