Helen Hooker

Helen Huntington Hooker or Helen Hooker O'Malley Roelefs (1 January 1905 – 2 April 1993) was an American sculptor and portrait painter who spent a considerable part of her career in Ireland. Early life Helen Huntington Hooker was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, United States on 1 January 1905. She was the third of four daughters of chemical engineer and business man Elon Huntington Hooker, and Blanche (née) Ferry, the daughter of Dexter M. Ferry. The family were wealthy and had six governors of Connecticut and Massachusetts among their fore bearers. Hooker attended Miss Chapin's School in New York until 1923, and in the same year won the American national junior tennis championship, rating tenth on the tennis tables. She was artistic from an early age, making her first sculpture, of a rabbit, aged six. Instead of attending university, Hooker studied sculpture with Mahonri Young, William Zorach, and Edmond Amateis in New York, and later in Paris at Académie de la Grande Chaumière with Antoine Bourdelle. Hooker was well travelled, studying wood carving in Germany, sculpture and dance in Greece, theatre design in Moscow, and painting in Leningrad, where she learned from the Russian avant-garde painter Pavel Filonov. Time in Ireland In 1933, Hooker met and fell in love with the Irish writer Ernie O'Malley, who her family did not approve of. Despite that, the couple married on 27 September 1935 at Marylebone registry office, London. The couple first moved to 229 Upper Rathmines Road, Dublin, and later relocated to County Mayo in the autumn of 1937. With financial assistance from Hooker's father, the couple rented and then bought Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, County Mayo, with forty acres in Hooker's name. She bought an additional 30 acres in 1942, which the family worked as a farm. They amassed an extensive art collection, which included works by Jack Butler Yeats, Evie Hone, Mainie Jellett, Paul Henry, Nano Reid, John Piper, Henry Moore, Amedeo Modigliani, and Georges Rouault. The couple had three children, Cathal, Etáin, and Cormac. By 1944, their marriage was failing, leading to Hooker requesting a divorce in late 1946 in the United States. They finally separated, and were divorced in 1952, and Hooker abducted two of the eldest children to Colorado Springs, Colorado without O'Malley's consent. Their youngest remained with O'Malley in Ireland. Hooker continued to be a generous patron of the arts in Ireland.