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: 26 October 1901, Ireland
Died: 4 November 1977
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Dorothy Travers Smith
Robinson, Dolly (1901–77), artist and theatre designer, was born Dorothy Travers Smith on 26 October 1901 in Dublin, daughter of Richard Travers Smith, MD, FRCPI, of 20 Lower Fitzwilliam St., and his wife, Hester (née Dowden), a celebrated psychic and medium. Dolly’s grandfather was the noted literary critic Professor Edward Dowden. She studied art under Estella Solomons in Dublin and at the Chelsea School of Art, London, where she lived for a number of years with her mother at Cheyne Gardens. She began to work in theatre design and in 1926 was asked by the Abbey to design the set for Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Emperor Jones’. The following year she was commissioned to design costumes and set for ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’, by G. B. Shaw, at the Abbey. Lady Gregory found the set quite beautiful but was more critical of her set for ‘King Lear’ (Abbey, 24 November 1928) which she termed ‘jazz – crooked stripes of colour that distract the eye and don’t mean anything’ (Gregory, Journals, ii, 346). By this stage Dolly had taken a permanent studio, dubbed ‘the grimery’, in North Frederick St., Dublin, where Harry Clarke had his glassworks, and she had become close friends with the Yeats family, Lennox Robinson, and Thomas MacGreevy. She allegedly inherited some of her mother’s psychic powers and, like George Yeats, practised automatic writing. One of her ‘spirits’, Thomas of Odessa, appears in W. B. Yeats’s Vision. The poet was fond of Dolly, dubbing her ‘Chinatown’ because of her slightly oriental appearance, and writing her a warm letter (November 1929) praising her combination of aesthetic sensitivity and practicality.
On 8 September 1931 she married Lennox Robinson in Chelsea registry office and for her honeymoon accompanied him and the Abbey on an American tour. Back in Dublin the couple settled in Sorrento Cottage, Dalkey, but their marriage ran into difficulties as Robinson was gay and became an alcoholic. There were no children. Despite drinking too much (like her husband), Dolly remained cheerful; Micheál MacLiammóir described her as ‘easy to know, bubbling with good nature, barbed with wit, her lazy innocent smile would carry her unharmed through the heart of cannibal forests’ (MacLiammóir, 90).
In 1934 she designed the costumes for two Abbey productions, Yeats’s ‘The resurrection’ and ‘The king of the clock tower’. Her sole contribution to the RHA came in 1936, when she showed ‘Bungalows’. Two years later she had an exhibition at 7 St Stephen’s Green, where she showed forty-nine works, including landscapes of Cork, Dublin, Donegal, and Sligo and views of Britain, France, and Majorca. The Irish Press critic praised her for being able to make ‘something out of the most uninteresting subject . . . she is interested in shapes, in the division of things’ (29 September 1938). At the Irish exhibition of living art in 1943 she showed ‘Donegal in March’. By 1949 she and her husband had sold Sorrento and were living in a flat in Longford Terrace, Monkstown. A member of the United Arts Club, Dublin, she helped organise art exhibitions for the club and was curator for a short time of the Joyce museum at Sandycove during the early 1960s. She died in a Dublin nursing home on 4 November 1977 and was buried with her husband at St Patrick’s cathedral, Dublin. Her ‘Cordyline palms’ (1935) is in the Crawford municipal art gallery, Cork, which also has a charcoal drawing of Robinson by Margaret Clarke.