Irish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, volume 1
Nicola Figgis and Brendan Rooney,
National Gallery of Ireland 2001 h/b
494pp. 260 col 29 b/w ills090-316-270-9
Toby Barnard
This handsome, if heavy, volume announces a new and exciting phase in the evaluation of Irish painting. It builds unashamedly—and with proper acknowledgement—on the pioneering researches of Anne Crookshank, Jane Fenlon, the Knight of Glin, Michael Wynne, and ultimately on those of W G Strickland. Strickland’s Dictionary of Irish Painters, published in 1913, set an approach to art history through biographies of artists and connoisseurship, which Nicola Figgis and Brendan Rooney adopt. Their work, lavishly illustrated thanks to subventions from the Medici of the modern art historical world, the Getty Grant Program and the Paul Mellon centre, immediately takes its place as an indispensable work of reference.
The massive format discourages casual browsing. Nor is the mere dabbler indulged, since the text is focused and rigorous. In essence, it is a catalogue of those works in the National Gallery of Ireland by artists known to have been born in Ireland before about 1800. A few of non-Irish birth squeeze in, but others who worked in Ireland for shorter periods are excluded. So Ashford, Smitz, and van der Hagen are in; James Worsdale, responsible for group portraits of the rakes of Irish hell-fire clubs as well as of Dublin notables, is not. In compensation, talented Hibernians are followed abroad: Thomas Frye and Charles Jervas to England; Hugh Douglas Hamilton to Rome.
The remit stops the book serving as a comprehensive history of painting and painters in 17th- and 18th-century Ireland. Even stricter limits to what can be included are set by what has been bequeathed or purchased by the National Gallery. Some of this material is already familiar, for example the Milltown legacy of the be-furred and bedizened members of the Leeson brewing dynasty. These paintings are regularly displayed and have recently been the subject of a separate publication. In contrast, other acquisitions, because not usually exhibited, come as surprises. To this category belongs the gallery of Edgeworth portraits, commissioned in the 1750s by the then squire of Edgeworthstown in County Longford and unusually well-documented (Figs 2 & 6). This group is also rare in enabling contemporary evidence of their painting and purchase to be matched to surviving canvases. All too frequently, similar family portraits, which existed in abundance in the provincial Ireland of the 18th century, have been yanked from their original contexts. Consequently, provenance and any useful social and economic background to their manufacture are lost. Indeed, because of such discontinuities, much that was produced in late Stuart and Hanoverian Ireland is no longer recognised as being of Irish origin.
The scholarship deployed here is formidable and impeccable. Lengthy entries minutely recount the histories of the sitters and their properties. This formula adds to the value—as well as to the weight and magnitude—of this as a work of reference. Some of the productions treated so painstakingly are—it has to be conceded—dull and dim. With many, the main interest relates more to the subject, not to the originality or dexterity of the painter. The majority of the paintings are portraits. This predominance faithfully reflects the preferences of the patrons.
The authors are careful and generally convincing in linking the stylistic developments to what was happening in England and continental Europe, especially the Low Countries and Italy: the customary destinations of putative patrons and novice artists. After 1690, following the defeat and dispossession of all but a few Catholic proprietors, patronage was monopolised by the ascendant Protestants. Garret Morphy who had depicted Irish admirers of France in a style derived from France had no successors. One regret is that the opportunity has not been taken to compare the Irish productions with those in the apparently similar societies of Wales, Scotland, and colonial north America. Particularly, with the recent publication of two studies by Peter Lord of art in Wales, parallels and divergences could fruitfully be pursued. Hanoverian Dublin offered a more populous and prosperous clientele than any of the Welsh townships, so it may be that Edinburgh and Philadelphia offer better scope for reconstructing patterns of patronage.
Those portrayed included undoubted luminaries of the emergent Protestant ascendancy as well as the obscure and anonymous (Fig 3). Here are to be found Dean Swift, the wealthy Arian Bishop Robert Clayton (Fig 1), and the lordly bishop of Derry, Frederick Hervey. Once famous peers and MPs, such as John Ponsonby, Speaker of the Commons, and Tottenham, ‘in his boots’, appear. So, too, do the founder of the Dublin Society, Samuel Madden, the dissenting philosopher Francis Hutcheson, and Edmund Burke. But absentees range from giants of the Church of Ireland, like Ussher, William King and George Stone, to the prominent politicians, Conolly, Brodrick, and Boyle. Portraiture was the genre most highly valued by the buyers of contemporary art. Recognisable likenesses were sought and made work for journeymen, who, when commissions dried up, turned to more humdrum jobs. To gain livelihoods, they would copy older works, touch up distressed canvases, repair and gild frames, and even paint the coverings for floors and the doors of carriages.
The taste for subjects other than portraiture—classical, biblical, and mythological scenes or sea- and landscapes—was satisfied by ‘old masters’. The last were sometimes loot from the grand tour; others were imported by opportunist dealers; more may have been fabricated by artists living in Ireland. Already in the 18th century, trickery, even forgery, were rife in the art world. Only slowly did Irish practitioners diversify to furnish something other than images of kinsfolk, acquaintances, and patrons. Pride in place as well as in pedigree led to the commissioning of views of houses, such as Carton and Stradbally, and of the towns of Derry, Drogheda, Kinsale (Fig 4), Waterford, and Youghal. However, these early essays in topography are not to be found in the National Gallery. It is a mid-18th-century prospect of Leixlip by Joseph Tudor which first represents the idiom. Tudor exemplified the versatility necessary to thrive in a not altogether congenial environment. He provided the illusionist settings for routs and ridottos in Dublin; he also recorded a lavish firework display on St Stephen’s Green in 1748. Rural scenes, both untamed and the domesticated, were painted by Ashford, Barret, and Roberts. National collections, including the Gallery itself, do possess earlier representations of Irish towns and buildings. However, because not painted on wood or canvas, the views of Thomas Phillips, Francis Place, Susannah Drury, and Mary Delany cannot be considered.
Necessarily, then, this volume reflects the choices of donors to and curators
in the National Gallery more than the preferences of 18th-century patrons. The latter, it is argued, esteemed likenesses most highly. In that respect, the collection accurately reflects past priorities. Also, Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries was too troubled and poor to sustain a demand for art akin to that in French and Italian cities or in the Low Countries. Only one artist, Charles Collins, with dazzling virtuosity attempted anything akin to the voluptuous still lifes of the Dutch. With deceptive simplicity Collins depicted a cooked lobster. More surprising still, only a single example of the equestrian portrait is found. It features the prized mount of Widenham Quin from Adare. Other evidence suggests that the passion for the chase and turf could express itself in reminders of equine triumphs to hang on walls, but did not yet support a bevy of specialist horse painters. More generally, the meagre market at home forced the talented such as Frye (Fig 5) and Hamilton (Fig 6) to earn their bread outside Ireland. Yet, for all these disadvantages, more images hung in Irish homes than is often supposed. Much of this imagery
was engraved on paper, not painted. Unfortunately, the documents which reveal the presence of pictures—chiefly account books and inventories—seldom give enough detail to match descriptions to surviving objects. In addition, many canvases, removed long ago from their
first homes, lack plausible provenances. Uprisings and plunder, together with
routine sales, bequests, and thefts, strip Irish paintings of all traces of their local origins. Speculators and scholars, with their rather different techniques, are left to re-create ancestries for these objects.
The achievement of the talented duo of Figgis and Rooney is part of a larger harvest. Jane Fenlon’s recent catalogue of the Ormonde collection at Kilkenny and the wide-ranging investigations into the Cobbes’ activities centred on Newbridge in County Dublin are altering perceptions of what art was shipped into and commissioned in Ireland. The Cobbes’ accumulation, begun by an 18th-century archbishop of Dublin, was recently exhibited at Kenwood House, and is thoroughly investigated in an impressive catalogue, Clerics and Connoisseurs. Soon, the much expanded new edition of Anne Crookshank’s and the Knight of Glin’s Painters of Ireland will reveal a much livelier artistic scene than was once supposed. The availability of so much information, much of it—as in the case of this volume—fresh, opens up a realistic possibility of undertaking the social histories of the arts and collecting in Ascendancy Ireland.
Dr Toby Barnard is a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.