Mainie Jellett

Mary Harriet "Mainie" Jellett was born on 29 April 1897 at Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, and was educated at home by a governess. From about age eleven she took private painting lessons in Dublin with Elizabeth Yeats, Sarah Cecilia Harrison, and May Manning, alongside piano lessons taken with an early ambition to become a concert pianist. She studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1914 to 1917 under William Orpen, then moved to London to attend the Westminster School of Art from 1917 to 1919 under Walter Sickert, working in an Impressionist mode.

Around 1920 to 1921 she traveled to Paris to study with the Cubist painters Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes, and continued to return to Gleizes' studio through 1932. That training shaped the abstract, geometric compositions she began showing in Ireland. In 1920 she won the Taylor Art Scholarship and exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Her 1923 exhibition of Decoration and related Cubist works at the Society of Dublin Painters drew hostile reviews from the Dublin press, including a widely noted dismissal from the critic George Russell, writing as AE in the Irish Statesman.

Jellett continued to paint, lecture, and write in defense of modern art through the following two decades. She competed in the painting category of the Olympic Art Competitions at the 1928 Amsterdam Games representing Ireland, won a silver medal at the Aonach Tailteann festival in 1932, and represented Ireland at the New York World's Fair in 1939. In 1943 she helped establish the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and was appointed its first chair. She died on 16 February 1944 at St. Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, of pancreatic cancer, at age 46.

Jellett's early reception was openly hostile. The 1923 Dublin exhibition of Decoration drew critical dismissal in the Dublin press, and George Russell, writing as AE, disparaged her Cubist work in the Irish Statesman. That hostility gave way over the following decades to recognition of her as a founding figure of Irish modern art, culminating in her role establishing the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943 and, more recently, in the National Gallery of Ireland's 2025 exhibition Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship, which reassessed the two artists' shared contribution to Irish abstraction.

Jellett's auction record is Achill Horses (1933), which sold for EUR 210,000 at Whyte's in Dublin on 26 May 2025, described by Whyte's and by the Irish Times as the highest price yet achieved for her work. It surpassed the previous record of EUR 110,000, set by The Land Eire (1940) at Whyte's in 2019. Her market is handled almost entirely through Irish and UK secondary-market auction houses, including Whyte's, deVeres, Bonhams, Adam's, and Morgan O'Driscoll, and no current gallery or estate representation could be confirmed.

Jellett has no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and cross-reference against her extensive public-collection holdings, including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and several regional Irish galleries, carry unusual weight in authentication. Her auction market is thin, with relatively few works appearing at sale in any given year, so the 2025 record for Achill Horses should be read alongside the 2019 record it replaced rather than as proof of a smooth upward trend. No current gallery or estate is confirmed to represent her, which means collectors should expect to transact primarily through Irish and UK auction houses.