In the autumn of 1852 Mary Severn went to Ireland on a painting commission for the extended Palliser family in Ireland. The Colonel Wray Palliser, Anne Gledstanes and his large family of 15 children had been neighbours of the Severn’s when they lived at 21A St James Gate near Buckingham Palace in London: the two families shared gardens and played together. Mary Palliser was Mary’s best friend and also an artist. (In another blog I hope to write much more on her!) By the time Mary set off for Ireland, her father Joseph Severn had few commissions, and money was very short – they had had to move to cheaper lodgings at 2 Denbigh Terrace in Pimlico.
The Pallisers were part of Anglo-Irish gentry and their home in Ireland was on the Southern tip of the country at Comeragh House, County Waterford. At the age of just 20, Mary travelled to Ireland to undertake portrait commissions, mainly of children, to provide much needed funds for her family. It is likely that one of the Colonel’s sons Wray Palliser, as well as the Colonel accompanied her, as she records him falling in with ‘a bad set’ at Clonmel, playing billiards all night though she has sympathy as he is stuck at home with his ‘sleepy father’. She started by staying with Colonel Palliser’s brother, making portraits of his sister and children. This led to other commissions for portraits and copies of paintings so she then moved round large houses in County Tipperary, Waterford and Cork with occasional visits to Dublin for the next five months. Ireland had only just come out of the horrific famine that engulfed the country and its poor tenants; violence and desperation was rife, yet, the Anglo-Irish lived in huge remote mansions.
One of the first places Mary stayed in Ireland was at Newtown Anner (also Newtonanner) in Clonmel, County Tipperary, where she was working on a portrait in November. She wrote to her mother that her work was interrupted by the children of Mrs Osborne, who was pleased with her work and Mary liked a great deal.* Mary describes her as:
She is unlike a commonplace lady - she is clever and therefore original and agreeable. She seems unhappy . . . A melancholy expression in her face adds to her beauty. She is very thin, I think too much, and cannot sleep at nights.
This was Catherine Isabella Bernal Osborne, who was heir to the estate and had married a politician Ralph Bernal in 1845. They seem to have informally separated with Bernal in London and Osborne mainly in Ireland, though had two daughters Edith and Grace who both lived with their mother. I realised I had heard of Edith Osborne but as Edith Osborne Blake, the artist and colonial governor’s wife, whose collection of an artefactmade by indigenous led to the Island Song for Beyond Notability. This was first performed by Vanessa Woolf at the Society of Antiquaries on International Women’s Day this year and now sits on the National Museum of Jamaica website with historical context by my friend Dr Amara Thornton. Edith was therefore one of the children who interrupted Mary as she worked and would then have been six years old. Circles of connection!
Returning to Mary, she records the many visitors to Newtown as Catherine Osborne led a cultivated social life with visits from the cultural elite of Ireland and far beyond. She was an artist and writer herself – later writing a novel that was a ‘thinly veiled’ attack on her husband. The heiresses Laura and Eleanor Arbuthnot, who were a similar age to Mary, were also staying for a few days and attracted the attention of Harry Dawson and John Rutter Carden, whom Mary described as ‘Eleanor’s persecutor’. it was about this time that he first met Eleanor and became obsessed with her – he was 41 and she was 18. Shortly after he begged her to elope with him and essentially stalked her. In 1854 Carden attempted to abduct her after church, ready with armed men, a carriage, chloroform and rope. (A horrific account of it is in the Examiner from the time)**. Fortunately, Eleanor escaped and Carden tried and sent to prison, still nurturing his obsession and threatening sexual violence on his release. In 1852, Mary thought him 'quite an extraordinary man', though I sense she did not like him for just ‘dropping in’ to persecute Eleanor, and he read the party Longfellow, Byron and Shakespeare.
It is clear Mary and Catherine Osbourne bonded over poetry as Mary tells her mother that ‘Mrs O has given me an illustrated edition of Longfellow’. And when she stays at Newtown there again a few months later, they stay up all night reading Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VIIII right thro. How wonderful Shakespeare is!!!!’*** Soon after, when Mary is at her last great house and painting the portraits of Lord and Lady Monck’s three children in Charleville, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, later in March, Mary writers to her mother that Mrs Osborne
[. . .]is indeed a nice person and I am her a true friend. Her kindness to me is wonderful, for she ever speaks so kindly of me to people - I feel quite as if Newtown was my home. Mrs Osborne is like a mother or a sister to me. She gave me a little volume of Moore's Melodies. I shall always keep it as a momento of Ireland. I have my first relic in it, a bit of shamrock which I mean always to keep.****
Mary refers to Thomas Moore, a poet, lyricist and the first biographer of Byron, whom Byron gave this archive. A catholic and nationalist sympathiser, Moore was viewed as Ireland’s national poet at the time and his work was hugely popular, with ballad settings of music attached to the poems, hece melodies. I remembered that a friend had given me a Centenary Edition of Moore soon after handing in my PhD 20 years ago and found it on my bookcase. They had given it to me due to the song cycle Evenings in Greece (yep – I was that sad then too!). I confess that I love the volume for its Victorian bling and illustrations more than the actual poems.
Mary’s friendship with and prolonged and returning stays with Mrs Osborne is not mentioned in either of the two accounts of her father in which she has a brief biography, though her meeting and painting with Louisa Countess of Waterford, another female aristocratic artist, is. This friendship and exchange of art and words recorded in Mary's letters home shows another side to the unofficial tutoring between women artists and support they gave each other.
*Letter Ann Mary to Mother, 20 November 1852, Townsend Family Archive (Birkenhead)
** THE GREAT IRISH CASE OF ABDUCTION. Examiner; Aug 5 1854; 2427; British Periodicals: 496
***Letter Ann Mary to Mother, 12 March 1853, Townsend Family Archive (Birkenhead)
****Letter Ann Mary to Mother, ? March 1853, written from Charleville, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, Townsend Family Archive (Birkenhead)
Commenti