Hilary Pyle looks at the archive of papers and sketchbooks belonging to Estella Solomons preserved in the Manuscript Department of Trinity College Dublin
Woodtown Cemetery, Rathfarnham, is the last resting place of the painter, Estella F. Solomons, as it is of other members of Dublin’s Progressive Liberal Jewish community. A phrase from the poetry of her husband, James Starkey, better known by his pseudonym, Seumas O’Sullivan, is engraved on the black marble headstone – ‘Have thou no fear, the image of your love is set within.’ She chose not to be buried with him, but rather with her own people, under trees on the hilltop overlooking the sweep of Dublin’s plain. ‘Stella’, as family and friends called her, was unusual in the ethos of Ireland’s cultural renaissance in having a dual loyalty, to her Jewish origins, and to the Ireland which she loved with equal zeal
