Katherine MacCausland

Charles Filiger (1863-1928), a gift from the artist

Sale, Hôtel des ventes de Monte-Carlo, 20 January 2021, lot 9

Private collection

Charlotte Katherine MacCausland was born in Dublin in the mid-nineteenth century and belonged to a generation of Irish artists who left home to study in Paris. MacCausland is recorded as a student at the Académie Julian c.1885-88, in the ateliers of Carolus-Duran, Henner and Robert Fleury and from c.1887-89, in the atelier of Boulanger and Lefebvre. (Julian Campbell, Irish Painters in Paris, 1868-1914, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 1995, Vol.11, p.163.) She remained in France for the rest of her life, painting at several of the most popular artistic communities there including Marlotte, Pont-Aven, Concerneau and Grez-sur-Loing.

Dr Julian Campbell describes MacCausland as ‘a long term resident at Grez-sur-Loing. She was painting at Lowestoft in England in 1883, and settled at Grez perhaps in c.1890, staying first at the Hôtel Chevillon, and later buying a house of her own. She was a close friend of American painter Francis Chadwick and his wife Emma, and it is possible that she lived with Chadwick for a while. She seems to have become well-known in the village, and was nicknamed ‘Miss Mac.’’ (Julian Campbell, The Irish Impressionists: Irish Artists in France and Belgium, 1850-1914, exh. cat., The National Gallery of Ireland, 1984, p.95). Campbell suggests it is likely at Grez that she met Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940) and his close friend, the Chicago artist, Guy Ferris Maynard (c.1856-1936), who became her long-term companion.

Charles Filiger (1863-1928), to whom this painting is inscribed, was a French Symbolist painter associated with Paul Gauguin and the artists’ colony at Pont-Aven.