Born: 21 March 1876, United States
Died: 15 July 1941
Country most active: Ireland, United States
Also known as: Lady Grattan Esmonde
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Eve M. Kahn. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Levins, Anna Frances (Lady Grattan Esmonde) (1876–1941), photographer, publisher, political activist, lecturer and portrait painter, was born in New York city on 21 March 1876. She was one of at least eight children of Peter Levins (1815–94), a builder from Drogheda, and one of five he had with his Irish-born second wife, Nancy Hale Levins (1836–1929), known as Nanno; they were married on 2 November 1865. Anna Frances Levins lived with her family on Avenue A on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and worshipped at St Brigid’s church on Avenue B. The family then moved to the Mount Hope section of the Bronx, acquiring a large house built in the 1830s on East 175th Street at Topping Avenue. She attended a school run by St Brigid’s, where her instructors included a priest and a nun who were skilled portrait artists. Levins’s determination to document the accomplishments of Irish Americans was partly inspired by her own scholarly ancestors. Her paternal grandfather Patrick Levins was a schoolteacher in Co. Louth, who taught languages including Latin, Greek, English and Irish. Her uncle, Thomas C. Levins (1789–1843), also emigrated from Co. Louth to New York, where he worked as a priest, engineer, scholar, journalist and librarian. (He was also a bibliophile and his book collection, including incunables and medieval manuscripts, was incorporated into the library at Georgetown University, where he served as librarian and professor of mathematics and natural philosophy.)
Around 1900, Levins was apprenticed to the renowned New York photographer, George Rockwood; he saw a photograph that she had taken of a grizzled American civil war veteran and encouraged her to pursue a solo career. In the early 1900s, Levins travelled widely in Ireland and England, taking photos of such well-known figures as Thomas Power O’Connor and John Francis McCormack. As her fame grew, she also published self-portraits, often with cameras in her hands. While photographing her parents’ homeland – she called it her ‘Sireland’ – she came to view many aspects of Ireland, including its industries, food, textiles, culture and idealistic people, as vastly superior to their American counterparts. All that Ireland needed to thrive, she observed, was freedom from ‘the whole machinery of English tyranny’ (Levins, 1915, 2). Levins was reputed (somewhat improbably) to have been the first American woman to set foot on Inishbofin and was described as ‘the most Irish travelled woman in the world’ (Yonkers Herald, 30 Sept. 1914). She later gave lectures on Ireland, illustrated with her photos of its urban and rural landscapes. She also explored Newfoundland and published photographs of its scenery – its temperate climate and intense greenness reminded her of Ireland.
By 1909 Levins had set up her own studio at 5 East 35th Street in midtown Manhattan. She displayed her portrait and landscape photographs there, as well as her reproductions and enlargements of nineteenth-century prints, paintings and photos, such as a portrait of her uncle Thomas C. Levins and a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe. She attracted portrait sitters ranging from young soldiers and newly affianced socialites to celebrated politicians, writers and activists like Joseph McGarrity, Patrick Pearse, John Redmond and Éamon de Valera, and clerics such as Pope Pius X, John Healy and Michael Logue. Levins also welcomed impoverished Irish immigrants, catholic and protestant, to gatherings at her studio. She made them feel at home partly by burning Irish turf in the fireplace and wearing gowns made of Irish fabrics. Her success was attributed to her ‘knack of having her sitters assume their easiest pose’ (Times Union, 7 Feb. 1909). Levins syndicated and often copyrighted her photos and they were widely reproduced in newspapers and periodicals, including the New York Times and Vogue, as she became known as ‘the Irish American image maker’ (Catholic Union and Times, 21 Oct. 1920).
Around 1911 Levins was appointed to the board of the American Irish Historical Society (AIHS) and was named its official photographer; she was the society’s first, and for many years only, female board member. She was among the few women who attended the society’s banquets, usually held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and photographed the society’s prominent members including Michael Joseph O’Brien and John W. Goff. Levins concurrently ran the American Daughters of Ireland, a volunteer organisation that she had founded in 1911, which attracted tens of thousands of members worldwide and held frequent gatherings at her studio and at the Waldorf Astoria. The organisation hosted concerts, plays, poetry readings and lectures; naturally, Levins photographed many of the performers and speakers, including Teresa Brayton, Joseph Ignatius Constantine Clarke, Shane Leslie and Patrick Pearse.
Following the execution of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, Levins displayed their portraits at her studio as a gallery of martyrs. She had earlier established her own private imprint, Levins Press, which she used to publish her collections of poems and aphorisms deploring English oppression in Ireland and longing for independence, including A little Irish gift book (1915) and Freedom! The battle cry of Ireland, patriotic poems collected by Anna Frances Levins (1917). She provided illustrations for books that celebrated dead Irish nationalists and documented the achievements of the Irish in America, such as Thomas Addis Emmet’s Memoir of Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet (1915), Maurice Joy’s The Irish rebellion of 1916 and its martyrs: Erin’s tragic Easter (1916) and Michael J. O’Brien’s A hidden phase of American history: Ireland’s part in America’s struggle for liberty (1919). (Levins assisted Emmet with his research.) Books containing her ‘wondrous reproductions’ of antique prints, photos, drawings, paintings and maps were said to have helped combat prejudice against Americans of Irish descent, and to deter reductions in the US government’s immigration quotas (Catholic News, spring 1915).
Levins met Sir Thomas Henry Grattan Esmonde in the early 1920s through their mutual friend John Goff. In 1924, two years after Esmonde’s wife Alice died, he proposed to Levins. They married on 15 September 1924 at St Patrick’s cathedral; Goff gave the bride away. She closed her Manhattan studio upon becoming Lady Anna Frances Grattan Esmonde. The Esmondes largely divided their time between Grattan House in Dublin and Farmley, Scarawalsh, Co. Wexford. They took hunting and fishing vacations as far afield as Canada and also spent time at the Vatican. The Esmondes collected major historical artefacts and donated them to the AIHS, including the death mask of Wolfe Tone and a cracked crystal goblet owned by Robert Emmet. Newspapers continued to publish her copyrighted photos, and she and Sir Thomas set up Levins Press in Dublin; together they published Gentlemen! The queen!: an Irish reverie (1926), chronicling the Esmonde family history; An Irish picture gallery (1927), about the Esmonde art collection that was saved from the fire that destroyed the family seat during the civil war; and More hunting memories (1930), about Esmonde’s hunting escapades.
Grattan Esmonde died in 1935 after years of depression and poor health, and bequeathed his entire estate to Levins. Months later, his son Osmond sued Levins, claiming that the will was invalid due to Sir Thomas’s illnesses; he died soon after losing the court battle. By 1940, as Levins’s health declined, Irish physicians insisted that she return to the USA for medical care. She died of heart failure on 15 July 1941 while visiting friends in upstate New York. Her funeral was held at St Patrick’s cathedral and she is buried in an unmarked grave at the Levins family plot at Calvary cemetery in Queens, New York. Obituarists remembered that she had been an accomplished photographer.
Hundreds of Levins’s credited photographs were published in newspapers, periodicals and books, and many more appeared without credit. Her original photographs, paintings, correspondence, artworks and artefacts are found in various institutions, including the AIHS, the archdiocese of Boston, the archdiocese of New York, the Catholic University, Georgetown University, the Library of Congress, the University of Notre Dame, the National Library of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland and University College Dublin.