Kenwood: Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest Julius Bryant Yale University Press 2003 pp 400 h/b £50.00 €73.00 ills 145 col & ills 259b/w ISBN 0 300 10206 2 John Mulcahy Shortly before he died in 1927, Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, bought the Robert Adam designed Kenwood House on the edge of Hampstead Heath in London. It was not that he needed a roof over his head. He already owned two houses in Ireland, Iveagh House on St Stephen’s Green and Farmleigh in the Phoenix Park. He also had the huge Elveden estate in Norfolk and Thornhill in Cowes, nearby which was moored his 203-ton schooner, Cetonia. And, finally, there was his town house in London at 4-5 Grosvenor Place, which boasted no less than 145 rooms. No, what Iveagh wanted in Kenwood was a home for what turned out to be the finest collection of old master paintings to be given to the British nation in the 20th century. Iveagh had accumulated his collection in a most unusual fashion and almost entirely through the Bond St dealers, Agnew’s. The story goes, and it is repeated in this volume, that ‘Lord Iveagh’s association with Agnew’s was quite accidental. One day when the partners were at lunch, Lord Iveagh strolled into a Bond St gallery and asked to be shown some fine pictures. The cautious assistant refused to show him any and, considerably piqued, Lord Iveagh left the gallery. Reaching Agnew's, he entered and made the same request. There too the partners were absent but the assistant showed greater discernment and there and then sold Lord Iveagh several pictures. Thenceforth Agnew’s enjoyed practically his exclusive patronage’. Whether or not this story is apocryphal, in the following few years Iveagh did indeed accumulate a huge collection through Agnew’s. In 1887 he bought just six paintings following three visits to Agnew’s, but the following year he ordered no less than seventy-three paintings from the same dealer. In 1889 he bought forty-three pictures, in 1890 he added a further thirty-one and in 1891 he acquired a further fifty-nine. And after that he stopped. Most of these pictures were hung in Iveagh’s town house at Grosvenor Place but of the sixty-three paintings which he finally bequeathed to Kenwood, sixty-two of them had been bought at Agnew's. He was certainly a once-in-a-lifetime client, but Agnew's too had served their client well. The Kenwood collection, which has since been expanded to something over one hundred pictures, can be divided broadly between the English 18th-century portraitists and the earlier continental masters. The former category includes such outstanding portraits as Gainsborough’s Mary, Countess Howe (1764), Reynolds’s Miss Cox and her Niece (1789) and Romney’s Mrs Master (1780). There is also Romney’s engaging portrait of Mary Tichel (1795) who sat twenty-three times for the artist when she was eighteen years old; and many, many others. The continental masters include what is perhaps the finest (1665) of the sixty- three self-portraits that Rembrandt painted. But even this has to contend for attention at Kenwood with Vermeer’s The Guitar Player, another of the great treasures in this collection. Then there is Frans Hals’s portrait of that adventurer of the Dutch East India company Pieter van der Broeche, and Anthony van Dyck’s commanding portrait of Princess Henriette of Lorraine 1634. The charm of Kenwood, of course, is that the pictures are there to be contemplated and enjoyed in a ‘natural’ setting. This particularly applies to the 18th-century portraits which hang so comfortably in the music room of the house. But elsewhere the hanging is always imaginative, and the pictures can be seen as Iveagh intended—in the comfort of a gentleman’s residence. Julius Bryant’s catalogue of the paintings in the Iveagh Bequest gives not just the provenance of each picture but the story of each subject, the involvement of each artist, the condition of each painting and the connected literature. The volume is, of course, richly illustrated with many full-page colour-plates and contains a full biographical reference. In short, it is a most enticing invitation to visit Kenwood House. John Mulcahy is the editor of the Irish Arts Review   The Cries of Dublin Drawn from the Life by Hugh Douglas Hamilton, 1760 William Laffan Editor Published by Churchill House Press for the Irish Georgian Society 2003 pp 208 p/b €25 Ills 68 col & ills 35 b/w ISBN 0-9545691-1-3 Patrick Fagan The cries in question were the cries of hawkers as they peddled their wares through the streets of the city. The best-known Dublin hawker was the probably fictitious Molly Malone who wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow and ended up with a prestigious monument, wheelbarrow and all, at the bottom of Grafton Street. Most cities of a certain size in Ireland and Britain and even on the continent had their own distinctive cries and a practice developed of making card-size portraits of the various hawkers, with captions naming their trades and recording their cries, ensembles of say a dozen or twenty such portraits being published on broadsheet-sized paper. Such an ensemble of twenty Dublin cries published about 1773 is reproduced at p 52 of the work under review. The figures representing the different trades tended to be quite stylised, all of them well-dressed, but the small size of the portraits tended to diminish their usefulness as a guide to what the various hawkers actually wore. Hugh Douglas Hamilton, the original begetter of the cries now before us, was born in Crow Street, Dublin in December 1740. He studied drawing under Robert West in the Dublin Society School in George’s Lane, now South Great George’s Street. He was primarily a portrait painter, who, having practised his art for some years in London, went to Italy in 1779 and did not return to his native city until the 1790s. He died in 1810. He is recognised as one of the more considerable Irish artists of the eighteenth century. The album containing Hamilton’s The Cries of Dublin was discovered last year in Australia and is now made available to the public for the first time by the Irish Georgian Society in this splendid production, the general editor being William Laffan, with background contributions from Laffan as well as from T C Barnard, Joseph McDonnell, Brendan Rooney and Sean Shesgreen. Since the album is dated 1760, when Hamilton was aged only 19, what we have in these 66 plates is the product of the artist’s teenage years and there are times when it shows, mainly in errors of perspective and foreshortening as in plates 5, 9, 32, 51, 61 and 63. Plate 66 is evidently unfinished. But these are the exceptions. Since Hamilton drew ‘from the life’, one would expect his album to be a faithful representation of trades and callings in Dublin (with two from Cork) in the late 1750s. But he strays far from the quite restricted medium of Cries to give us scenes from the different markets of the city, a few portraits of well-known characters like Hackball, the King of the Beggars, Blind Daniel the Piper, with several drawings showing modes of transport, thus giving us a much better insight into life at the coal-face in the city than if he had adhered strictly to the medium. However, it has to be said that many of the personages presented are far too well- dressed and well-fed to accord with reality. In particular the beggarwoman (Plate 26) is a total contradiction of all that has been written about the state of degradation and nastiness which was the lot of such people. It may be that some of the subjects had advance notice that they were to be sketched and posed before Hamilton all dressed up in their Sunday best. The only barefooted subjects to be seen are the chimney sweep’s little boy (Plate 62) and the boys in Plates 13 and 17. Apart from four in red chalk, the drawings are in pen and ink, with an application of wash in greater or lesser degree to model form and shadow. There are here many little gems of composition (in particular Plates 4,9,12,34,36,47,50 and 57) which seem to capture a moment in time with all the immediacy of a Fr Brown photograph of the 1920s. Each plate is accompanied by a commentary, the joint work of Laffan and Rooney, and while they must be commended for the thoroughness with which they went about their task, there are times one feels when they tend to gild the lily over much. In further articles Laffan outlines Hamilton’s early career and presents a general analysis of his Cries; T C Barnard relates the plates to the local and national scene while Sean Shesgreen subjects the Cries to further analysis and classification and compares them with Cries from other cities (London, Paris, Waterford) and with later Dublin Cries. Appendices by Joseph McDonnell deal with the dark-blue goatskin binding of the album and its rococo frontispiece. This is a book which should find a ready sale among people with an interest in the social history of Dublin in the 18th century, as well as those whose interest is specifically in art. Patrick Fagan is the author of The Second City: Portrait of Dublin 1700 -1760 and of several other works concerned in the main with a reassessment of the Catholic experience in the 18th century in Ireland.   The Encyclopaedia of Ireland General Editor: Brian Lalor. Gill & Macmillan 2003 pp. 1,256 h/ b €65 £50 ills 700 most in col ISBN 0 7171 3000 2 John Mulcahy At last an Encyclopaedia of Ireland stretching to 1,256 clearly laid out pages, containing over one million words with 700 illustrations and more than 5,000, mostly brief, entries. Over the past six years, sixteen consultant editors, fifty consultant contributors and a ‘standing army’ of 950 writers, based in more that one hundred universities, have toiled to produce this massive work of reference. Without email, the project would probably have taken as long to compile as the Annals of the Four Masters (for which, see under Annals, page 33). For the general reader, this is a very useful book of reference and extremely good value at €65. It should do well at Christmas. That said, it should be understood that this Encyclopaedia is really closer to being a Dictionary of National Biography. Of the 5,000 entries mentioned above, at least 4,000 of them appear to be biographical ones. And perhaps more. Indeed in the Visual Arts category which contains about 200 entries, only half a dozen are not biographical. So how does this Encyclopaedia stand up to the test of being encyclopaedic? Well, the first complication is that the editors decided to include living persons as well as those gone to their eternal reward. And this decision has brought about some very strange choices indeed. To take, for instance, just the example of entries under the letter ‘C’. Here one finds such bizarre inclusions as Jack Charleton, Eamon Casey, Noelle Campbell-Sharpe and a Czech-born pianist who has been teaching music in Cork for many years. Would any of these be included in a second edition ten years hence? The real problem with including ‘living’ entries is that the personal connections, prejudices and preferences of the 950 contributing editors are bound to get through, however well intentioned. And they do. Mind you the dead too can cause controversy. Again under ‘C’ one comes across perhaps the most surprising entry in the entire volume which is for ‘Cahill, Martin, 1949-1994, criminal’ etc. Cahill’s entry, as a matter of interest, is longer that than allocated to artists George Campbell or Tom Carr and twice as long as that for Justice Mella Carroll. The Royal Irish Academy is engaged on the definitive Dictionary of National Biography which is due for publication in 2006. It will contain 9,000 entries all of whom are no longer in the land of the living. Until then, those interested in the subject can refer to Webb’s pioneering Dictionary of National Biography (1878), Crone’s Concise Dictionary of Irish Biography (1928) and Henry Boylan’s Dictionary of Irish Biography (1978). In the visual arts area there is, of course, Strickland’s A Dictionary of Irish Artists (1913) and Theo Snoddy’s excellent complement to that A Dictionary of Irish Artists 20th century (1996). And finally worth a mention is Women of Ireland by Kit and Cyril O’Ceirin ( 1996) and A Dictionary of Irish Writers by Anne Brady and Brian Cleeve (1985). But for the general reader, this new Encyclopaedia and dictionary of Irish biographies will be a most useful reference in an area that has been poorly served. John Mulcahy is the editor of the Irish Arts Review   Portrait Miniatures in National Trust Houses. Volume 1: Northern Ireland Richard Walker and Alastair Laing The National Trust, 2003 pp70 s/b £19.99 €29.00 ills 39 col and ills 160 b/w ISBN 0 7078 0343 8 Martyn Anglesea It is gratifying for us in Northern Ireland that we should be honoured with the first in this projected series of comprehensive catalogues of miniatures in over eighty National Trust properties throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland (not Scotland, which has its own National Trust). The reason may be that there are so few National Trust houses here that have collections of miniatures – just four in fact – Castle Ward (Co Down), Florence Court (Co Fermanagh), Mount Stewart (Co Down) and Springhill (Co Londonderry). I was surprised not to find Castle Coole on the list. Objects privately owned and on loan to the National Trust are included, such as those belonging to the Lady Mairi Bury on view at Mount Stewart. This slim paperback volume is handsome and handles nicely. It has a useful introduction, explaining the social function of miniatures, both personal and private, written by Dr Paul Caffrey of NCAD, who has made himself an authority on Irish miniature painting. They were commissioned as keepsakes, often worn or carried about the person, and sometimes containing a lock of the sitter’s hair. Miniatures come in various types. The Tudor and Stuart ones are usually painted on vellum (animal skin) in a technique derived from manuscript-illumination. ‘Virgin parchment’, taken from foetal calves, which had never borne hair, was greatly prized. Later miniatures are painted in watercolour on paper or on thin sheets of ivory. Care needs to be taken in handling these out of their frames, as ivory easily splits along the grain. Then there is the tedious process of miniature painting in enamel, which Nathaniel Hone practised. Like pottery glazes, enamel only achieves its intended colour when fired, and each colour has to be separately fired. These painters kept their kiln notes, and exasperating records can occur such as ‘failed 34th firing–written off’. Many of the 18th-century miniaturists were initially Dublin-trained, such as Nathaniel Hone, Frederick Buck and John Comerford. English practitioners like George Chinnery also worked for a time in Dublin. Chinnery influenced Comerford who in turn influenced Samuel Lover, of whom Paul Caffrey has made a special study. Each country house section has an introduction outlining the history of the house and the families who lived there. The entries on the individual portraits contain much delightful social chit-chat, recalling Vicary Gibbs’s gossipy comments in GEC’s Complete Peerage. For instance, in the Springhill section, the entry on William (‘Wims’) Lennox-Conyngham (1792-1858) gives a piece of useless information previously unknown to me. Apparently the Victorian fashion for beards resulted from the difficulty of shaving in camp in the Crimean War, and that Dundreary whiskers are named after a comic character in a play by Tom Taylor, Our American Cousin, published in 1858. In all, 151 items are catalogued: 32 from Castle Ward, 52 each from Florence Court and Mount Stewart, and 15 from Spring Hill. All are reproduced as small black and white illustrations at the top of the page above the entries. Some I find too small. A selection of 27 is reproduced in colour, some actual size but others slightly less. At the end of the book is a full bibliography and a terse but informative index of artists. Martyn Anglesea is the Keeper of Fine Art at the Ulster Museum.