Background
Elinor Mary Monsell, the eldest daughter of William Thomas Monsell, was born in Limerick, Munster, Ireland. He was a golf writer and grandson of the British naturalist Charles Darwin.
Elinor Mary Monsell, the eldest daughter of William Thomas Monsell, was born in Limerick, Munster, Ireland. He was a golf writer and grandson of the British naturalist Charles Darwin.
She studied at the Slade School of Art in London, earning a scholarship in 1896.
Elinor was active from about 1899 to 1929. He appreciated her woodcuts, and asked her to create a logo for the Abbey Theatre. She created a pearwood engraving of a romantic image of Queen Maeve with one of her wolfhounds that appeared on the Abbey Theatre programmes beginning in 1904.
She created the cover for Stephen Gwynn"s The Fair Hills of Ireland, which was published in 1906.
In 1907 Dun Emer Press"s first pressmark was a wood engraving that she made of Lady Emer beside a tree. She illustrated some of her husband"s books for children, such as the Tale Of Mr.
Tootleoo, Every Idle Dream, and Mr. Tootleoo and Company.
Her illustrations, and those of J.B. Yeats and William Orpen, were included in the Second Annual Volume of The Shanachie, an "Irish Miscellany Illustrated" which included works be many Irish writer, including West.B. Yeats, Stephen Gwynn, Lady Gregory and George Bernard Shaw.
Her paintings A Doorway, Child with Toy Bird, and The Annunciation were exhibited in 1913 at the Whitechapel Exhibition of Irish Art in London. She painted a portrait of poet and author Aubrey Thomas De Vere when he was 87 years old.