Thomas Duffy recalls Mildred Anne Butler’s most unusual commission: to create an artwork on a miniature scale to grace the interior of the world’s most beautiful dolls’ house
In 1922, Mildred Anne Butler was invited to submit a work for the Queen’s Dolls’ House. The house designed by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was a replica of an Edwardian aristocratic residence and was created for Queen Mary, wife of King George V (Fig 1). Each room of the house was resplendent in every detail from furniture created to scale by expert craftsmen, to carpets and rugs, pictures, plumbing that actually worked and a set of limousine cars. The library held miniature books written to commission by noted writers of the day including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and W Somerset Maugham. Mildred Anne Butler was one of over 700 artists asked to contribute work for a portfolio of drawings, watercolours and prints in the library. The artists selected were the leading artists of their day and their work was ‘representative of the best art of the period’ with styles embracing Realism, Impressionism and early Modernism.
Stephanie McBride reflects on the extraordinary life’s work of Arthur Fields, the last of the street photographers
All around the globe, conflicts have and continue to shape the land and their inhabitants’; Elizabeth Magill explores the flipside of the buccolic in conversation with Brian McAvera.