Who is Susanna Drury?

Susanna Drury, later Susanna Warter (c. 1698 – c. 1770) was an Irish painter. Though little is known of her excitement or work, she was definitely influential in the go ahead of Irish landscape painting. She is chiefly noted for her watercolor drawings of the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, which brought international attention to the site.

Drury was born more or less 1698. She was joined with the Dublin Society (later the Royal Dublin Society), which presented her past its first award, worth £25, in 1740 for her paintings of the Giant’s Causeway. She had traveled to Ulster to observe the site firsthand, and spent several months there working. Her drawings are composed of gouache on vellum and present two views of the Causeway from the east and west. These paintings con accurate details of the jointing forming the basalt columns of the Causeway. The paintings brought attention to the formation, and the popularity of Irish monument paintings boomed in their wake. Engravings were made by Francois Vivares amongst 1743 and 1744. Prints made from these engravings were popular in Europe and were widely circulated in scientific communities; in 1765 an door for the Causeway appeared in volume 12 of the French Encyclopédie which suitably relied on the engraving of Drury’s paintings. A plate made from the engraving of Drury’s “East Prospect” itself vanguard appeared unattributed in a volume of plates published for the Encyclopédie. It was included in the geology section along following two extra plates depicting same basalt formations in France, and included a caption by Nicolas Desmarest proposing, for the first times in print, that the structures were volcanic in origin.

Drury married a man named Warter and died in or after 1770. Her indigenous gouache drawings of the Giant’s Causeway now hang in the Ulster Museum in Belfast.