Image: National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
The National Gallery of Ireland has issued a final call for entries to the 2026 Sarah Cecilia Harrison Essay Prize, an award for new research and writing on women and Ireland’s visual culture. Entries must be submitted by midnight Irish Standard Time on Friday 18 September 2026, with the competition open to members of the public aged over 18.
Now in its fifth year, the prize recognises research concerning women who contributed to Ireland’s visual culture, as well as Irish women who worked in the visual arts abroad. Eligible subjects may be drawn from fine art, design and craft. Entries must be previously unpublished, written in English and no longer than 5,000 words, including cover pages, footnotes and endnotes.
Applicants must email an essay, a 500-word abstract and a 200–500-word biography. The submission must also include the entrant’s full name, address, telephone number and date of birth, along with permission for the Gallery to share the entrant’s name and locality if shortlisted. The winning author will receive €1,000 at a reception at the National Gallery of Ireland on 18 November 2026.
The award was established to honour Sarah Cecilia Harrison’s contribution as an artist, curator and advocate of social reform and women’s rights in Ireland during the early twentieth century. Harrison was also associated with the cultural world documented in an archive acquired by the Gallery in 2019. The collection contains more than 400 letters from Sir Hugh Lane to Harrison, dating from 1905 to 1915, and has been catalogued and digitised for researchers.
The Gallery presents the prize through its Library and Archives, whose holdings include the Centre for the Study of Irish Art, the Yeats Archive and the institution’s own archives. The department says that while women’s central role in the development and dissemination of modernist art in Ireland is documented, the wider history of women artists and their achievements has often been forgotten or treated as secondary to the standard canon. The prize is intended to support research that brings those histories into view.
Previous recipients include Ella Sloane, winner in 2024 for ‘The education of the work-girls’: Evaluating Dún Emer’s educational objective through the literary and visual material of Leabhar Dún Éimire; John Christopher Vaughan, who won in 2023 for ‘In the Mood for God: Colour and Mysticism in the Art of Mary Swanzy’; and Chiara Harrison Lambe, winner in 2022 for ‘Stella Steyn (1907–1987): A Name to Remember’. Deirdre Kelly received the 2025 prize for ‘Kathleen Fox: Chronicler of Irish History’. The 2026 competition is supported by descendants of Harrison’s sister, Beatrice Chisholm.
