Edyth STARKIE (1867 - 1941, Irish)
Portrait of a Lady in a White Dress
circa 1913
oil on canvas
60 x 26 inches
This marvelous and evocative turn of the century full length relates very closely to Edyth Starkie"s Painting of the spotted dress in The Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris. She is remembered as the Artist and also the wife of the English artist and illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), or as the aunt of the writers Enid (1897-1970)' and Walter Starkie (1894-1976).
Edyth Starkie was born at Westcliffe House, County Galway in 1867, the seventh and youngest child of William Robert Starkie. Her artistic leanings were apparent at an early age, for in 1883, when she was sixteen, Frances Starkie put her husband into rooms in Cork and, with Edyth, left the confined society of Skibbereen for London, where Edyth enrolled at the Slade School. There were few serious opportunities for women to train to become painters in Ireland. The Royal Hibernian Academy, for example, did not admit women until 1893. Other aspiring young women artists whose families could afford to do so, such as Edith Somerville or Sarah Purser, traveled abroad with chaperones to the art schools of London or Europe.
In 1883, the Slade School, then under the Professorship of the French-born painter Alphonse Legros (1837-1911), was one of Europe's most progressive art schools, teaching a strictly observed drawing of the nude, portraiture and figure composition. Legros encouraged an awareness in his pupils of contemporary French painting and equally encouraged them to travel.
Perhaps at Legros' suggestion, Edyth and her mother moved to Paris in 1884, where Edyth enrolled at the Academy Julian. This was an informal art school, with several branches throughout Paris, one especially for women, which had been enterprisingly established in 1873 by Rodolphe Julian to take the large numbers of French and foreign students who had flocked to Paris, but who were unable to win a place at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Edyth's self-portraits have a pensive quality and a characteristic and highly personal intensity of mood. Our self-portrait is a sketch in oil by Starkie for her 1913 “Spotted dress” in the Musee de L’art Moderne in Paris.