Sketches, Dresses and Clean Laundry: Ann Mary Severn in-between Great Houses in Ireland

In late August 1852, twenty-year-old Mary Severn travelled to Ireland with her brother Walter and Colonel Palliser. This was the beginning of what would become an eight-month journey and the start of Mary’s professional career. Colonel Wray Palliser (1788-1862), his wife Anne (nee Gledstanes) and their large family of 13 children had been neighbours of the Severn’s when they lived at 21A St James Gate in London. One of their daughters, Mary Palliser (here after Mary P) was Mary’s best friend and also an artist. By the time Mary set off for Ireland, her father Joseph Severn had few commissions, and money was very short – the Severn family had already had to move to cheaper lodgings at 2 Denbigh Terrace in Pimlico. Mary intended to stay with the Pallisers at their house, but it is clear from her letters to her mother that she did not realise how long she would be away, nor that she would need to make commissions and send money back as frequently as she did. In a letter from November 1852, Mary wrote that she had come ‘for her health’ and not brought her portfolio of drawings with her.

Mary visited the Anglo-Irish ‘Great Houses’ and it was the first time she worked within the in-between role of guest and employee. Her diary-like letters home to her mother Elizabeth detailed who she met, her commissions, and gave a vivid picture of these houses and families. After a few days in Dublin, Mary met Mrs Palliser to go to Clonmel by train and once there, they ‘got on a cab with all the luggage and went through such scenery. Purple mountains in the distance & old ruins here and there’ to the Palliser’s house in Comeragh. This is possibly pictured by her in a sketch below.

When Mary reached Comeragh, her beloved friend Mary P was there with her brothers Wray, William and sister Grace. Comeragh House was near the Comeragh Mountains and Mahon River in County Waterford. This was the start of Mary’s tour of the great estates and houses of Ireland, where half the land of the country was owned by around 1,000 landlords. In these estates the Anglo-Irish gentry were ‘served by an army of servants’ and ‘enjoyed a luxurious and leisurely lifestyle, housed in mansions with richly furnished interiors and elaborate gardens’ (Williams 2012, 9).

Mary was to be a peripatetic portrait artist for another seven months, but did not know that she would be there so long - thinking she'd be there for a month or two to recuperate while making some sketches. She spent the time drawing from anatomical models and experimenting with painting landscapes, including this copy from ‘M.P.s sketch book’ done ‘by moonlight from the drawing room at Comeragh’.

Mary’s Sketch Book 93 (in the Birkenhead family collection) has a number of sketches of the Richmonds and Mary Palliser, as well as portraits that she made of people in Ireland and landscapes. It may have been Mary Palliser’s own book that she kept as a keepsake of Mary; most of the sketches are from 1850-53, with a few later ones, and there are many of her, as below:

This sketch book means that the names in Mary’s letters of some of the people she drew in Ireland can be matched to sketches, showing her work in progress:

I used to paint beautifully in London but that now I paint from nature which is such a  mistake [. . .] I long to try & arrange about Paris. I think of nothing else – my drawing would make such progress at the same time as my French.

At this point, Mary is blissfully unaware of how bad the financial difficulties of her family were and she would not get to Paris for years; over the next few weeks she learnt that her family’s financial troubles were worse than before. She wrote reassuringly to her mother that ‘be at ease about me as I can stay here for a long time’ and sent some sketches to amuse her that she 'did on purpose to put you in good spirits' (MS to ES, ? September 1852). She started by making portraits of Colonel Palliser’s sister and her children. This led to other commissions, so she then moved from house to house across Counties Tipperary, Waterford and Cork with occasional visits to Dublin over the next five months.

The landed gentry of Ireland were a tight and isolated group that intermarried within their mostly Protestant (and Church of Ireland) religion, who formed a 'separate caste in Ireland, with an identity clearly distinct from other classes, even the prosperous and well-educated merchant and professional classes of their own religion' (O,Keefe 2020). As an outsider, Mary could move between the upper-middle class homes of military families, like the Pallisers, and mercantile classes to the estates of the aristocracy, such as the Mahers at Tullameine Castle in Tipperary. She soon picked up commissions and wrote to her mother from Tullameine Castle that she was doing a watercolour of a lady for Mrs Maher but would finish it at Mrs Osbourne’s house as ‘Mrs Osbourne came out and asked me to do her children’ so she would ‘try to do a nice group like Arthur and Eleanor. Not be sponging on you and Papa’. Mindful of the impending winter, Elizabeth Severn had sent some lindsey-woolsey, a warm robust material of wool and linen, for Mary to have made into two dresses, and some paper, for which Mary thanked her mother. She wrote that she had ‘not done as many drawings as did not like to ask them for paper.’ This hesitation about asking for paper recorded Mary’s awkwardness as a guest and an employee at the same time.

Despite not having her portfolio and being so young, she found that her popularity as an artist and guest grew over the months in Ireland. She wrote to her mother that Mrs Maher invited her and Colonel Palliser back for Christmas while a ‘friend of the Eglington's is here and calls me a 'Corinne', referencing the hugely popular novel about an Italian poet and professional woman by Madame de Stael. Both Mary Severn and her friend Mary Palliser enjoyed wearing lauels and wreathes of flowers around their head, instead of more formal hair styles, as did Corinne and Madame de Stael herself.

Clothes were a pressing issue for Mary, especially as the season changed. She was short of small money as she needed to tip the domestic servants to get her washing done. For example:

I have had my muslin dress washed. I was so sorry to wear my new blue one for a   whole week at Mrs Maher's but the others were dirty and I did not give them to be  washed, till I had my tin (Miss L's [Lockhart]) for I had difficulty in getting the change. I have had to get Indian Rubber cloggs.

Indian rubber cloggs were worn as ‘over shoes’ in wet weather, which as any one who has explored the rugged scenery in Ireland would know is necessary! By the end of October 1852, she was working on portraits for Catherine Bernal Osbourne and nearer the town of Clonmel, around which was clustered several larger houses, and needed more clothes for visiting. Fortunately, new dresses sent on from London via Comeragh arrived and fitted ‘most beautifully’. Mary had a white muslin evening dress ‘made up by a woman in Clonmel.’ She wore this with an ‘ivy wreath with scarlet velvet plaited’ in her hair and now possessed four bonnets as Grace Palliser had given her a black net one for summer. Evidently, Elizabeth was still concerned about her daughter’s lack of funds as Mary found small change in the dresses:

I must also thank you for so thoughtfully sending what you put inside them, you will  be pleased to hear that I am so well, I do not require it now! Mrs Osbourne has taken a great fancy to me. (MS to ES,  2 November 1852)

Catherine Osbourne's house was one of the few where Mary, eventually, felt like she stayed as a friend rather than half employee, half guest: an in-betweener who needed a dress for travel, dinner, walks and work.

Maxwell, Ian (2012), Everyday Life in 19th Century Ireland, London, The History Press

O'Keeffe, Jane (2013). Voices from the Great Houses of Ireland: Life in the Big House: Cork and Kerry (Function).