Even if she had not possessed a forceful personality, strong political views and exceptional talent as a painter, it is scarcely imaginable that Sarah Cecilia Harrison would have failed to make an impression on her contemporaries. Standing six feet tall, she towered over the majority of them and, from this commanding position, expressed her opinions in a more forthright fashion than was customary for women of the time. Perhaps this trait came from her family background: on her mother's side, she was a great-grandniece of Henry Joy McCracken, and her own brother Henry was a Nationalist MP who acted as Parnell's secretary.
The political interests of Celia, as she was called by her friends, found their fullest expression in January 1912 when she became the first woman elected to Dublin Corporation. During her three years as a city councillor, she championed the cause of the poor and unemployed, whose plight she highlighted in an article written for a book - Ireland's Hope: A Call to Service, published the year after her election.
Harrison's political skills were also regularly put to good use on behalf of her friend Hugh Lane and his efforts to establish a gallery of modern art in Dublin. She seems to have met Lane relatively soon after he began working towards this goal, because in December 1904 she was already writing to the press offering financial assistance for the purchase of pictures he wanted to acquire for Dublin. Her interest in contemporary art is easy to understand: she was a painter of rare merit, specialising in portraiture, examples of which "Holbein himself need not have been ashamed", according to Thomas Bodkin, who subsequently became director of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Many of her paintings were quite small and highly finished, in the manner of the 17th-century Dutch masters she had studied in the Netherlands after leaving London's Slade School of Fine Art. Settling in Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century, she soon built a reputation as a portraitist and would exhibit at the Royal Hibernian Academy for more than four decades. She was one of that group of well-bred, well-educated, well-intentioned and unmarried women who made such a significant contribution to Ireland's cultural renaissance.
Many of the people who offered Lane help in the creation of a modern art gallery - Sarah Purser, William Orpen, George Russell - were themselves artists, but none seems to have been quite so tireless in their efforts as Harrison. When Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art finally opened to the public in temporary premises on Harcourt Street in January 1908, she wrote all the catalogue entries for the 300 works in the original collection.
Writing came as naturally to her as painting, unlike Lane, who all his life would remain hopelessly inarticulate in both speech and print, especially when the subject was of great personal interest to him. But Harrison was a keen correspondent. She wrote easily, often and at length to the national newspapers about the modern art gallery project - particularly after being appointed secretary of a voluntary group, the Mansion House Committee, set up to help the new institution to find its own purpose-built premises.
And she wrote just as frequently to Lane himself, long letters detailing the committee's activities as well as expressing anxiety over the recipient's health and welfare. These letters were sent to her "Dearest friend" and invariably concluded "Always yours very sincerely" followed by her signature. While gallery business was her primary concern, she usually found space on the pages for some more personal remarks as well, perhaps an observation about Lane's professional activity as a dealer in old masters, or some helpful suggestions on how he could conduct his business with greater ease.
And then she would articulate her worries over Lane working too hard and not taking sufficient care of himself. As he prepared to leave for a holiday in the south of France, she wrote tenderly, "I rather wish you did not say you were going abroad for health. It seems ungrateful to a body like yours which puts up with such shocking treatment without going on strike."
LANE, who inspired similar maternal sympathies in a great many women, did not show as much appreciation for her devotion as might have been expected. He recognised that she was inclined to engage in conspiracy theories, believing in what she called "hidden opponents" who were trying to thwart her work. In the summer of 1913, when Lane and his supporters were vainly attempting to persuade Dublin Corporation that the new modern art gallery designed by his friend Edwin Lutyens should be built as a bridge across the Liffey, he wrote to his aunt, Lady Gregory, that "Miss Harrison is no good as a general" and, furthermore, that she "is extraordinarily unpopular here" and had many "bees in her bonnet".
Battling with her fellow city councillors on behalf of the art gallery project, Harrison clearly had no idea that she was perceived in this fashion. In September 1913, when the battle was lost, Lutyens's designs spurned and Lane's valuable collection of Impressionist pictures removed to London, she was devastated. As if to console Lane for the failure of his plans, she continued her bombardment of letters: "Miss Harrison writes rather often again" he ironically observed to his sister Ruth Shine in November 1913.
A widow since the previous year, Shine went to live with her brother in his house in London and, as Harrison frequently found reason to call in whenever she went over from Dublin, the two women became friends. And so they remained in the immediate and shocking aftermath of Lane's death: he drowned in May 1915, a passenger on the Lusitania, which was sunk by a German submarine.
But Harrison relinquished her position as an intimate of Lane's family when, within a couple of months of the tragedy, she announced that she and the dead man had been secretly engaged and were planning to marry on his return to London. There were many reasons such a scenario was regarded as highly improbable: Lane was settling into confirmed bachelorhood; while appreciative of Harrison's work on his behalf, he regularly found her company irksome; and there was a considerable disparity in age between the two of them - at the time of his death, Lane was not yet 40, whereas his soi-disant fiancee was 52.
Harrison, however, was insistent that the engagement had existed, and that only she knew Lane's intentions prior to his death. She declared the will he wrote in October 1913 - and its codicil composed almost 18 months later - were fakes, and she therefore refused to accept the £100 and piece of jewellery he had bequeathed her, since by doing so she would validate the documents.
For his relatives, Harrison's obsessive preoccupation with Lane and her claims of an engagement to him were an acute embarrassment. While in Dublin in December 1918, Shine discovered that her former friend would speak of the matter to anyone prepared to listen. She was, it seemed "quite mad on the subject of Hugh though quite sane on other things" and liable to tell her tale with "floods of tears". Lady Gregory asked Henry Harrison to speak to his sister, but he said he had not seen her for months, and that any discussion with her about Lane left him wanting "to bash her head".
Unable to get any satisfaction from either her own family or Lane's, Harrison publicised her grievances by issuing a formal statement, writing of her intentions to Lady Gregory, who responded succinctly from Coole Park: "I cannot think my going to Dublin to hear the statement you mention would serve any useful purpose."
Harrison presented the document in question to Dublin Corporation in May 1924, and as that body failed to respond to her satisfaction, she began a letter-writing campaign to Irish newspapers. When the editor of the Freeman's Journal received one of these missives, he handed it on to W.B. Yeats who, in turn, showed the letter to Lady Gregory. The latter told her niece Ruth, "Yeats says how the Dublin people are saying Miss Harrison drinks - and tho' it may not be true it is as well they feel she is not a witness to be trusted."
Still not getting any satisfaction, at the beginning of 1927 Harrison published a pamphlet called Inquiry Concerning the Continental Pictures of Sir Hugh Lane, The Next Step, the primary purpose of which was to argue once again that only she knew the wishes of her supposed fiance, and that the will and codicil which everyone else accepted as genuine should be recognised as forgeries.
Lest the arguments presented in support of this case were insufficiently powerful, she also claimed that a valuable collection of documents dealing with the entire question of Lane and his intentions had somehow been stolen from a locked desk in her home. The conspirators she once believed had been trying to stop her work for the modern art gallery now appeared determined to undermine her ongoing struggle to tell the truth about Lane to the public.
Although they took no legal action against her over the pamphlet's unquestionably libellous contents - in which Shine was presented as a shameless opportunist who had destroyed Lane's real will for the sake of financial gain - the dead man's family and friends took no legal action against Harrison, but simply cut off all contact with her. Isolated, she chose to commemorate Lane alone, asking Lutyens to design a suitable memorial tablet for her. In 1929, this was erected at her own expense in the north gallery of St Anne's Church on Dawson Street, Dublin, where it remains.
The plaque is dedicated "To the beloved memory of Hugh Percy Lane, Knight", and records how "Endowed with a passionate love of the beautiful, he dedicated his gifts to the service of Art and his Fortune to spreading a knowledge of it in his own country. The memory of his self-forgetful life, inspired by a devout and humble faith, is the precious possession of his friends."
For more than five years after Hugh Lane's death Harrison did not exhibit any pictures, but eventually she started to paint again. However, in the latter years of her life she devoted much of her considerable energy to helping alleviate poverty in Dublin. She died in a nursing home in July 1941, and obituaries spoke as much of her charitable work as of her art. The newspapers did not mention her great devotion to Hugh Lane, but among the pictures left behind in her studio were two portraits she had painted of him; one of these is now owned by the National Gallery of Ireland and the other by Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.
Hugh Lane, 1875-1915: A Biography by Robert O'Byrne will be published on Thursday, by Lilliput Press, £25. To coincide with the book's publication, two exhibitions and series of lectures have been organised: Hugh Lane and Friends at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, and A Tribute to Sir Hugh Lane at the National Gallery of Ireland. Both exhibitions open to the public next Friday. For further information, tel 018741903 (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art) and 01-6615133 (National Gallery of Ireland).