Maria Dorothea Webb Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1840 - d. 1920

Born in Northern Ireland, Maria Dorothea Webb, moved to Dublin where she was probably a student at the R.D.S. Schools. She started exhibiting at the R.H.A. in 1873, giving her address as 7 Palmerstown Road, Dublin, and continued to exhibit there until 1917. She went to Paris in 1880, becoming a pupil of Robert-Fleury at the Academie Julian. She made regular summer visits to Brittany, c. 1881-1885, initially to Pont-Aven, then becoming one of the early foreign members of the artist colony at Concarneau. There she stayed at the Hotel des Voyageurs. She is thought to have met her future husband, Harry Harewood Robinson, at Concarneau and they were to later become central figures in the artists' colony at St. Ives, Cornwall. She made her debut at the 1883 Paris Salon with A Breton Farm that she painted in Pont Aven. Maria exhibited a large number of her Breton paintings, of fishermen and peasant women, of street, market and woodland scenes, at venues in Dublin, London, and Liverpool, 1881-87, and, significantly, at the Paris Salon, 1883-84. The present work, an evening street scene in Paris dates to the late 1880s.