This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Bridget Hourican. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 19 October 1903, Ireland
Died: 12 July 1988
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Doreen Vanston
Vanston, Doreen (Dairine) (1903–88), artist, was born 19 October 1903 in Dublin, daughter of John S. B. Vanston, solicitor, and Lilla Mary Vanston (née Coffey), sculptor (see below). She was educated at Alexandra College, Dublin, and then studied art at Goldsmith’s College, London, and under Roger Bissière (1886–1964) at the Académie Ranson, Paris, where her mother sent her on the advice of Paul Henry. The Paris school had a definable, lasting effect, shown in her independent approach, her flair for primary colours, and the strong Cubist influence. She belonged, like Mainie Jellet, Evie Hone, and Norah McGuinness, to what the critic Brian Fallon has called the ‘Franco-Irish generation of painters who looked to Paris’ (Irish Times, 16 July 1988).
In 1926, while still in Paris, she married a Costa Rican law student and took the name Vanston de Padilla. The couple lived briefly in Italy before settling in San José, Costa Rica, where she developed, in response to her surroundings, tropical, highly toned colours in her paintings. After the break-up of her marriage, which left her with one son, she returned to Paris c.1933 and studied with Bissière’s friend André Lhote (1885–1962). In 1935 she was in Dublin to show seventeen paintings, mostly Costa Rican landscapes, at Daniel Egan’s gallery in Stephen’s Green. When the second world war broke out she was living in the south of France but escaped to London in 1940 and then to Dublin.
After meeting Basil Rákóczi, an English artist also in Dublin to escape the war, she became associated with his White Stag Group, which he had founded in London in order to introduce subjectivity into art. The White Stag Group was the focus of new art in Dublin during the war years. Vanston showed with them for the first time in November 1941 at a group show of twenty-four artists, including Patrick Scott. Her painting for this exhibition, ‘Keel dance hall’, indicated that she had recently spent time in the west. The White Stag’s most important event was the ‘Exhibition of subjective art’, held at 6 Lower Baggot St. in January 1944. On that occasion the Dublin Magazine noted that Vanston was the most effective of the experimental vanguard. ‘Dying animal’, shown at the exhibition, was a successfully realised Cubist work composed of semi-representational forms in bold colours. The following year her work was shown in London at the White Stag exhibition of young Irish painters at the Arcade gallery, Old Bond St.
After the war, in 1947, she spent nearly a year in Costa Rica, mostly executing watercolours, but otherwise she lived and worked in Dublin at 3 Mount St. Crescent. She showed five works at the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943; her prices then ranged from £13 to £26. In 1960, at the inaugural Exhibition of Independent Artists, of which she was a founder, she showed three landscapes and a painting entitled ‘War’. Independent Artists, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, and the Oireachtas were her main showcases. She did not exhibit at the RHA. Her two landscapes at the 1970 Independent Artists show were commended by the Irish Times for their ‘vibrant, almost tropical colour, controlled with a distinctly French finesse and intelligence’ (19 Dec. 1970). In her last years she showed at the Figurative Image exhibitions in Dublin and she was one of the first painters to be chosen for Aosdána. In 1987 a number of her works were shown in a large exhibition, ‘Irish women artists, from the eighteenth century to the present’, arranged by the National Gallery of Ireland and the Douglas Hyde gallery. She died at a nursing home in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, on 12 July 1988. She is generally admired but has received relatively little critical attention, possibly because her output was slow, her works are difficult to trace, and she guarded her privacy – she refused to cooperate with the Taylor galleries, which wanted to do a retrospective on her in the 1980s. A watercolour, ‘Cow outside cottage’, was sold by de Veres of Dublin in September 1996 for the unspectacular sum of £280.