Sarah Purser

The Artist

A painter, stained-glass artist and exhibition organiser, Sarah Henrietta Purser was born in Dublin. Educated in Dungarvan and Switzerland, she later attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and the Académie Julian, Paris. Returning to Dublin in 1879, she established a studio and developed the naturalist painting techniques she had learned in France.

Purser began exhibiting portraits at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1881, and from an early stage, depictions of Dublin’s academic, legal and medical leaders featured prominently in her practice. At this time her studio was located at 2 Leinster Street but she moved it to 11 Harcourt Terrace in 1886, where she established a vibrant cultural salon – a meeting place for figures from Ireland’s cultural life.

In the opening years of the twentieth century, Purser began to turn her attention to encouraging artistic practice in Ireland. She organised and curated an exhibition of work by Nathanial Hone and John Butler Yeats in 1901, feeling that their work had been overlooked in their home city.

In 1903, she founded and managed An Túr Gloine, a stained glass co-operative that would go on to contribute windows and other decoration to churches across Ireland.

Despite these, and many other commitments, Purser continued to paint and contributed genre, landscape and portrait works to the annual Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) exhibition. In 1914, Purser was appointed to the National Gallery of Ireland’s Board of Governors and Guardians. In 1924 she was the first woman elected to full membership of the RHA.

She was an active figure in the campaign for Hugh Lane’s pictures to be retained for Ireland, and in securing Charlemont House as a permanent home for the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, now the Hugh Lane Gallery.

Purser’s family was prominent in Dublin’s professional circles, and included connections to figures in brewing, engineering and medicine. Her brother, John Mallet Purser (1839–1929) was Professor of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, and following his death, she donated funds for a memorial lecture. Purser made a further endowment in 1942 for medical research. In 1934, Purser and her cousin, John Griffith established the Purser-Griffith lecture and scholarship programme to support art history education in both Trinity and University College Dublin.

The Sitter

The portrait of Lombe Atthill (1827–1910) was presented to the College in 1913 by his surviving family. It was likely a private commission during Atthill’s presidency of the College between 1888 and 1890.

Purser’s portrait of Sir John Thomas Banks (1816–1908) was commissioned by the Dublin Branch of the British Medical Association and formally presented in January 1888.

Banks is depicted in his Trinity College Dublin doctoral robes and a Windsor uniform which represents his role as physician-in-ordinary in Ireland to Queen Victoria.

Read full biographies of Sir John Thomas Banks and Lombe Atthill as part of our Lives of the Presidents project