Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize 2024

A charcoal sketch of a woman looking slightly over her shoulder. There are some white and red highlights on the sketch.
Antonio Mancini (1852-1930), Sarah Cecilia Harrison (1836-1941), Artist, 1909

New research and writing telling the stories of women in Ireland's visual culture 

Sarah Cecilia Harrison (1863–1941) was an accomplished artist and curator, as well as an advocate of social reform and women’s rights in Ireland in the early twentieth century.

The Gallery acquired the Sarah Cecilia Harrison archive in 2019. Comprising over 400 letters from Sir Hugh Lane to the artist, the archive (dating from 1905–1915) provides insight into the world in which both Lane and Harrison lived and worked.

To mark the launch of the Sarah Cecilia Harrison archive to the public, and in honour of Harrison’s legacy in the arts and as a social campaigner, the National Gallery of Ireland established the Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize in art history, recognising the best new research and writing on the history of women in the visual arts in Ireland. 

Winner of the 2024 Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize 

The winner of this year's prize was announced at a ceremony here on 13 November: Ella Sloane was awarded the 2024 Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize for her essay ‘The education of the work-girls’: Evaluating Dún Emer’s educational objective through the literary and visual material of Leabhar Dún Éimire.

Read Ella's award-winning essay here. 

Ella Sloane graduated with a BA in English Literature and Sociology from Trinity College Dublin. She has since started writing for the Irish Times as part of the newspaper’s journalist graduate programme where she primarily writes features relating to arts, culture and lifestyle issues. For her final-year thesis, Ella chose Trinity’s School of English’s Open Collections pathway, a non-traditional dissertation option that allowed her to engage in an archival research project. This essay is the result of her work. Fascinated by Ireland’s material history she combined her love of literary and visual arts in this project, transforming it into something more than a dissertation. Ella hopes to continue exploring different aspects of Leabhar Dún Éimire to uncover the lives of the craft enterprise’s largely forgotten work-girls, building on the work of Trinity’s Cuala Press Project.

Two runners-up were also acknowledged by the judges: 

  • Anne Marie Saliba: Gifford’s Grace – A life in Pen. Grace Evelyn Gifford (1888-1955): Ireland’s Finest Cartoonist
  • Lian Bell: Doubles – a new archive
     

This prize is generously supported by the descendants of the sister of Sarah Cecilia Harrison, Beatrice Chisholm.

Previous winners

2023

2022

The Gallery's Library and Archive

The Gallery’s Library and Archive include important and valuable collections of research material held at the Centre for the Study of Irish Art (CSIA), Yeats Archive and Gallery's institutional archives. These collections support the study and scholarly interpretation of visual art in Ireland.

The central role played by women artists in the development and dissemination of modernist art in Ireland is well documented. However, the broader story of women artists in Ireland and their achievements has often been forgotten, or viewed as ancillary to the standard canon.

In 2019 the Gallery acquired the Sarah Cecilia Harrison archive. Comprising over 400 letters from Sir Hugh Lane to the artist, the archive (dating from 1905–1915) provides insight into the world in which both Lane and Harrison lived and worked. This important collection is now fully catalogued and digitised and available to researchers on source.ie. 

Archives and primary research are essential to understanding and revealing these stories. Through the development of our collections, engagement and learning programmes, the Library and Archives department, including the CSIA, has worked to promote Irish women artists as well as female-led collectives and industries.