Kathleen Fox RHA (1880-1963) Woman on a Beach Oil on canva...

Hammer

€20,000

Kathleen Fox RHA (1880-1963) Woman on a Beach Oil on canvas, 100 x 70cm (39¼ x 27½) Signed lower right Provenance: Collection of the Hon. Francis D. Murnaghan Jr., thence by descent The daughter of Captain Henry Charles Fox of the King’s Dragoon Guards, Kathleen Fox came of an Irish Catholic upper middle class family with a British Army tradition. She was brought up at Glenageary Hall, Co. Dublin and went to school at St. Mary’s, Ascot and Loreto Abbey Convent, Dalkey. She entered the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1903 and was at first attracted by the crafts of fine metalwork and enamelling. Under the guidance of Oswald Reeves she won top prizes for her metalwork in London at the National Competitions of 1908 and 1909. She also worked on painted china, carved wood, silver, costume design and stained glass, which were aspects of the strong arts and crafts revival in Ireland. However, her interest in painting was to be fired by the teaching in Dublin of Sir William Orpen, only two years her senior, who encouraged her and for whom she had a high regard. It was Orpen’s style of tonal realism acquired at the Slade School of Art, which he passed on to her and which is evident in the present work. In 1910 she was admitted to the RHA Life School. She exhibited for the first time at the RHA in 1911 with Science and Power (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery), sometime after which she left to paint in Paris and Bruges. Later she moved to Nice where she continued to paint and exhibited in France, London and Dublin. In 1921 her work was shown at the New English Art Club, the National Portrait Society, the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy. She returned to Dublin in the early twenties and later inherited the family home in Milltown, Dublin where she painted many interior views. For the next twenty years she worked as a highly successful portrait painter in Ireland and England but made no further submissions to the RHA until 1944. In her later paintings there is a significant and enduring transformation in terms of subject matter. Gone is the spirited work of some twenty years earlier, to be replaced by highly competent flower-studies which she exhibited throughout the 1940s and 50s and for which today, perhaps unfairly, she is best known. She died in 1963.