Clodagh Finn: The Irish woman who was a famous French sculptor's studio assistant

The grand display was totally at odds with the conversation that followed because, as Gwen John’s biographer Sue Roe writes, Nuala O’Donel would then “hold forth on her two favourite subjects: her illustrious ancestry, and how poor she was”.

Gwen, we’re told, understandably wondered how she reconciled her poverty with her grand surroundings. Meanwhile, Suzanne Horden, the English actress who lived with Nuala at number 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, grew exasperated with talk of her grand lineage.

“We are all descended from the same ancestors, Adam and Eve,” Suzanne would quip.

But who was Nuala O’Donel, and who were her great ancestors?

Brendan Lynch, author of the newly reprinted Prodigals and Geniuses: The Writers and Artists of Dublin's Baggotonia, asked the same question when he first came across a reference to this little-known artist about 12 years ago.

He approached the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts and other bodies, but they had no information on her apart from the fact that she had exhibited there from 1898 to 1900.

Trawl the newspaper archives and you’ll see that she and her parents were on the guest list for the State Ball at Dublin Castle in March 1894.

Her parents, as Brendan Lynch discovered, were Caroline O’Donel (née Fordati) and magistrate Charles Joseph O’Donel, who came from a landed Mayo family (the source of her pride, perhaps). Nuala, one of four children born to the couple, came into the world at 47 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin, on July 22, 1868.

Search a little more and you might chance across this careless reference under the heading: “A partial list of the women Auguste Rodin seduced”.

It reads: “Nuala O’Donel, an artist, grew jealous when she discovered that Gwen John entertained Rodin in her bed and saw him almost every day. She wrote a sad little note, then put her head in the oven and turned on the gas.”

To be fair, that summary appears in a piece of fiction, the novel Gwen by Goldie Goldbloom, although Rodin’s reputation as a voracious womaniser and O’Donel’s sad fate were considered fact.

Paris-based journalist and writer Isadore Ryan takes up the story. In his illuminating new book, Irish Paris: Stories of famous and infamous Irish people in Paris through the centuries, he has unearthed further traces left by a woman whose work was clearly of note.

It’s not known when she moved to Paris, but between 1903 and 1905 she was working with Antoine Bourdelle, a French sculptor and disciple of Auguste Rodin. Through him, she came to the attention of Rodin who admired one of her marble sculptures.

Today, you won’t find any trace of Nuala O’Donel’s work at the Rodin Museum, although that isn’t a surprise given that it took several decades before Camille Claudel, Rodin’s one-time partner and a gifted sculptor in her own right, was accorded space there. (On an aside, Claudel had a studio on the road where O'Donel lived; it’s tantalising to imagine these women learning their craft at the height of an artistic golden age in Paris).

Hints of Nuala O’Donel’s work do survive in the museum’s archives, though, which preserves some of the letters she wrote to Rodin in impeccable French.

Isadore Ryan unearthed them and in doing so gives us the most complete picture of this forgotten artist to date. In one letter, dated  August 2 but without a year, Nuala wrote that she was thrilled to discover that Rodin, or the ‘Maître’ (master) as she called him, was going to give her a trial at his studio.

She wrote: “I was really happy and honoured to be given permission to enter your workshop to gain experience there, and to have the enormous advantage of your corrections while you determine if I have the special qualities necessary to become a practitioner capable of interpreting your sculpture,” she wrote.

Another letter suggests that her first trial didn’t go too well because she promises to be quicker the next time: “I would like to express, once again, my sincere regret for having made you wait so long for your marble. If you would entrust me with another job, now that I have acquired a little more experience, I will be able to return it to you more promptly and, I hope, to your satisfaction.”

In another piece of correspondence, she reminds Rodin of his promise to help her get a slot at an international exhibition in London. One of her pieces, a bronze sculpture called Portrait d’Homme (Portrait of a Man), was shown at the 1907 Salon d’Automne, the annual art exhibition held in Paris.

Whether that came about because of Rodin’s influence is not clear, but Nuala O'Donel’s talent was recognised by her peers. They were much less forgiving about her personality, though.

Gwen John said she was bad-tempered while Malvina Hoffman, a neighbour and fellow assistant of Rodin’s, said she was “very talented but morbidly sensitive”, and would burst into tears if Rodin failed to keep an appointment to see how her work was progressing.

She feared Nuala was living on the edge of an emotional precipice and she was the one to be greeted one morning by the concierge, or caretaker, of Nuala’s building who told her something terrible had happened.

In her book Heads and Tales, she recounts that awful moment: “I smelled gas in the hallway and tried to get into her studio, but it was locked,” said the concierge. “I ran for help, and they broke open the door and found Mademoiselle lying dead on the floor, the gas tube tied over her mouth with a towel.”

But, as Isadore Ryan writes, Nuala O’Donel’s end remains a mystery. There is no police record of a suicide, only that she died on July 22, 1916, her 48th birthday, in the Franco-British hospital in Levallois-Perret, outside Paris. She was buried in the town cemetery some days later.

The Kerrywoman Janie McCarthy, so active in the French Resistance a few decades later, is buried in the same cemetery. As so often happened, both women were transferred to a communal ossuary, or grave, when their cemetery fees went unpaid.

At least now, the memory of Nuala O’Donel has been resurrected thanks to writers Isadore Ryan and Brendan Lynch. The latter even went to the trouble of tracking down and buying one of her watercolours.

He says: “On my annual pilgrimage to Paris, I always pay my respects outside her home at 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs near Montparnasse, a few doors from where Ernest Hemingway later lived, and close to La Closerie des Lilas restaurant frequented by Dubliners James Joyce and James Stephens.”

If you find yourself passing by, you might remember her too.