JOHN JOSEPH SLATTERY (fl. 1846-58) Portrait of Norah Hill (1835-1920) Oil on canvas, oval 53 x 43.5cm Signed, dated and inscribed on the reverse of the unlined canvas: ‘Norah M.E. Hill 1856 by J Slattery, Dublin’ Provenance: Lord George Hill (the sitter’s father); By descent through his brother’s family, the Barons Sandys at Ombersley Court, Worcestershire, until the death of Richard Hill, 7th Baron Sandy, recorded in a store room in a 1963 inventory but more recently hanging on the main stairs; Private collection Ireland Exhibited: Loan Museum of Art Treasures, Dublin Industrial Exhibition Palace, 1873, lent by the sitter’s father, Lord George Hill, where it is catalogued under the sitter’s married name The Hon Mrs Somerset Ward, as recorded on a label on the reverse from Loan Museum of Art Treasures Literature: Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 vols, (Dublin and London, 1913) vol. 2, p. 359, ‘a portrait of the “Hon Mrs Somerset Ward” was lent to the Dublin exhibition in 1873 by Lord George Hill’ William Laffan, ‘Samuel Beckett, John Joseph Slattery and Jane Austen’s Niece’, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, the Journal of the Irish Georgian Society, vol. xxvi (2023) pp. 90-98 This portrait of Jane’s Austen’s Irish-born grandniece has recently been brought to scholarly attention in an article on its painter John Joseph Slattery. After a successful spell as a student of the Dublin Society Schools, which he entered in 1846, Slattery was by 1852 exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy from an address of 10 Wicklow Street. Four years later he exhibited again having moved to St Stephen’s Green. Strickland notes that he had gained ‘a good practice’ in the years around 1850 and ‘painted several persons of distinction’. Dominating his small extant oeuvre are portraits of cultural figures of mid-century Ireland notably of the antiquarian and artist George Petrie (Royal Irish Academy), the painter Jeremiah Hodges Mulcahy (University of Limerick) and the novelist William Carleton (National Gallery of Ireland). This last portrait was acclaimed by Carleton’s early biographer as ‘the best and most life-like’ of the sitter ‘in existence’. However, despite the early success which elicited such lavish praise, Slattery’s documented career in Ireland ended abruptly and, after the 1858 exhibition at the RHA, he seems to have vanished. Strickland notes that he ‘is said to have gone to America’. In his short biography of the artist Strickland records a portrait by the artist of Mrs Somerset Ward. Her own name obscured by her husband’s, as convention dictated, Mrs Somerset Ward was born Norah Hill (1835-1920). Her father was Lord George Hill, a younger son of Arthur Hill, Marquis of Downshire, of Hillsborough, County Down, and Mary Sandys. In October 1834 Hill, an MP and solider, married (after several years of parental opposition to the match) Cassandra Jane Knight, the daughter of Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight (1767-1852), who took her name from Austen’s beloved sister and confidant. The following year on 19 December their first child, Norah Mary Elizabeth, Slattery’s subject here, was born. Lord George and Cassandra settled in Donegal, where Hill was developing his estate at Gweedore, as a pioneering, if notably controversial landlord, but sadly Cassandra died on 14 March 1842 three days after giving birth to Norah’s sibling, another Cassandra. Her mother’s sister, Louisa Knight, again a niece (and also god-child) of Jane Austen moved to Donegal to help with the young children and 11 May 1847 married Lord George, her sister’s widower, in Denmark; British law at the time forbade the union. The extraordinary story of the relocation of members of Jane Austen’s family from Kent to Donegal has recently been recounted in rich detail by Sophia Hillen, their lives in Ireland echoing ‘to an uncanny degree’ Austen’s novels, if ‘some of what befell the Knight sisters was beyond even the realm of their aunt’s extensive imagination’ (Sophia Hillan, May, Lou & Cass, Jane Austen’s nieces in Ireland (Belfast, 2011)) Slattery’s portrait of Norah Hill was painted in Dublin in 1856 when she was twenty-one. Her looks and character a girl had been much admired – just as Jane Austen had praised her mother’s. Her cousin, another Louisa, noted in a letter of 1850 of a visit back to the Knight’s estate in Kent: ‘Uncle George Hill brought Norah over from Ireland to Godmersham…she is the prettiest as well as the nicest girl of 14 I ever saw.’ In addition to Norah girlish charm and membership of the Downshire family, her kinship with Jane Austen helped her prospects in Vice-Regal circles. Her aunt Louisa noting in the Spring of 1856, as Norah sat for her portrait, how Pamela, Lady Campbell, a friend of Lord Carlisle, the new Lord Lieutenant was ‘a most ardent admirer of Aunt Jane’s works’. Lady Campbell, herself, wrote to the Viceroy: ‘Only fancy the discovery we have made…! Lady George Hill [Louisa] is own niece to Jane Austen the authoress and she can tell us so much about her!’ On 28 April 1859 Norah married the dashing soldier Somerset Ward, of Castle Ward a happy union but also a more equal and pragmatic match than that of her parents as it linked the political interests of the Bangor and Downshire families in County Down. In 1873 the Slattery’s painting was lent by the sitter’s father, Lord George Hill, to the Loan Museum of Art Treasures, in Dublin’s Industrial Exhibition Palace but subsequently it descended through his brother’s family at Ombersley Court, Worcestershire. The picture and title passed through the family until the death of Richard Hill, 7th Baron Sandys (1931-2013) when the title was united with the Downshire marquisate. By the time of a 1963 inventory of Ombersley Court it had been relegated to the Store Rooms but more recently it was hung with other family portraits on the main stairs (see photograph). We are grateful to William Laffan for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Oil on Canvas Signed and dated 1857 lower left 159 x 224 cm. (62 ½ x 96 in) Provenance: Commissioned by William Nicholas Keogh (1817-1878); Thence by descent; Private collection Exhibited: Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, 1858, no.1 The present painting would have been exhibited alongside the Portrait of the Right Honorable Judge Keogh (Private collection, unknown), who would most likely have commissioned both works. In April 1856, on the death of Mr Justice Torrens, William Nicholas Keogh (1817-1878) was appointed a judge of the court of common pleas in Ireland. He was involved in a number of high profile cases throughout his career, most notably in 1872 when the celebrated Galway county election petition was tried before him. In 1852 Keogh, like his friend John Sadleir, accepted office in the Aberdeen Government, becoming first Solicitor-General for Ireland, and then Attorney-General for Ireland in 1855; it was this decision that tainted the rest of his career, with many in Ireland perceiving Keogh to have betrayed his political principles. The present group portrait shows his wife, Kate Rowney, and their three children. Slattery entered the Dublin Society s School in 1846, following which he established himself as a portrait painter in Dublin. His first painting exhibited the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts in 1852 was a Portrait of Dr Barker (1852, no.166). In 1856 he exhibited a further four portraits at the Royal Hibernian Society, and another four in 1858, including the present group portrait. It is said that after 1858 Slattery left for America, and there are no records of further paintings exhibited in Ireland after this date.
