Barber, F., 2025.

Hidden in plain sight: Estella Solomons' portraits

Portraiture played a significant role as part of the process of nation-building in early twentieth-century Ireland. By comparison with other artists' aspirations to create a public body of portraits of important individuals with national status, much of Estella Solomons' portraiture depicts a very different range of sitters committed to achieving Ireland's independence on cultural, political and military levels and whose identities or levels of activity in these areas could not necessarily be revealed. This chapter focuses on three portraits from this period in order to foreground questions of gender, subjectivity and space in relation to wider political developments.