Artist
She worked mostly as a portraitist. She was also associated with the stained glass movement, founding a stained glass workshop, An Túr Gloine, in 1903. Some of her stained glass work was commissioned from as far as New York, including a window at Christ Church, Pelham dedicated to the memory of Katharine Temple Emmet and Richard Stockton Emmet, grandson of the Irish patriot, Thomas Addis Emmet. Through her talent and energy, and owing to her friendship with the Gore-Booths, she was very successful in obtaining commissions, famously commenting
- "I went through the British aristocracy like the measles."
In 1977 Bruce Arnold noted
- "some of her finest and most sensitive work was not strictly portraiture, for example, An Irish Idyll in the Ulster Museum, and Le Petit Déjeuner (in the National Gallery of Ireland)."
Sarah Purser became wealthy through astute investments, particularly in Guinness. She was very active in the art world in Dublin and was involved in the setting up of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, persuading the Irish government to provide Charlemont House to house the gallery.
In 1923 she became the first female member of the Royal Hibernian Academy.
Until her death she lived for years in Mespil House, a Georgian mansion with beautiful plaster ceilings on Mespil Road, on the banks of the Grand Canal. It was demolished after she died and developed into apartments. She was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Sarah Purser
Famous quotes containing the word artist:
“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it “creative observation.” Creative viewing.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality—same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)