Lady Gregory
Artist
Antonio Mancini
(1852 - 1930)
Date1907
MediumOil on panel
Dimensions74 x 57 cm
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery.
Lane Gift, 1912.
Object number44
DescriptionLady Gregory, born Isabella Augusta Persse (1852-1932) was Hugh Lane's aunt. She was a close friend and patron of W. B. Yeats and deeply involved with the Abbey Theatre from its foundation in 1904 and in her career as a playwright she did much to increase its popularity. Apart from her numerous plays, which were mainly one-act comedies based on Irish rural life, she also produced translations of old Irish sagas. Her home, Coole Park in County Galway, was an important meeting place for members of the Irish Literary Revival. One of Italy's greatest modern painters, Antonio Mancini (1852-1930) is best known for his daring and innovative painting methods. Mancini's paintings are at once realistic and visionary, and they span a career that brought him from the legendary slums of Naples to Paris, Rome, and English country houses. Mancini worked at the forefront of Verismo, an indigenous Italian response to nineteenth-century realism, producing haunting portrayals of circus performers, street musicians, and impoverished children taken from the streets of Naples. In Naples, Mancini's promising career was seriously derailed by an episode of mental illness possibly brought on by mercury poisoning that included delirium and even hallucinations and culminated in his hospitalization for four months in 1881-82. Although pronounced "cured," his bizarre behaviour persisted to the extent that many referred to him as il pittore pazzo--the crazy painter. It was during this first period of mental instability that Mancini began to express his lifelong fixation with reflective self portraits. His paintings were at once realistic and visionary. Mancini settled in Rome, and with the support of American and Dutch patrons managed for many years to eke out a precarious existence.
The artist John Singer Sargent, who famously declared Mancini to be the greatest living painter, eventually introduced him to a circle of wealthy English patrons for whom he produced notable society portraits. Lane first met Mancini when visiting Rome in the autumn of 1904 and commissioned a portrait from him (Portrait of Hugh Lane), a work which must have greatly appealed to Lane as he bought other examples of his work (four were to be included in his conditional gift to Dublin) and also decided to bring the artist to Ireland. At the time, Mancini was staying with a patron, Mary Hunter, at her English country house. He arrived in Ireland in September 1907 where he stayed in the United Services Club, dined with Augustus John and attended the Abbey Theatre for performances of Synge's Riders to the Sea and Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan. Lane commissioned a number of portraits from Mancini, including W.B. Yeats, in pastel, and two oil paintings, one of Lady Gregory and the other of Lane's sister, Ruth Shine. There are eighteen works, in total, by Mancini in the Hugh Lane collection.
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