MITCHELL, Flora H: Vanishing Dublin

With fifty coloured plates and one page of text to each. With an introduction by the Earl of Wicklow. Dublin: Figgis, 1966. First edition. Quarto. pp. x, 101. Green cloth. A fine copy in fine dust jacket.

Flora Mitchell, 1890-1973, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and moved with her family to Ireland as a
result of the Sioux Indian Rising in the 1890’s. She studied drawing and painting at the Dublin
Metropolitan School of Art developing a reputation for her life sketches and her watercolours. After a
period of voluntary work in Dublin during the First World War, she went to teach art in Canada but by
the end of the 1920’s, she was back in Dublin. In 1935 she began exhibiting with the Water Colour
Society of Ireland, which was her only showcase until the mid-1950’s, when she exhibited with the
Dublin Painters’ Gallery and the Royal Hibernian Academy.
Much of Flora Mitchell’s work encompassed drawings of Dublin landmarks, as well as cityscapes in
oils and watercolour paintings, exemplified in her excellent illustrated book, ‘Vanishing Dublin’. This
work contains 50 fine coloured plates. She also produced some fine pencil sketches of London
buildings. Examples of her works are in the National Gallery of Ireland, the Civic Museum, Dublin and
the James Joyce Museum.