Michael Waldron considers the drawing and painting of the celebrated writer Edith ΠSomerville
Late in life, Edith Œ Somerville reflected that she wished she had given ‘a great deal more time to painting and a great deal less to hunting’. She is best known today as one half of Somerville and Ross, the writing partnership she maintained with her cousin and intimate, Violet Martin (1862–1915), of Ross House, Connemara, Co Galway. According to her friend and biographer Geraldine Cummins, however, Somerville ‘wanted above all else to be a great painter’. Yet, despite such aspirations, her work as a visual artist is now little known and generally restricted to book illustrations and the very few paintings held in public collections.
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