Harriet Anne Cowper

An inked inscription verso in a period hand identifies the girl in the sculpture as Harriet Anne Cowper and gives the date, June 1867. The man standing next to the sculpture is presumably either the girl's father or the sculptor.

Born on 14 September 1863 at Fitzwilliam Place in Dublin, Harriet Anne Cowper was the daughter of Henry Alexander Cowper (1831-1925), of Dublin and Newtown Mount Kennedy in County Wicklow. Her mother was Elizabeth née Puzey, second daughter of Thomas Puzey of Penge in Surrey.

In 1892 she married Major Robert Fleetwood William Rynd of the Kildare Militia.

In 1891 she brought a civil case against a man named Victor Perry after he knocked her down with his bicycle. In court she admitted she had not looked up or down the road when alighting from the tram and the judge dismissed the case. A newspaper report gave Mrs Rynd’s address as ‘Abbeyville, Blackrock, county Dublin.’

At the time of the 1901 census she was staying at a lodging house in Bristol.

She was still alive when her husband died on 7 December 1924.

Photographed by James Simonton of the Royal Panopticon of Science and Art in Dublin.