The art of Rose J. Leigh
HANDS UP, please, anyone who has heard of Rose Leigh. Thought so. Not too many hands...
Teacher and art historian Mary Stratton Ryan launched her mission to raise the profile of Rose Jane Leigh (1855-1920) with a lecture at Wexford public library. The 30strong audience was introduced to a painter who was in the forefront of the Impressionist revolution in art.
A trailblazer for women, who were excluded from many of the 19th-century academies where painting was taught, Rose Leigh was one accomplished, talented and determined lady. She also had the great virtue of being a native of Wexford.
Though she spent much of her 65 years elsewhere, home was always Rosegarland in the south of the county. The woodland of the family estate in Wellingtonbridge and the spectacle of the nearby south coast stimulated her love of landscapes.
Rose had the advantage of coming from money, serious money. The Leigh family controlled close to 8,300 acres of prime Model land. The drawback of privilege was that she was brought up largely isolated from the ordinary people of the neighbourhood.
Image after image flashed up on screen by lecturer Mary Ryan during the session in the library showed countryside scenes noticeably devoid of human life. There was just one dazzlingly beautiful exception, where a small figure could be seen walking along a forest track, dwarfed by trees.
Mary was at pains to point out that, with good O'Moore blood in her veins, our heroine came from Gaelic stock and was not of Anglo-Irish lineage. This pedigree supplied by her father Francis Leigh was blended with the French genes of her mother Augustine, née Perrier.
The male side of the family tended to be pillars of the British military establishment. Her older brother enlisted in the Royal Irish Regiment, while the younger one cut a dash in the Hampshire Regiment. Rose, however, was destined for cultured salons rather than the officers' mess.
Keen to build on the potential shown in childhood drawings, she became a student at the Slade school of art in London. She took her place there long before the arrival of another Wexford woman, designer Eileen Gray of Brownswood, whose work now commands multimillion prices in some of the grandest auction rooms.
After London, and a spell in Paris, Rose Leigh passed time during her twenties in Belgium, where her gender ensured she was excluded from enrolment in the college at Antwerp. Instead, she imbibed the adventurous Flemish approach to paint less formally with the assistance of influential private tutor Theodore Verstraete.
The Irish woman had the good fortune to be in the right place just as art was being given a radical shakeup. The Impressionist revolution in Belgium and France produced many of the names recognised to this day far beyond the specialised world of the connoisseur and collector. Rose Leigh was at the cutting edge.
You want haystacks? Miss Leigh was painting haystacks three years before Monet was painting haystacks. You want apple blossom? The Rose from Rosegarland had her easel set up in the orchard producing work reminiscent of Van Gogh – but she worked her magic before Vincent.
Maybe she was not quite of the same class as Monet or Van Gogh but Mary Stratton Ryan is convinced that she has been shamefully neglected, overlooked even in her native land.
Various reasons may be put forward for this. It did not help that she was a gipsy Rose Leigh, with no strong sense of place. Though strongly associated with Wexford and Wellingtonbridge, her wealthy family had houses too in Dublin and London. It was in the British capital that she spent her later life, though she continued to exhibit at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.
Her work ranged far and wide – perhaps too far, too wide. She could create a loving landscape from the beach at Ballytrent while her exquisite touch in creating trees on paper or canvas was well exercised in and around Rosegarland.
However, she was just as likely to find inspiration further afield in the rivers of Cork or Kerry or in the North Sea coast or in a French forest. She was a dab hand at painting longhorned Highland cattle against wild Scottish backgrounds. Though she clearly had a sense of place, her output does not associate her with any one place.
And then there was her consistent avoidance of human subjects. This ensured that she deprived herself of an income (which she evidently did not need) from painting portraits, the most reliable earner for the artists of her generation. It may also have hastened her slide into obscurity.
‘Rose Leigh is not well known,' acknowledges Mary Stratton Ryan, her latter-day champion. ‘And we need to address that in Wexford.'
Mary notes that the painter was represented at galleries in Dublin, London, Liverpool and Birmingham during her lifetime. Now the hope is that a retrospective show can be mounted closer to home, possibly in Rosegarland itself.
Among those attending the lecture, which was arranged with the help of Kevin Freeny on the fringe of the ‘Art in the Open’ festival, was one of the current stewards of the Leigh family house. Sarah Kehoe reports that the building is unoccupied, pending restoration, and paintings by the woman she knows of as her grandfather's aunt are currently in storage.
At the gathering in the library, Mary Ryan presented Sarah with a charming reproduction of an etching dating back to 1890, held in the collection of the British Museum. It is based on Aunt Rose's pen and ink drawing of south Wexford cottages set in woodland.
The painter's works are scattered across private collections in Ireland, Britain, America and the Continent. Mary is hot on the trail, her soft spoken manner concealing a singleminded determination to bring largely forgotten Mary Leigh back to wider consciousness. She has retired from her job in the art department of Bridgetown Vocational School to concentrate on research into the pioneering woman from Wellingtonbridge and Carlow painter Frank O'Meara.