Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1882 Dublin, Republic of Ireland

Died: 1978 London, England

Biography

Painter Mary Swanzy was born into a Protestant family on 15 February 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. Her mother’s name was also Mary (née Denham) and her father, Sir Henry Rosborough Swanzy was an ophthalmic surgeon; the couple had three daughters. According to Liz Cullinane, the family gained political prominence in 1920 when Mary’s cousin, Royal Irish Constabulary Inspector Oswald Swanzy, was assassinated by the IRA. His death outside a cathedral sparked violent riots in Lisburn, where Protestant loyalists looted Catholic businesses and attacked homes, leading to what became known as the Swanzy Riots (Cullinane, 2023, p. 29). Swanzy first studied at Alexandra College in Dublin, then at schools in Versailles, France, and Freiburg, Germany, becoming fluent in French and German. She later took art lessons at Mary Manning’s studio, where the noted painter, Jack Butler Yeats taught, and was encouraged to study sculpture with John Hughes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. With the National Gallery of Ireland nearby, she often spent time there, studying the works of famous artists. In 1905 she moved to Paris, studying at Antonio de La Gándara’s studio and attending classes at both the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Colarossi. The works of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso that she encountered in Paris became key in shaping her artistic development. In 1914, she went to Florence, intending to remain for a period, but had to return to home at the outbreak of war. She later visited eastern Europe and the Balkans, together with her sister who was involved in the Protestant relief mission in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. After returning to Dublin, she lived between Ireland and Saint-Tropez. In 1920, as the Irish War of Independence raged, she left Ireland, choosing a voluntary exile, making her way to Hawaii and Samoa from 1923 to 1924, and then to Santa Barbara in California, USA. In 1926, she immigrated to London, England as a form of self-exile and settled in Blackheath, south east London.

Swanzy’s artistic practice primarily consists of abstract works, landscapes, genre paintings, and portraiture. In Ireland, until around the beginning of the First World War, she mostly painted in an academic style, prior to her adoption of modernist influences. While her work can be linked to major European movements, such as Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism, and Orphism, she remains a distinctly individual artist, with the painters, André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and, particularly, Robert Delaunay, her main reference points, while some of her seascapes and harbour scenes from the late 1910s and early 1920s are evidently influenced by the works of Paul Cézanne. Now recognised as Ireland’s earliest abstract artist, despite her early representational output, Swanzy's most celebrated works belong to the tradition of European abstraction, in which objects and figures are deconstructed and reassembled. However, by the end of her career, she had embraced a more allegorical and representational approach: the paintings from her travels through Polynesia and the Balkans stand out as early examples of anti-colonial and feminist critiques

Swanzy had an extensive exhibition career, holding at least fifteen solo shows, along with numerous group exhibitions. Her first exhibition was with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1905 where she showed Portrait of a child, and where she continued to exhibit portraits annually until 1910. Although she exhibited increasingly internationally, including in London, she nevertheless remained deeply involved with the Irish art scene, showing in Ireland more than in England. In 1934, she held a solo exhibition in London’s Lefevre Galleries, where an art critic compared her approach to that of C. R. W. Nevinson, suggesting that ‘she throws whole systems of straight likes set at zig-zags over her picture, chops about with her old forms so as to temp them into new angles, and thereby makes something in the new – but not the newest – decorative tradition. She does so cleverly,’ (The Scotsman, 1934, p. 13). A key moment in her London career came in 1946, when her work was featured in a group exhibition at the St George’s Gallery (founded by émigré, Lea Bondi Jaray), alongside renowned artists such as Henry Moore, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and William Scott.

Mary Swanzy died in London, England on 15 February 1978. Her works are held in UK public collections, including the Ulster Museum and Hillsborough Castle, Historic Royal Palaces. Posthumously, in 2007, Christie’s held a major sale of her paintings, where works, estimated at as little as £1,000 to £2,000, sold for £40,000 to £70,000. The 2018 retrospective exhibition Voyages at IMMA aimed to show her as a modern Irish Master. Cullinane subsequently argued that Swanzy failed to gain a bigger reputation - despite exhibiting with names like Chagall and Picasso - because her family was ‘on the wrong side of Irish history during the shift from British rule to independence,’ (2023, p. 30).