Born: 1876, Ireland
Died: 12 March 1956
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Niav Gallagher. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Barnes, Eileen Elizabeth Janet (1876–1956), museum artist, was born in the family home at 137 Great Britain Street (now Parnell Street), Dublin, in 1876, the youngest of at least ten children of Edwin Barnes, a grocer and wine merchant, and his wife Elizabeth (née McKay). Several of Eileen’s siblings died young. The family later lived at 2 Cabra Terrace, Phibsborough, and following Edwin Barnes’s death in 1899 moved to Kenilworth Square, Rathgar, where Elizabeth lived for the rest of her life, joined by Eileen and her siblings Herbert and Edith. Barnes received her primary education at the Rutland School for Girls on Great Britain Street, later attending the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art on Kildare Street, enrolling in July 1898 and graduating in 1899 with an Art Class Teacher’s certificate. On 10 January 1900 she was awarded a prize for her art, presented by Countess Beatrix Cadogan, wife of lord lieutenant George Cadogan; William Pearse received a prize at the same time (Irish Times, 10 Jan. 1900).
In 1901 Barnes was living in Ballinard, Co. Tipperary. The census lists her as a boarder and governess in the house of Anna Maria Cooper-Chadwick and her two daughters, Kathleen and Louisa. By 1911 Barnes was back living with her mother in Kenilworth Square. Although the date of Barnes’s return to Dublin is uncertain, she was associated with the Museum of Science and Art in Dublin (now the National Museum of Ireland) by at least 1907, when she donated a model of platypus eggs to the natural history division. Two years later Henry Bantry White, chief clerk of the museum, informed attendees at the Museums Association Conference in Maidstone that: ‘In Dublin there is a lady (Miss Barnes) who sets up these cases [for injurious insects] for us. She is most clever at her work: her address is 45 Kenilworth Sq., Rathgar, Dublin. She is a good modeller and makes models of fruit, roots &c in wax remarkably well’ (Bolton, 162). His recommendation of her work to other museums (and provision of her address) suggests that she was not yet an employee of the museum, though in 1911 its natural history division’s annual report referred to Barnes as having been employed in the museum for some time.
Barnes’s artistic talents were multifaceted. She was a gifted modeller, working in 1910 with marine zoologist Rowland Southern to construct a model of a rock pool for the lower lobby of the Natural History Museum. The model was described by Robert Scharff, the keeper of the natural history collections, as ‘one of the most beautiful pieces of work ever produced in the museum’ (Lucey). The pool, complete with its suite of fauna and flora, is preserved in medicinal liquid paraffin and is still displayed in the museum. Three years later the invertebrate zoological division of the museum in Bristol listed twelve models of British slugs constructed by Barnes (under Scharff’s supervision) as among their more ‘notable accessions’ (Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 1913). When the images were displayed as part of the Royal Dublin Society’s (RDS) 1931 bicentenary celebration, the catalogue described her work as a most successful attempt to reproduce the movements and colour of a living animal. She is also believed to have assembled and painted the habitat backgrounds in the mammal and bird showcases still used in Dublin’s Natural History Museum.
In addition to modelling, Barnes was also enormously skilled at botanical illustrations, although her interest in plants does not appear to have stretched to collecting them – she was a member of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club from 4 March 1913 and participated in numerous field trips but appears to have contributed few specimens, or at least never to have published them. She was, however, highly sought after for the quality of her botanical and zoological illustrations, and renowned biologists and naturalists such as Annie Massy, Matilda Knowles and Jane Stephens (later married to Scharff) commissioned her to provide illustrations on subjects as diverse as cephalopods (Massy), lichens (Knowles) and sponges (Stephens). Over a period of around twenty years Barnes also provided illustrations for one of Ireland’s best-known naturalists, Robert Lloyd Praeger. After a day working in the museum, she would go over to his house on Zion Road, Rathgar, to work on botanical drawings for his numerous publications, most notably more than 300 drawings for his work on Sedum and Sempervirens. In recognition of her contribution, he named Sedum barnesianum, a new species collected in East Himalaya, in her honour (Praeger, 73). She also accompanied Praeger on his trips to the Canary Islands in the 1920s in order to illustrate the underwater plants there in situ.
As well as her botanical and zoological interests, Barnes was also skilled in paleontological and geological drawings. She did a watercolour illustration of fossilised rootstock from the Kiltorcan formation in Co. Kilkenny for Thomas Johnson, one of Ireland’s foremost botanists, and provided her impression of an Irish elk (more correctly, deer) for Praeger’s celebration of Robert Scharff upon his retirement in the Irish Naturalists’ Journal (Scharff had a role in the acquisition of one of the iconic skeletons of the Irish elk for the Natural History Museum). She also worked with the antiquities division in the museum, most notably reconstructing a large dug-out canoe that had been excavated in Co. Leitrim and conserved in the museum. Throughout the 1920s and up to 1938 she did occasional work as a cartographer for the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI), at one stage spending a total of 376 hours working on a one-inch map sheet in a five-month period. Despite the sheet reaching the colour-printed proof stage, it was never published and remains in the archives of the GSI (Lucey, 120).
Outside of her work for the museum, Barnes had her own studio in Kenilworth Square where she worked on private commissions for institutions such as the RDS, the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy, which was said to have ‘valued her services highly’ (Irish Times, 24 Mar. 1956). She also worked with some of the most distinguished academics of the era, for example contributing four sketches to Francis Elrington Ball’s monumental A history of the County Dublin (1902–20). During the 1920s, archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister excavated the Hill of Uisneach, Co. Westmeath. He uncovered a royal dwelling with the remains of several houses and other features associated with domestic occupation spanning several centuries, as well as an ancient roadway linking Uisneach to the Hill of Tara. In his report for the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1928/9), he noted that Barnes accompanied the excavations in 1927, creating a model of the eastern building to be deposited in the National Museum. Reporting on the excavations, the Irish Independent noted that Barnes’s complementary model of Tara was one of the best-known exhibits in the museum (21 Sept. 1927). When the ashes of Irish writer George Moore were being repatriated from London, Barnes was the artist chosen to design and make the urn. Described in the Irish Press as ‘a specialist in reconstructive pottery’, she was commissioned to make an earthenware pot based on the pottery of the late bronze age (6 Apr. 1933).
Despite Barnes’s long association with the National Museum, it remains unclear if she was directly employed there. It seems more probable that she was a temporary technical and professional assistant, albeit one of long standing, whose standard of work ensured that she continued to receive commissions even after she formally retired. Barnes left the museum shortly after March 1947: a footnote in an article published by Etienne Rynne in 1976 notes that fragments of an iron sword were sent to ‘Miss Barnes … the technical assistant and artist then working in the National Museum’ but that she left the museum service shortly afterwards (237).
After the death of her last surviving sibling in 1937, Barnes lived alone in Kenilworth Square until 1941 when she began taking in female lodgers. For the final two years of her life she shared the house with her friend Maura Keane. Following an accident Barnes was admitted to Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, Dublin, on 13 February 1956. Two weeks later she underwent an operation for ‘extensive burns’. She died in the hospital on 12 March and was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery with her siblings, Herbert and Edith. She left her house and its contents to Keane. On 24 March the Irish Times ran an appreciation of her life (written by ‘M. S.’) in which Barnes was described as a ‘gentle unobtrusive personality’ who nonetheless contributed significantly to Irish culture and heritage. The list of her accomplishments included her definitive drawing of the Tara brooch and the invention of a device to build up the fragments of broken vases. According to the author, when the head of the National Museum wrote to the British Museum suggesting that Barnes could study there, they wrote back: ‘There is nothing we can teach Miss Barnes. We have been acquainted with her exquisite drawings for years’ (Irish Times, 24 Mar. 1956).