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Portrait of Stella Steyn by Patrick Tuohy

Career

<ref> Stella Steyn's schooling included Alexandra College and Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art (now NCAD), where, she was taught by Patrick Touhy who introduced her to the Cézanne style of art. Much of Steyn's early work was inspired by Harry Clarke and Aubrey Beardsley. In 1926 Steyn moved to Paris with her mother and artist friend Hilda Roberts, she attended the La Grande Chaumiere. She worked in the Arts Quarter (Montaparnasse) and called Paris “the most stimulating place for the artist who really wants to work”. While in Paris she met a number of other Irish artists including Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. She became friends with Joyce’s daughter, Lucia and was asked to illustrate Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. She did not understand the piece, but it was explained to her by Joyce and was specifically asked to respond to its musicality. 1928 saw Stella’s first individual art show in St Stephen’s Green at the Dublin Painter’s Gallery. She exhibited a variety of forms, including etchings, watercolours and pencil drawings. That same year Steyn entered into Sur La Glace, she did not win but was awarded a silver medal at the Tailteann Games. Between 1927-30 she had 19 works displayed in the Royal Hibernian Academy, four of which were of the female figure. In 1929 she had an exhibition in Manhattan and embarked on a tour of France and Germany visiting Avignon, Toulon and Marseilles. She felt her work was underappreciated in Ireland and returned to continue her study at La Grande Chaumiere and then Académie Scandinave. In 1931 Steyn became the first known Irish artist to study at the Bauhaus School of Design at Dessau, there she was taught by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Joseph Albers. She began to feel disillusioned by the methods while there, but continued her study until 1932 when she moved to Kunstgewerbeschule, Stuttgart. Stella met her future husband David Ross, a professor of French at University London, in 1933. When she married Ross in 1938 they moved to London, she stayed mostly out of the public sphere after this rarely displaying her work. However, In 1947 Ladies in a Vase was completed and in 1952 she featured in the Carnegie institute Exhibition Pittsburgh.