ROSE BARTON R.W.S. (1856 -1929)

A townscape painter born at Rochestown, Co. Tipperary, 21st april 1856, Rose Mary Barton was the daughter of a solicitor, Augustine Barton, and the cousin of Edith Somerville. Educated privately, she was presented at Dublin Castle in 1872. In 1874 her father died and the next year her mother took Rose and her sister Emily Alma on a visit to Brussels where they had drawing and painting lessons. Three years later Rose exhibited Dead Game', the first of a dozen works at the Royal Hibernian Academy. In 1879 she was on the local committee of the Irish Fine Art Society which arranged their exhibition at the Theatre Royal, Cork. In the early 1880s she decided to become a professional artist and, accompanied by Mildred Anne Butler, who became a lifelong friend, she studied at the studio of the French artist, Henri Gervex. Both women also worked in London under Paul Jacob Naftel. In some of her watercolours there was a noted interest In atmospheric effects. The Last Lamp was dated 1892. 'On Yarmouth Sands' was dated 1893. She was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours in 1893 but did not reach full membership until 1911. In the National Gallery of Ireland is 'Hop Pickers in Kent Returning Home', 1894. Her next major London Exhibition was at the Clifford Gallery in 1898. In the first decade of the century her Watercolours were well-known in Dublin and London, particularly as she had illustrated books about both cities. As well as portraying children in cities she occasionally placed them in rustic settings. In her London book,1904, she wrote that the city "has ever been to me a most enthralling place. Not only on account of its intense attractions from an artistic point of view, but also from what it has always taught me to feel so strongly - how little and feeble each one of us is and that therefore there comes the stronger necessity to try and work aright." She also referred to travelling on the Underground with her easel and stool, mentioning a studio in South Kensington as well as one which she rented for a winter in Glebe Place. The publication had sixty-one colour illustrations from her watercolours. Lord Iveagh owned sixteen of the originals, including 'In the Strand', 'Waiting for Election News', 'Gordon's Statue' and 'The Thames, Charing Cross'. She divided her time between Dublin and London, her most permanent residence being at 79 Park Mansions, Knightsbridge, where she died 10 october 1929.

MILDRED ANNE BUTLER RWS (1858-1941)

A landscape painter, Mildred Anne Butler spent most of her life at the family home, Kilmurry in Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny. Kilmurry was her chief source of inspiration, flower gardens and landscapes featuring animals and birds being her forte. She studied under Paul Jacob Naftel in London, crediting him with her first real understanding of the art of watercolour. Exhibition with the Water Colour Society of Ireland began in 1890 and three years later her work was included in an album of watercolours presented to the future Queen Mary. A tiny watercolour of crows hangs in Queen MaryÍs dollÍs house at Windsor. She is associated with the Newlyn school, spending the summers of 1894 and 1895 studying under Norman Garstin, who, like Walter Osborne, had been a pupil of Charles Verlat in Antwerp. Mildred Anne showed only five works at the Royal Hibernian Academy. She exhibited at the first Belfast Art Society show and was one of the first nine academicians elected by the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1930. It wasn't until 1937 that she was granted full membership of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, having become an associate as early as 1896.

GEORGE CAMPBELL, RHA (1917 - 1979)

Born in Arklow, Co Wicklow, George Campbell was schooled in Dublin and began painting in Belfast in 1941. As early as 1944 he was exhibiting alongside Gerard Dillon and in 1948 with Dillon and Daniel OÍNeill. A thirty-year association with the Royal Hibernian Academy began in 1947. A painter of landscape, still life and figure subjects, he was highly successful in public competition winning the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal for the best historical painting at the Oireachtas and later for the best landscape. He first visited Spain in 1951 and his subsequent work was heavily influenced by things Hispanic, picadors, gypsies, Spanish street corners and musicians. Adept at the Spanish language, he showed in Madrid and was made a Knight Commander of Spain in 1977. Campbell was appointed an associate of the RHA in 1954 and a full member in 1964. The Watercolour Society of Ireland elected him a member in 1954. High-profile exhibitions and accolades marked his latter years; in the 1970s he was the subject of programmes by both BBC and RTE. He died in Dublin in 1979.

WILLIAM CONOR RHA, PPRUA (1881 - 1968)

Born in the Old Lodge Road, Belfast, son of a wrought-iron worker, William Connor's artistic talents were to the fore at the early age of ten. A teacher of Music, Louis Mantell, recognised the merit of his chalk drawings and arranged for him to attend the College of Art. By working as a poster artist with the David Allen printing firm he was able to continue his studies in Dublin and Paris. His forte was the sensitive portraiture of children, mill-workers and shipyard men set in the industrial backdrop of his native city. At first he worked in oil, charcoal and water-colour but the studies became more particularly his own when he confined himself to crayon. "He first draws with greasy crayons and then scrapes away the greater part of the colour with a razor blade in a most ingenious manner and with impressionistic effect - shows us a poor but smiling and not unhappy people".. [Apollo, May 1929].

JAMES HUMBERT CRAIG RHA (1877-1944)

Born July 12 1877 in Belfast to Alexander Craig, a tea merchant, and a Swiss mother, Marie Metzenen, from a family with a painting tradition. Principally a landscape painter, Craig had a great fondness for the Glens of Antrim, where he kept a studio at Cushendun. The fresh softness of his Antrim paintings is offset by the more rugged western maritime landscapes painted in Donegal and Connemara. Humbert Craig was a stylist in that he had the eye to see and the skill to make others see what he saw, never attempting to embellish or distort nature. His job, as he saw it, was to reflect nature as ïshe saw bestÍ.. Once, being admonished by the short-sighted AE for his treatment of a scene, Craig said "Pardon me, Mr.Russell, but may I look at your spectacles?" AE handed over his thick glasses which Craig perched on his nose. Finding that he could see nothing, he exclaimed "There you are Mr.Russell, thatÍs why you and I paint the same scene differently." Humbert Craig painted in situ and his hawk-like eyes missed nothing and left nothing to chance. He was at his happiest out-of-doors, if not painting then indulging in his second great love, the art of angling. Widely regarded as a modest man, Craig made no pretensions to intellectualism or mystique in his art. Successful in his day, Craig was elected to the Royal Ulster Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1928, the year in which he also exhibited at the Fine Arts Society in London. Examples of his work may be seen in the collections of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Armagh County Museum, The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin, The Ulster Museum in Belfast and The National Gallery of Ireland. The Oriel Gallery mounted an exhibition of his work in 1978.

GERARD DILLON (1916 -1971)

A landscape and figure painter, Dillon was born in Belfast, the youngest of eight children. He left school at fourteen to be apprenticed in the painting and decorating trade. Influenced by the images of Sean Keating and Marc Chagall, he briefly attended the Belfast College of Art. Inspiration was also provided by the beauties of Connemara, which he often visited in the company of fellow-artist George Campbell. He was later encouraged by Mainie Jellett who exhibited his works at the Country Shop, St.Stephen's Green when he moved down to Dublin in 1941.

STANHOPE FORBES R.A. (1857 - 1947)

Born in Dublin of an English father and French mother, Stanhope Forbes studied in London at the Lambeth School of Art and the R.A. Schools. He went to Paris in 1880 to study under Bonnat, a successful portraitist. Keen to paint en plein air, he headed for Brittany working out of St Malo. He returned to Paris in 1881 but felt that he had little more to learn from Bonnat, who disapproved of plein-air painting. In 1882 he moved to Quimperle, where he met up with other Irish painters; these included Osborne, Kavanagh, Hill and Garstin. In January 1884 he moved to Cornwall, settling at Newlyn, where he became one of the leading figures of the Newlyn School.

PERCY FRENCH (1854 - 1920)

Born at Cloonyquin, County Roscommon, in 1854, Percy French was a renaissance man in that not only was he a noted entertainer and musician but also an accomplished water-colourist and writer. Educated at Trinity College in the Engineering faculty, he was for a short while a surveyor in County Cavan. It was whilst in this midland county that he devoted himself to capturing the colours of the Irish skies and countryside. The size of his watercolours reflects the fact that they were mostly executed during his musical tours. He would paint the skies en route to his next engagement filling in the foreground on arriving at his digs. Almost invariably he would present the finished watercolour to his host. The fact that he travelled widely during the course of his musical career is reflected in his work; there are scenes painted in Switzerland, England, Canada, the USA and the West Indies. The effects of light breaking through clouds onto a landscape are ever-present in FrenchÍs work. His sunsets, too, are key to his oeuvre. At the time that he was painting Krakatoa had recently erupted spewing into the earth's atmosphere a considerable amount of debris which served to colour subsequent sunsets in the northern hemisphere.

NORMAN GARSTIN (1847 - 1926)

Born in Cahirconlish, Co.Limerick, Garstin was the only child of an Anglo-Irish regular soldier, Colonel William Garstin, and Mary Hastings Moore, a relation of the writer George Moore. Due to his motherÍs illness and his fatherÍs suicide, he was reared by his grandparents. He studied both engineering and architecture before seeking his fortune in the diamond fields of South Africa. Having failed to strike it rich, unlike his friend Cecil Rhodes, he co-founded the newspaper ïThe Cape TimesÍ. Despite a reputation as a brilliant journalist, his financial situation did not improve so he returned to Ireland in 1877 to live as a country gentleman and dilettante painter. In 1880 he enrolled in the Academy of Charles Verlat in Antwerp and from there moved to Paris where he spent three years in the atelier of Carolus Duran. He travelled in the South of France, Italy, Tangier and Spain before settling in Newlyn around 1886. He was described by Stanhope Forbes as " the intellectual mentor of the Newlyn School as well as a much-loved figure". Inspired by the naturalist tradition of the French Barbizon School and the plein-airist works of Bastien Lepage, the aesthetic of the Newlyn school aimed at an exact and unprettified rendering of the realities of country life.. Garstin exhibited with the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1883. His late works became more anecdotal in content. He had a talent for suggesting the atmosphere of a particular district, seeing it in terms of mystery and character as well as the perceptible effects of light.

EDWIN HAYES R.H.A. (1820 - 1904)

He was born in Bristol but spent his youth and early life in Dublin where his father, Charles, kept the Bristol and Glasgow Hotel and Tavern in Marlborough Street. He was a student at the Dublin Society's Schools and from the very first his ambition was to be a marine painter. The proximity of his home to the quays and the docks no doubt gave him his love for the sea and shipping. He made the sea his studio and in a small ten-ton yacht he spent his time sailing about Dublin Bay and even as far south as Cork. To experience something more of a sailor's life he shipped as a steward's boy on board a vessel bound for America. He had rough experiences at sea taking his turn at the pumps. Such early experiences stood him in good stead in his future art, enabling him in his pictures to delineate the sea and shipping with a sincerity born of experience. He first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1842 and for the next ten years resided in Dublin practising his art. In 1852 he removed to London where he apprenticed himself to Telbin, the scene painter. His first venture as an exhibitor in London was at the British Institution in 1854, where he showed "View of the River Liffey and the Custom House". In the following year he exhibited at the Royal Academy, continuing to do so for forty-nine years. He also exhibited at the Society of British Artists and at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, of which he became an Associate in 1860 and a Member in 1863. He continued to contribute to the Royal Hibernian Academy and was elected as Associate in 1853 and as Member in 1871. Hayes painted the shores and harbours of the English coast, the south coast fishing boats and French and Dutch luggers. His visits to the coasts of France, Spain and Italy yielded him many subjects. His knowledge of the sea enabled him to paint it in all its moods and to put on canvas the ever-changing aspects of sky and ocean.

MICHAEL JOSEPH HEALY (1873 - 1941)

Born at 40 Bishop Street, Dublin, the son of Andrew Healy and Mary Farrell. His father died when he was a child. Two brothers were in printing and, having a gift for drawing himself, he joined the Metropolitan School of Art in 1897. He paid a brief but unsuccessful visit to London in the hopes of getting work as an illustrator. In 1898 he moved to the RHA school where he won first prize for a drawing from life. A year later the editor of The Irish Rosary arranged for him to go to Florence to work under Bacci-Venuti. He studied murals, stained glass and the paintings of Piero della Francesca while there. He returned to Ireland in May 1901 to resume publishing with The Irish Rosary for two years. He taught briefly at the Dominican College in Newbridge. Shortly afterwards he was invited to join An Tur Gloine, where he studied under A.E.Child. Here his strong line in drawing, detected early by Hughes, found a proper medium for expression. Healy is remembered chiefly for his distinctive stained glass, where he developed the process of aciding in an individual way, and for his wash-drawings of Dublin characters.

PAUL HENRY RHA, RUA (1876 - 1958)

A Northern painter trained in the great 19th century Realist tradition, Paul Henry is primarily a landscapist. He is often credited with having created our picture of the West of Ireland. He conveys a great sense of freedom when depicting the illimitable space topped off by his lofty, towering skies. It is, in fact, his skies with their massive cloud formations which dominate his landscapes and are the real subject.

HANS ITEN, RUA (1874 - 1930)

Born in Zurich in 1874, Hans Iten studied at the School of Art, St Gall before working for some time in Paris. In 1904 he took up an appointment as a damask designer with a Belfast linen manufacturer. He remained in the city for the rest of his life. Active in the Belfast Art Society, his pictures were first hung in the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1908. Noted for his flower pieces and landscapes, he drew largely on Counties Antrim and Down for his inspiration.

SEAN KEATING PRHA (1889 - 1977)

Born in Limerick, Sean Keating came to Dublin in 1911 to attend the Metropolitan School of Art, where he became Sir William Orpen's most important pupil and later his model/assistant in London in 1915. A strong nationalist, he followed in the wake of Yeats, Orpen and Henry in seeking to depict a national consciousness. In 'Men of the South' he presents us with a group of republicans awaiting an ambush. An excellent draughtsman, he lacks the delicacy of his mentor, Orpen, but more than makes up for this with his unerring contour and powerful sense of form. In 1918 he returned to the Metropolitan School in a teaching capacity and was made RHA in 1919. For many years he dominated the Irish art world becoming in 1948 PRHA, a position he held until 1962.

HARRY KERNOFF RHA (1900 - 1974)

A regular visitor to Davy Byrne's public house in Duke Street, Dublin, Harry often depicted its interior. His keen interest in the theatre is also conveyed in this work. Kernoff designed theatre sets so the insertion of playbills in this picture is of some significance. Son of a Russian émigré cabinet-maker and a Spanish mother, Harry Kernoff was born in London but the family moved to Dublin when he was fourteen years of age. He attended night-classes at the Metropolitan School of Art, winning the Taylor Scholarship in 1923, He was to remain in Dublin for the rest of his life, depicting the personalities of his adopted city. An established illustrator, Kernoff presents a primitivism in his painting. There is a certain na ve sophistication at play in his simple and direct composition. In 'From the Buffet in the Bailey to Davy Byrne's' it is the obvious rectilinear composition furnished by the window-panes and bar itself which attract his graphic designer's eye.

LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (20th - 21st Century)

Born in Dublin in the year of the Easter Rising, 1916, Louis le Brocquy bears a name of Walloon origin. A self-taught artist, he was trained as an industrial chemist before departing for Europe in 1938 to study the great masters. 'Alone among the great artists of the past', he says, 'in these strange related cities I became vividly aware for the first time of my Irish identity to which I have remained attached all my life'. Louis le Brocquy's own words in an interview with George Morgan best sum up his approach to the head image: 'clearly, it is not possible to paint the spirit. You cannot paint consciousness. You start with the knowledge we all have that the most significant human reality lies beneath material appearance. So, in order to recognise this, to touch this as a painter, I try to paint the head image from the inside out, as it were, working in layers or planes, implying a certain flickering transparency. What one is left with at the end - if I am in any way excited by the image that emerges - is the suggestion of some turbulence going on beneath the picture surface, beneath the external appearance of the image....a mouth isolated on the canvas and freed from the context of the face is apt to appear abstract, an abstract hole within the surface of a minimalist painting. But this is not my purpose. You could well interpret my image of an open mouth, isolated at the centre of a canvas, as a cry, or a scream, or an expression of outrage. Look about you. It is all that! But it may be seen, too, as a way within. Yes, for me, the open mouth, the slit of a closed mouth, the deep dent of the navel, the eye, the ear are seen primarily as seolective openings with the bodyÍs opacity - entrances into darkness or into that which is not visible, the reality of the interior being, the 'other side'. as you call it'.

FRANK McKELVEY, RHA, RUA (1895 - 1974)

The son of a painter and decorator, Frank McKelvey was born in Belfast in 1895. A poster designer, he attended the Belfast School of Art where he won the prize for figure drawing in 1912. His work was accepted by the Royal Hibernian Academy as early as 1918. For the next fifty-five years he never missed a year's showing at the RHA. In 1921 he was elected a member of the Belfast Art Society. He was appointed an associate of the RHA in 1923 and in 1930 he became a full member. During his lifetime McKelvey was considered on a par with Paul Henry and J Humbert Craig. He was elected one of the first academicians of the Ulster Academy of Arts when it was founded in 1930. He died on June 30, 1974. An exhibition of his oils and watercolours was held in 1979 at The Oriel Gallery.

COLIN MIDDLETON RHA (1910 - 1983)

Son of a damask-designer, Colin Middleton was born in Belfast in 1910. Trained at Belfast College of Art, he was heavily influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh.. He regarded himself as the only Surrealist working in Ireland in the 1930s. His work first appeared at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1938. His first solo exhibition was at the Grafton Gallery in 1944. A damask-designer like his father before him, he now devoted himself to full-time painting. More exhibitions followed in Dublin, London and Boston. In 1953 he moved to Bangor where he designed for the New Theatre; he also designed sets for the Circle Theatre and the Lyric Theatre. At around this time he exhibited alongside Daniel O'Neill at the Tooth Galleries in London. In the same year, 1954 he started his career as an art teacher at the Belfast College of Art and at Coleraine Technical School, eventually becoming head of art at Friends' School, Lisburn. The 'Dublin Magazine' at this time said of him: 'Apart from the brilliance of his paint, he has one rare quality in his inexhaustible capacity for wonder'. A poet and musician, Middleton also produced murals, mosaics and posters. In 1969 he was awarded an MBE and appointed an associate at the Royal Hibernian Academy, with full membership in 1970. A major retrospective was held in 1976 at the Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. He continued to exhibit at the RHA until the year of his death, 1983.

WALTER OSBORNE RHA (1859 - 1903)

Walter Osborne entered the RHA Schools in 1876. He may have studied at the Metropolitan School and was probably a student of Augustus Burke. He began exhibiting at the RHA in 1877, winning the Taylor Scholarship for £50, which enabled him to study abroad. Before travelling abroad he had painted both animals and landscapes, his father being an animal painter. Not surprisingly, on arriving in Antwerp in 1881, he enrolled in the Natur class of Verlat, a noted animal and genre painter. In 1882 he enrolled in the Life classes. The following year he exhibited several Flemish pictures at the RHA. His work from this period is characterised by a dark precision. On leaving Antwerp to work in Brittany, mainly at Quimperle and Dinan, his works take on a lightness of style and subject; he depicts farmyards, orchards and markets. In 1884 Osborne moved to England, painting with Nathaniel Hill at Walberswick, where he continued to paint the rural scenes - villages and cottage gardens -that he had painted on the Continent. An admirer of Cazin, Besnard and Manet, in the early 1890s an 'impressionistic' influence began to appear in his work. Yet again the dark tonalities yield to brighter colours with an increased interest in sunlight and shadow. Shapes are now loosely blocked in, the paint being freely applied. Light is now the salient feature of his compositions. These last canvases of his career would certainly qualify Osborne as the first 'Irish Impressionist'.

GEORGE RUSSELL - 'AE' (1867 - 1935)

Known by his pseudonym AE, George Russell was frequently referred to as 'that myriad minded man' in that he was known as not only an artist but also a poet, playwright, journalist, editor, critic, mystic and evangelist for the co-operative movement. Although born in Lurgan, Co Armagh, George Russell was raised in Dublin, where he attended the Metropolitan School of Art at the same time as W B Yeats who became his friend and later his rival - 'the Antagonism that unites dear friends' as AE was later to put it. Even at this early stage he eschewed the model and preferred to paint from the imagination. As Yeats wrote years later: 'We copied the model laboriously; he would draw without research into the natural form'. At about this time AE suddenly began to experience waking dreams of astonishing power and vividness, which seemed to be thrust into his consciousness by a mind which was not his own. Images of cosmic happenings and other worlds overwhelmed him with a majesty far removed from anything of which he as aware in his own being. 'I remember', he wrote, 'how pure, holy and beautiful these imaginations seemed; how they came like crystal water sweeping aside the muddy current of my life.... The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by the winds behind it. If it would raise but an instant I knew I would be in Paradise'. Given his awareness of that other worlds, it is small wonder that AE painted so many pictures of it and its inhabitants.. Even his everyday paintings show an other-worldly influence, with their half-crouched or kneeling figures gazing in awe at some being radiantly aflame.

MAURICE C WILKS, RUA, ARHA (1910 - 1984)

A landscape and portrait painter, Maurice Canning Wilks was born in Belfast in 1910. He attended night classes at Belfast School of Art and was elected an associate of the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1935. In Dublin he showed at the Royal Hibernian Academy, mostly landscapes painted in Ulster, Counties Donegal, Kerry and Connemara. His watercolours featured in the inaugural meeting of the Ulster Watercolour Society in 1977. In 1980 he showed thirty-five works at the Oriel Gallery, thirty-four of which were landscapes. After his death in 1984, a retrospective was held at the Oriel.