A large number of key works in the collection of the Edith Collier Trust were completed during time she spent studying and working with the Australian artist Margaret MacPherson, in Bonmahon, Ireland in 1914 and 1915. Collier made two trips to Bonmahon, and wrote to her parents: ‘A grand place for painting. Models of all sorts, seascapes, and landscape without going far’. In 1915, she accompanied Margaret MacPherson and twenty-one fellow art students to Bonmahon for a stay that lasted from March to September or October. The fishing village offered an ideal location for a summer school, as students could live at relatively low cost with local families.

Edith was encouraged by Macpherson to use the people of Bonmahon as her most significant subject matter. Her family also eagerly awaited new insights into the life and people of the village. Edith’s sister Dorothy reported on how Peasant Woman of Bonmahon was received in Wanganui: ‘Dad likes your Irish Biddy very much, quite proud of you . . .’ In this work, as with other portraits completed in Bonmahon, Edith takes the traditional if not clichéd nineteenth-century theme of the worthy but impoverished peasant, and applies to it a new Post-Impressionist vision.
(from exhibition text Edith Collier Selected Irish Works Feb 2012 by Greg Donson)