Hilary Pyle recalls the artist Hilda Roberts, two-time winner of the RDS Taylor Art Award, whose talents were apparent from an early age
After Hilda Roberts died in 1982, fellow Dubliners remembered her for the striking images she exhibited of children in Aran or in Dublin. They were eye-catching impressions of youth and innocence – and, in the case of those from the West, showed a shy wariness.
Roberts had tested her talent in many ways – in sculpture, stained glass, printmaking, book illustration and, mostly, oil and graphite portraits. Her personal manner was distinctive, direct and engaging. But her experiments with modern styles (including ‘somewhat Yeatsian paintings’) disconcerted critics, who felt she was inconsistent.
At every level she was a seeker. Born in Dublin in 1901 into a distinguished Quaker family of builders and architects, she knew from the start that she wanted to draw and paint in a contemporary, 20th-century way. Ireland was experiencing a renaissance of art and literature and this, combined with the opportunities the new state provided, was the atmosphere of creativity in which she was to mature.
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