Nick Miller: Figure to Ground, 1993-2003 Royal Hibernian Academy, 2003 pp.72. Large format p/b e15/£10.70 ills 51 col ISBN 1-903875-09-9 Readability: 4 Reference Use: 2 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of plates: 5 This is a handsome volume retrospectively covering the past decade of Miller’s practice. It consists of a brief interview by the RHA’s director Patrick T Murphy, and a well-written and informative essay by Catherine Marshall, marred only by occasional emphatic generalizations (‘..the Italian Renaissance opted for an idealised cerebral world..’; or Miller’s portrait of John McGahern described as ‘the most challenging and finest of Irish literary portraits’. Really?). The plates are excellent, as is the design but unfortunately there is no list of illustrations, making reference difficult, and the bibliography, with reference to newspaper items, does not give page references. Try ordering over inter-library loan without a page reference and see what happens…   Barbara Warren RHA: a retrospective, Royal Hibernian Academy, 2002 pp.57, Square format p/b e10/£7.20 ills 24 col ISBN 1-903875-08-0 Readability: 4 Reference Use: 1 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of Plates: 3 This is one of a series of exhibitions/ exhibition catalogues at the RHA ‘that document senior academicians who have been overlooked by the public gallery system’. I wouldn’t really have thought that Barbara Warren was overlooked but this catalogue won’t help. Not only is there no index or list of illustrations, which means that you have to keep flicking back and forth through the catalogue to find the work that is being referred to in the text, but just to ensure maximum annoyance, some works are referred to but not given a title (one of which, naturally, is illustrated). To compound matters, the bibliography is disapointing: six items are so incomplete you couldn’t order them through a library, however the illustrations are good.   Paul Henry S B Kennedy National Gallery of Ireland/Yale University Press, 2003 Large format p/b pp.150, e25/£18.95 ills 122, mainly col ISBN 0 300 09945 Readability: 4 Reference Use: 3 Design & Durability: 5 Quality of Plates: 0 The primary text, by S B Kennedy, is an effective summary of his earlier biography of the artist, supplemented by notes on each of the individual plates. The appendices (with the exception of a non-existent list of illustrations) are solid and scholarly: index, chronology, list of exhibitions and bibliography. At which point the compliments stop. There is an additional essay entitled ‘The Formation of an Irish School of Painting: Issues of National Identity’ by Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch which is surprising, for all the wrong reasons. The author points out that ‘the new school of Irish landscape painting’, a ‘school’ which, two paragraphs previously, we are told is difficult to define because of the individualistic tendency of Irish artists, is ‘almost entirely a Northern-inspired affair’. So, in other words, Northerners were predominant in landscape but instead of trying to explore this within its socio-political and historical context, let’s just subsume the lot of them into a [Southern] Irish nirvana, and while we are at it, at the same time as proclaiming ‘individualistic’ tendencies’, we’ll ignore the fact that all these individuals happen to Northerners and not Southerners. But the worst problem however is that of the poor quality of the reproductions. Walking through the exhibition with catalogue in hand, comparing the real thing to the colour illustrations, is a saddening experience, especially as the exhibition is timely, coherent, and cleverly selected. It’s not just a matter of the occasional bad plate. Almost all of them are tonally wrong, and a substantial number are utterly wrong, so much so that in Low Tide, for example, the original, in shades of pink, is rendered in the reproduction as shades of light yellow. The problem of course is that the rest of the world will view Henry in the light of reproductions which reduce his work to the status of bad calendar ‘art’.   David King: pleasant places Hallward Gallery, 2003 pp.32. Large oblong format p/b e10/£7.20 ills 22 col Readability: 4 Reference Use: 4 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of plates: 4 A young painter specializing in landscape oils, this would seem to be his first catalogue, and possibly his first solo show. The reproductions are rather good and the brief essay by Roisin Kennedy is functional. The rather truncated bibliography gives page references for two newpaper articles, but not for the other three. No list of plates.