‘A Populous Solitude’: the life and art of Sophia Rosamond Praeger, 1867–1954

Abstract

Although the Titanic is regularly discussed as a pinnacle of Northern Irish workmanship, much of the skilled craft that surrounded the Belfast shipyards, in which the Titanic was made in 1912, is by and large forgotten. Perhaps the most important artist whose work captures this era is Sophia ‘Rosamond’ Praeger. Although at the time of her death in 1954 Rosamond Praeger was considered one of the most important Irish artists of her time, she is today a forgotten and marginalised figure. Like so many women artists of her generation she has been allowed to fall very quickly from visibility in history books, museum collections and the public imagination. Trained in London and Paris in the age of the ‘New Woman’, she returned to live in the north of Ireland in the 1890s and completed numerous (often monumental) sculptures for every conceivable public and private space. Committed to female emancipation from an early age, she was a constant advocate of women in the arts, championing modern women artists, and she recognised, and championed, before anyone, the powerfully brooding genius of her younger contemporary, the stained glass and graphic artist Wilhelmina M. Geddes. Unlike many of her contemporaries, such as Sarah Purser and Beatrice Elvery, as well as Ellen Rope, Mary Watts and Phoebe Traquair, Rosamond Praeger’s life and work are long overdue for reconsideration, and as we come closer to celebrating the centenary of the Titanic her memory sadly sinks further and further into eclipse.