Born in Derry in 1901, Norah McGuinness trained at the Metropolitan School of Art under Patrick Touhy and Harry Clarke. She traveled to Paris in 1929, wherer she enrolled at the school of Cubist painter Andre Lhote. In the 1930´s, McGuinness was living in London, a member of Lucy Wertheim´s “Twenties Group”, and exhibiting at the Wertheim Gallery. The inspiration of the White Stag exhibitions in Dublin led to the establishment in 1943 of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, by McGuinness, Louis le Brocquy, Mainie Jellett and Jack Hanlon. McGuinness was elected president of ILEA in 1957, a postion she retained for almost twenty years. The popularity of the ILEA showed that there were many artists working in Ireland outside the academic realist tradition. The initial exhibitions included Nano Reid, Patrick Scott and Gerard Dillon. McGuinness, Doreen Vanston and Mainie Jellett showed the influence of Cubism in their work, while Colin Middleton brought a Surrealist flavour to the exhibition.

Throughout her career, McGuinness´s paintings, based on strong compositions and a confident use of colour, were influenced by what became known as the “School of Paris”. However with the passing of years, her style inevitably became less progressive, and by the 1970´s she was painting in a style that had long since been overtaken by new developments such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art.

Perhaps the finest work by McGuinness in the Great Southern collection is the earliest work, First Snow, a painting dating from 1949 and exhibited at the RHA that year. A sense of winter, of stilled growth, pervades this abstract composition, based on a landscape in which snow has blanketed the fields in the foreground and the hills in the distance. Strong diagonals in the composition are provided by the gate, while the gentler slant of the bulb placed in the glass container, its roots reaching into the water, also serves to animate a somber and thoughtful composition.

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