Cork In 50 Artworks, No 23: Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen, by Patrick Hennessy

The artist was a gay man from Shandon Street; his subject a famous writer who inherited an estate in Co Cork

A detail from the portrait of Elizabeth Bowen, by Patrick Hennessy, at Crawford Gallery of Art.

Patrick Hennessy’s Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen depicts the celebrated author on the staircase of Bowen’s Court, her ancestral home near Kildorrery in North Cork, in front of a Palladian window that looks north towards the Ballyhoura Mountains. The painting is dated 1957, though it seems likely that Hennessy had begun work on it a few years earlier.

“Bowen probably commissioned the portrait, though she had very little money at the time,” says Dr Michael Waldron, Assistant Curator of Collections & Special Projects at the Crawford Gallery in Cork, where the painting is part of the permanent collection.