Dr Marie Lea-Wilson

MedicineArt & Architecture
Written By Jean Sutton

Doctor and one-time owner of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ

The Taking of Christ (1602). Oil on canvas, 133.5 x 169.5 cm (52.5 x 66.7 in). National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

On a late summer’s morning in 1990, Sergio Benedetti, the National Gallery of Ireland senior conservator, visited a house owned by the Jesuits (known as the Jesuit House of Writers) on Lower Leeson Street, Dublin. He was there to assess their art collection.

What happened next is a familiar story to any art lover in Ireland. In the dining room opposite the fireplace hung a painting which immediately caught Sergio’s attention. His expertise was in seventeenth-century Italian art and he suspected that the painting before him was more than a simple rendition of Judas betraying Christ. Three years later, after collaborations and investigations involving other experts from around the world and no emails, the painting was authenticated as The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio. It remains on indefinite loan by the Jesuits to the Irish public and is now housed in the National Gallery of Ireland, where any visitor can view it for free.

However, the tale of how this painting came into our lives is one in which a woman is central and where women’s professional and educational progress in the early 20th century meets the violence of the Irish War of Independence and is overshadowed by the insidious influence of the Catholic Church on healthcare in post-Independence Ireland. The main character is Marie Lea-Wilson.

She was born Marie Monica Eugenie Ryan in Charleville, Cork in 1887 to a well-to-do Catholic family and in 1914 married Protestant Englishman Percival Lea-Wilson, a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). As their union was mixed, they got a Papal dispensation for the wedding. Percival went to fight in France with the Royal Irish Rifles during World War I and held the rank of Captain.

The prevailing narrative of Captain Lea-Wilson’s life is defined by his alleged actions when he was on leave from the front in 1916 and on duty in Dublin during the Easter Rising. Eyewitnesses described his treatment of the rebel prisoners rounded up in the gardens of the Rotunda Hospital as degrading and humiliating. Proclamation signatory Tom Clarke was apparently subjected to the most heinous dealings, including being stripped.

And so, the story goes, in 1920 vengeance was sought. Michael Collins ordered Captain Lea-Wilson’s killing. The IRA shot him dead in the street in Gorey, near where he and Marie lived in Westmount, Knockmullen. Percival was the District Inspector in the local RIC barracks. Marie never remarried. She maintained her husband didn’t do what people said he did and there is a competing theory that the killing was carried out by the IRA over his investigations into their local activities, especially the murder of Mrs Morris of Ballagh.

Four years after her husband’s death, the grieving Marie, whom friends called Monica, holidayed in Scotland. In Edinburgh, she attended an auction and bought a painting, The Betrayal of Christ, which was attributed to 17th-century Dutch artist Gerard Von Honthorst for just over £8. Sometime in the early 1930s, she gave the painting to the Jesuits on Leeson Street. The reason for such a beautiful and meaningful gift was her gratitude towards Fr Thomas Finlay SJ, who was a priest, professor of political economy at University College Dublin and a key figure in the Irish Revival movement. He had been a great comfort to Marie in the aftermath of her husband’s death.

This painting’s eventual legacy, albeit unintended, isn’t the only artistic gift from Marie to the public. In Wexford, she also commissioned Harry Clarke to design a window for Christ Church, Gorey in honour of her husband. The design - a quilt of purples and pinks and royal blue - centres on the martyr Saint Stephen. A banner portrays his final words: ‘Lord, lay not this sin to their charge’.

Between Captain Lea-Wilson’s death and the gifting of the painting, Marie became Dr Lea-Wilson. She received £17,500 in damages for her husband’s death and inherited his own sizeable estate. She decided to use the money to fund her study of medicine at Trinity College Dublin. She graduated in 1928 when she was 41. There were only two other women in her graduating class. Around this time she made her home at the very respectable Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin. She lived at this address until her death.

Another interesting fact about Dr Marie Monica Lea-Wilson’s life during this period is her more-than-faint link to the Russian Revolution. In the mid-1920s, she took care of an aunt, Annette O'Neill, who hailed from Canturk, Cork but had ended up in Russia working as a governess for an aristocratic family, the Sumarokov-Elstons. Ms O’Neill, nicknamed Missy, left Russia in 1921 — some years after many women in similar positions to hers — and returned to Ireland. Some years after the revolution, Ms O’Neill’s exiled charge Zenaide Bashkiroff came to live with the women. Dr Lea-Wilson paid for Zenaide’s education in Rathfarnham and an agricultural university in England. Zenaide even converted to Catholicism (Dr Lea-Wilson’s devoutness is noted in most sources about her). Sadly, the two fell out in late 1828 to early 1929 when Zenaide met and married the Tipperary politician Séamus Burke, a former member of the IRA. Dr Lea-Wilson was apparently, understandably, sadly unable to forgive the connection. It was something of a betrayal.

The rest of her story is complicated and challenges sympathy.

Following her impressive and hard-won graduation, Dr Lea Wilson went into paediatrics and was appointed as the assistant physician at the National Children’s Hospital on Harcourt Street in 1932. She worked there for some years and managed to be promoted alongside more qualified colleagues to a role with responsibility for the rheumatic fever clinic. Her peers maintained she heavily canvassed the hospital board for the position. Besides her personal history, faith and family connections may have helped. There was a desire for professional institutions to not appear sectarian in their appointments and her sister was married to a peer, who may have known members of the board.

In 1951 Dr Lea-Wilson was made the lead clinician in St Gabriel’s Hospital in Cabinteely, Dublin which specialised in the treatment of rheumatic fever. Serious allegations of abuse and mistreatment haunt her record there.

Within a matter of years, other doctors raised concerns about her work. She enforced periods of prolonged bed rest as treatment. Contemporary medical practice did not endorse such an approach. In the early 1960s, family doctors were alarmed at the psychological impact of these long, isolating stays on their patients who were being kept from loved ones. Some children spent over a year in bed. Painful physical side effects were not uncommon. Professional peers in North America and England with further-ranging expertise in rheumatic fever even wrote to her, telling her to cease this treatment method. They provided her with a reading list, which she dismissed. There were complaints of misdiagnosis, and proof - a reassessment of a substantial amount of inpatients showed no evidence of active rheumatic fever. Less patients were subsequently referred to St Gabriel’s. The hospital closed in 1970.

Dr Lea-Wilson’s career was shaped and protected by her close relationship with Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, a tie strengthened no doubt by her membership of a Catholic organisation called Regnum Dei. He elected her to the Planning Commission for Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin in 1956. McQuaid was heavily involved in the establishment and running of St Gabriels, performing a formal blessing at the opening and selecting a French order of nuns, the Daughters of the Cross, to carry out day-to-day operations. The Archbishop’s trust in Dr Lea-Wilson meant she wasn’t subject to peer review. The Daughters of the Cross were to follow her every direction. McQuaid ensured the hospital was financed and set up in such a way so that it operated outside of public control. Even when the hospital’s record was brought up in the Dáil in 1963, the Minister of Health said it wasn’t the state’s place to intervene. This set-up impacted the monetary damages victims of abuse were entitled to under redress schemes.

Dr Lea-Wilson died in Dublin in 1971. She was 84 years of age. She rests in Deansgrange.

Her life as a whole represents the difficult parts of Ireland’s first few decades but it also represents the double-sided coin of religious faith. Unspeakable awfulness can come from such absolute doctrine, but in one’s life there can exist those rare acts of humanity such as giving someone who helped and counseled you in your hour of need the small gift of a beautiful painting.

Sources and further reading: 

Author: Jeanne Sutton, September 2023.

If you have any corrections, or further information on this exhibit, please contact us.

Jean Sutton https://www.jeannesutton.ie
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Margaret Elizabeth Cousins