Estella Solomons's centenary passed in 1882 without public attention, and even her death in 1968 was not widely noticed. By that time, her own generation was largely gone too - a generation which had included painters such as Beatrice Elvery (better known as Lady Glenavy, who actually outlived her by a few years), Mary Duncan, Cissie Beckett (aunt of the playwright) as well as the many writers and patriots she had painted. And the long-lived Dublin Magazine, edited from the start by her poet-husband Seumas O'Sullivan with her devoted help, had ceased publication when he died a decade before.
Solomons was a very fine painter and etcher at her best, but she was also a woman at the very nerve-centre of Dublin - and Irish - cultural life for half a century. A nationalist and an undogmatic feminist, member of a distinguished Jewish family (her brother Bethel was Master of the Rotunda while still in his mid-20s), wife of a respected poet and man of letters, friend and hostess to most of Dublin's literati and artists, she was a considerable personality with many facets.
She was also a very beautiful woman, as various photographs and self-portraits testify, and one of a generation of remarkable and independent-minded Irish women, relatively few of whom have been given their full need of recognition. She was born in Dublin, the daughter of a well-to-do optician, and studied at the old Metropolitan School of Art under Orpen and Osborne, both of whom are now figures in the pantheon of Irish art and literature. She made the usual, obligatory visits to Paris and in 1906 saw the Rembrandt Tercentenary Exhibition in Amsterdam - the impact of which can be seen in the large, rather dark-toned portraits she painted of members of her own family, and in the self-portrait of 1908. She had fully mastered this style, but she did not stick with it. She also bought an etching press and began to contribute to the annual RHA exhibitions, a practice she kept up well into the 1950s.
She was now moving in nationalist and feminist circles as well as art and literary ones, and in 1915 she enlisted in Cumann na mBan. During the 1916 Rising various men "on the run" took shelter in her family home, and she painted some of them. It seems to have been through Cumann na mBan, too, that she met Kathleen Goodfellow, a member of a wealthy Quaker family and also a poet writing under the name "Michael Scott". This became a lifelong friendship, and Kathleen Goodfellow later helped to keep the Dublin Magazine afloat financially.
With an ascending reputation as a portraitist, she painted James Stephens (who once lived just below her studio in Great Brunswick Street), A.E. (George Russell), Fr Dineen of Irish dictionary fame, the poet Joseph Campbell, Frank Aiken (later de Valera's foreign minister), Thomas Bodkin of the National Gallery, Padraic Colum, Austin Clarke, F.R. Higgins and Patrick MacDonogh. As this impressive list shows, she had a special empathy with poets and even married one. But though she and Seumas O'Sullivan (James Sullivan Starkey in private life) seem to have fallen in love with each other quite early on, her Jewish parents would not have tolerated her marrying a Christian. So she waited dutifully until their death, and by that time she and Seumas were middle-aged. They had no children.
Solomons was a woman of strong convictions and principles, though she was rather reticent about voicing them in private. When, in the early years of the Free State, the Dublin technical school in which she taught art asked her to take the obligatory Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown, she refused and resigned. She became an associate member of the RHA in 1925, but much of her time and energy went into the newly-founded Dublin Magazine which ran for more than 30 years.
At The Grange, in Rathfarnham, she and her husband wrote, painted, edited and played hosts to most of intellectual Dublin. In 1937, however, they moved to the house in Morehampton Road which, more than anything else, is associated with them and their magazine and the talented men and women who wrote for it. Both she and Seumas were to die there. But she also took regular painting trips and holidays to Co Kerry, and sometimes to Donegal.
Her work generally sold well, and she was praised by critics, though she produced relatively few large-scale works and most of her landscapes were small, spontaneous, pleinairiste works painted out of doors - rapidly, vigorously and on the spot. But landscapes and portraits apart, she also painted still lives, interiors and figure compositions. Her husband appears in many of her breezy, light-filled, out-of-doors pieces, often with the sea in the background.
ESTELLA Solomons and her husband were close friends of my parents (my father contributed to the Dublin Magazine for many years, both in prose and verse) and they are still among the strongest of my childhood and boyhood memories. I remember her as tall but slightly stooping, silver-haired and ivoryskinned, with chiselled features and what is often referred to as "a Jewish nose"; quietly spoken but still something of a grande dame. Seumas, too, was tall and silver-haired, with a clipped moustache and a faintly military appearance, usually smoking a pipe; his bon mots and sometimes cruel wit were famous in Dublin, but I recall him as genial and at his ease with children. I also remember his funeral - a day of incessant rain - and the dignity and composure with which Estella accepted tributes of sympathy with her loss. She had been beautiful , and she remained handsome and regal.
How good an artist was she, then? At her best, very good indeed, at a time when talented Irish women painters were not in short supply. She kept a well-schooled, ultra-professional level through half a century, but more than that, her finest pictures can hang in the highest company and not suffer by comparison. Though her chief fame is as a portraitist, I continue in general to prefer her landscapes, which are fresh, lyrical, elegantly but informally composed and with an immediacy which can only have come out of a vivid, responsive temperament. She never moved into Modernism, but you could never mistake her work for that of a typical academician of the time - she saw things with open eyes, not through the conventions of the art schools. Her style from the 1920s onwards may have looked old-fashioned compared with the gigantic art revolutions she lived through, but it never degenerated into formulae; the smell of the studio is absent. Her etchings, too, are already small classics of their kind.At the same time, I have often felt strongly that this exceptionally gifted painter had the innate power and capacity to become a genuinely great one. She never did, quite, and the probable reason lies mainly in her epoch: other gifted women painters did not make the essential leap or breakthrough in middle age as they would probably do today. Marriage and familial ties, the demands of the Dublin Magazine, and patriotic, social and artistic activity (in 1939 she organised an exhibition in Dublin to help refugee artists from the Continent) did not allow for the full-time, ruthless, self-centred routine of studio life, or for the relentless search and self-renewal which make a born, talented painter into an unmistakably great one.
That she had the intellect and self-critical powers needed for this I don't doubt, as well as all the essential professional skills, but somehow, after her youth she apparently did not find the time. She was also a modest person, and modesty and self-effacement, while admirable qualities in themselves, are not the ones which make a Picasso or a Balthus.
What might an Estella Solomons accomplish today! But then, would her type of ultra-cultured, poised, "accomplished", instinctively cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class woman be possible in our society and with our contemporary values? I very much doubt it; she was shaped by a social and cultural milieu which has gone forever.
An exhibition of works by Estella Solomons opens today at the Frederick Gallery, South Frederick Street, Dublin, and runs until November 19th
