exhibited. This happened when she was twenty-two at an exhibition of the Water Colour Society of Ireland. She subsequently exhibited paintings in the Guildhall Irish exhibition in 1904 and in the Irish International Exhibition in 1907.
Letitia first exhibited, like her sister in an exhibition organised by the Watercolour Society of Ireland in 1902, when she was twenty four years of age.
How did the economic and social circumstances of the Hamilton family at Hamwood influence the artistic development of Eva and Letitia?
Their father had been sufficiently prosperous to send them both as teenagers to Alexandra College in Dublin, a boarding school on Earlsfort Terrace, which educated the daughters of well-to-do Protestant families up to university entrance standard. It may have been at Alexandra College that Letitia had art lessons from John Butler Yeats. Letitia, for her part, mentions having had tuition from Walter Osbourne and this also may have happened at Alexandra College.
The girls were, however,
growing up at a time when the incomes of people in their father’s class were falling.
As L.P. Curtis writes of the period following the land Act of 1881 "only landowners
fortunate enough to own valuable urban property, untenanted grazing land or stocks and
bonds were able to absorb the ton of agricultural rental without plunging into
bankruptcy".
The Hamiltons had been fortunate enough to hold onto a significant amount of untenanted grazing land from which cattle produced a family income, part of which would have sustained Eva and Letitia.
But Charles Robert Hamilton’s family was large, and six of them were daughters. He actively discouraged marriage suitors for his daughters because, according to an article by Hilary Pyle in the Irish Arts Review Yearbook of 1997, he had "mismanaged his affairs and could not provide dowries for his six daughters". The expectation in their social circle that a marriage dowry would be provided for each of the daughters of a farming family, like the Hamilton’s, must have been especially difficult because his family’s wealth was in the form of land, as asset that was not easily saleable without jeopardising the viability of their overall farming operation. The combination of falling actual incomes with high social expectation derived from an earlier era, must have been a very difficult one indeed for the family and others like them.
It could be said, however, that this difficult dilemma for the Hamilton family, which blighted the matrimonial expectations of both Eva and Letitia, was to prove of benefit to Irish art. In 1907, when Letitia was twenty nine and Eva thirty one and both knew that marriage was not be on their agenda, they enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art. This school was located in a building that is now part of Leinster House. The Royal Dublin Society, a body with which the Hamilton family would have been familiar through their agricultural interests, had originally sponsored it. The formal education in art, which they received in the Metropolitan School, enabled both Eva and Letitia to develop from gifted amateur artists to the stage of recognised professionals. The Hamilton sisters continued to be based at Hamwood until their father died in 1913. At this stage their brother Charles who had been living in England, returned to take possession of Hamwood. The sisters, with their mother, had to move to 38 Lower Dominick Street in Dublin. Dominick Street had been the