Mildred Anne Butler RWS (1858-1941)

The Irish landscape painter Mildred Anne Butler was born and spent most of her life in the family home, Kilmurry in Thomastown, County Kilkenny. Butler's work often depicts the birds and animals native to the gardens and country landscapes around her Kilmurry home. As it happened, she outlived all her five brothers and sisters and inherited the family house.

In the early 1880s, she traveled to Brussels and Paris where she studied drawing, and fine art painting alongside contemporaries such as Walter Osborne and John Lavery, and spent some time in London working under Paul Jacob Naftel, whom she later claimed had given her a profound understanding of the art of watercolour painting.

Her French training was considered highly unconventional in British art circles; London's Royal Academy refused to exhibit artists who painted in the French style, and any young painters who did so were obliged to form their own society in order to exhibit their paintings. This prejudice diminished during the 1890s, and in 1896 Mildred Butler's Morning Bath was acquired by the Tate Gallery, a rare honour for a watercolour painter, especially a female artist.
Meanwhile, from 1890 onward, Butler began exhibiting her art at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, and in 1893 her work was included in an album of watercolours presented to the future Queen Mary. (A small watercolour of crows hangs in Queen Mary's doll's house at Windsor.) In 1896, Mildred Butler became an associate member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours.

While in Paris she became associated with the Newlyn school, spending the summers of 1894 and 1895 in Cornwall studying under the Irish landscape and figure painter Norman Garstin, who, like Walter Osborne, had been a pupil of the Antwerp master Charles Verlat.

She exhibited just five works at the Royal Hibernian Academy, although she showed at the first Belfast Art Society show and was elected a full member of the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1930. However, despite her expertise in watercolours, it wasn't until 1937 - 40 years after being granted associate membership - that she was given full membership of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours.

Butler's works were exhibited as far afield as America and Japan during her lifetime and the Kilkenny Museum of Art was renamed the Butler Gallery in her honour.

She continued painting in watercolours and oils until the final decade. She died in 1941, aged 83. Her works appear in a number of collections of Irish painting.

Source:
Online Encyclopedia of Irish and World Art

Although Mildred Butler's paintings are timeless, there is an essential Edwardian quality to her art; a sense of peaceful summer pastures, peacocks on lawns, and evening mists in winter woodlands. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, her watercolours embody classic elements of Victorian culture, such as an interest in gardens, trees and animals-the latter frequently assigned anthropomorphic roles-but transcend the conventionality and sentimentality of much Victorian art.

In later years she produced sensitive depictions of cattle grazing, walled gardens and herbaceous borders, often in the setting of Kilmurry, near Thomastown in County Kilkenny, the house where she was born in 1858, and died in 1941.

Grandson of the 11th Viscount Mountgarret, Butler's father, Captain Henry Butler, was also an artist. He wrote and illustrated a book on big-game hunting, South African Sketches, published in 1841. Her mother, Ciara Butler (née Taylor), had come to Ireland from Leicester. The youngest in the family, Mildred Anne had two siblings, Walter and Isabel. She studied art first under Frederick Brown, at the Westminster School of Art. Then, in 1885, she and a relative, Lady French, toured France, Switzerland and Italy. Her work from this period reveals the influence of another tutor, Paul Naftel, who ran a school in London, and gave correspondence courses.

Mildred Butler was a dedicated student, studying the technique of watercolour painting with Naftel, the depiction of animals with William Frank Calderon, and absorbing a French Realist aesthetic from Henri Gervex in Paris. In 1894, along with May Guinness, she travelled to Newlyn in Cornwall, where Norman Garstin was teaching a style of Northern European Impressionism.

First exhibiting in 1888 with the Dudley Gallery, Butler enjoyed both commercial success and popularity. She showed regularly with the Watercolour Society of Ireland, and the Royal Academy. In 1891 her painting Morning was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest, and that same year Out in the Open attracted favourable comment from Queen Victoria. Two years later she was asked to contribute to a portfolio, to be presented to Princess May. She also contributed to a presentation to King Edward VII, and in 1910 Queen Alexandra purchased one of her paintings. Peter Murray, March 2019