Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland 1641-1770 Toby Barnard Yale University Press 2004 pp 352 h/b £30.00/ e43.80 ills 70 col/ills10 b/w ISBN 0 300 10309 3 Michael McCarthy In the introduction to this weighty tome we are told that its purpose is to flesh out the skeleton exhibited in the author’s previous books from the same publisher, A New Anatomy of Ireland: the Irish Protestants, 1649-1779, which is comparable in structure, though with even more notes to the text and fewer illustrations. The earlier volume differs also in that illustrations are grouped together in the centre of the volume and none is coloured. Their integration with the text in this volume make it seem less obviously academic in presentation. There are twenty illustrations in colour and sixty-eight uncoloured and unusually all are named as ‘Plates’ and numbered in undifferentiated sequence. Neither rhyme nor reason seem to have determined which illustrations are coloured and which not, a quirkiness apparent on pages 160 and 161 where Master O’Brien’s carefully chosen finery is in stark contrast to the colourful dress of Miss Dobbyn. Katherine Connolly’s cabinet merits colour but the Barbavilla lacquer cabinet ‘made by a Dublin joiner to incorporate imported painted panels’ is in black and white. Where the earlier volume deals in eleven chapters with people in their several stations in life and their ways of making a living in the Ireland of the heyday of the Protestant Ascendancy, this one deals with their possessions and their ways of spending their money with intent to maintain appearances at least and make a grand figure at best, in a similar number of chapters. A scan of the Abbreviations list that precedes each volume shows that the works of Strickland and Crookshank and the Knight of Glin for painting and of Loeber and McParland for architecture have been added to this volume. So too has Ingamell’s invaluable Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, a firm indication of the greater interest this volume will have for the art historian rather than the economic historian, though the author would subscribe to the current tendency to disregard the distinction between the two in favour of making both the study of consumption in the fixed political context. Ascendancy Ireland affords just such a laboratory specimen once the Catholic majority are assumed to have no history of consumerism because of their political exclusion. This is the most exhaustive analysis of the phenomenon that was Ascendancy Ireland that is possible from study of the documentation. This study is distinguished from others by its broad sweep, which encompasses the furniture and fittings of residences and estates and not merely the fine arts. Its quest is to establish the factors that contributed to status within Ascendancy society and since travel was an integral element of what the author terms ‘the English project for Ireland’ it merits a separate chapter, which surprisingly ends in Swanlinbar, Co. Cavan, after traversing Europe and England. There is no illustration unfortunately of the visitors to that spa ‘three in a bed’, nor of the tents that dispensed whiskey and cold meats, but two views of Killarney end the tenth chapter, ‘Going Abroad’, which follows the chapter titled ‘Dublin’. That is typical of the author’s problem in preventing the powerful centre of government and therefore of society from dominating his text and he fights the centripetal tendencies of his material manfully with documentation drawn from family archives around Ireland and in English deposits. Catholic archives like the exceptionally well-documented archive of the O’Conors of Belanagare have no place in the study, the borders of which are determined visually by the final illustrations, related to the Freemason and Protestant societies that erected the obelisk beside the Boyne to the victory of William of Orange. Within his chosen limitation however there are surprising omissions. It is gratifying to see attention given to prints within the chapter on pictures, but there is no recognition of the acknowledged superiority of the Dublin mezzotinters led by James McArdle over those of London in the mid-18th century, nor of the attractive output of Captain Baillie, published by Boydell later in the century. Thomas Wright is quoted in the text but only the note identifies him as the author of Louthiana (1746), the finest volume of engraved antiquities to be published in the century. One of the greatest travellers of the age is Richard Pococke, the first person to publish the antiquities of Athens and other archaeological sites in The Description of the East, in two volumes, 1743 and 1745, each illustrated with engravings of varying quality but of startling originality of content. He is quoted however only in connection with his travels in Ireland, and the leadership given by Protestant travellers from Ireland, from Bishop Berkeley to Robert Wood, in bringing knowledge of Egyptian and Hellenistic architecture to the west is ignored, though it is arguably the greatest achievement of Ascendancy Ireland in cultural terms. Every student of the period will find some such omission at which to protest no doubt, but all will be permanently indebted to the comprehensiveness and detail of this major contribution to the history of Ireland. Some overwriting is evident in, for instance, the comparison of the role of the Howard brothers to that of Cardinal Albani as middlemen for paintings. There is pitiful pedantry in spelling Celbridge with a double l, an affectation repeated in the author’s recent selection of essays published by Four Courts Press, Irish Protestant ascents and descents 1641-1770, a volume which usefully supplements the New Anatomy and the present work. There are occasional contradictions, notably the assertion in the caption to the print of Lohort Castle that it shows, ‘the extent to which even absentees reshaped the landscape’, while the text assures us that of nine proposed schemes for the planting of that estate none was executed (p.189). Such lapses are rare and Dr Barnard’s work will prove an indispensable point of reference for historians of every stripe in the future. Michael McCarthy is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin and author of Lord Charlemont and his Circle 2001   The Irish: A Photohistory Sean Sexton and Christine Kinealy Thames and Hudson 2002 pp224 h/b £24.95/ e36.50 ills 271 b/w ISBN 0 500 510970 John Mulcahy There are several unusual characteristics to this book which distinguish it from any run-of-the–mill illustrated book on the Irish. In the first place, all the photographs come from the private collection of Clareman Sean Sexton who acquired them at street markets in London before he qualified to bidding at Christie’s in King Street and Sotheby’s in Belgravia. Sexton’s collection of early Irish photographs now numbers close to 20,000, making him perhaps the largest private collector of this material in the world. Secondly, Sean Sexton has a very unreconstructed view of Irish history. He has no time whatsoever for the revisionists ‘white-washing, watering-down and rewriting Irish history’ and this explains his choice of Christine Kinealy to write the accompanying text. Kinealy, who is the author of The Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 pulls no punches in her narrative from the Union onwards. But it is left to Sexton himself to provide the detailed captions to the exceptional photographs and the late 19th-century photographers at work in Ireland such as Robert French, Francis Guy and Robert Banks. Sexton’s extraordinary career as a collector took off after he had one great stroke of luck when rummaging through the Bermondsey Street Market early one morning in 1981. By chance he came across a trunk full of photographs of turnips, carrots and parsnips by the renowned American photographer Charles Jones and he bought the lot for ‘a few hundred quid’. Each of these pictures now fetch Stg£6-7,000 when sold at auction and they made Sexton’s fortune. After that, there was no stopping the Irish émigré who could now afford to specialise in what interested him most, namely, early Irish photographs. The earliest Irish photographs date from 1839 just a year after Louis Daguerre announced to the world his discovery of the photographic process. In this volume, there are many Irish photos from the 1850s and the 1860s although some of the most vivid cover the terrible evictions of the 1870s and 1880s. Indeed many of these are so unusual and telling of their time that it seems a pity that the author did not concentrate entirely on the 19th century. No one volume can adequately present The Irish: A Photohistory and, once one moves into the 20th century, a lot of the ground has been well covered. Nevertheless, this is a unique collection of almost 300 unusual and early Irish photographs that are well deserving of attention. John Mulcahy is Editor of the Irish Arts Review.   Ireland’s Bridges Ronald Cox and Michael Gould Wolfhound Press 2004 pp 224 h/b e24.99 ills 54 col ills 220 b/w ISBN 0-86327-864-7 Peter Anthony This coffee-table format book, published by Wolfhound, charts the history of bridge construction in Ireland from earliest times to the present day. It is very well illustrated with copious photographs of what the authors stress is a representative sample only of the 30,000 bridges existing in the country. The early part of the book outlines the geography of the island of Ireland with its river and lake systems which gave rise to the need for bridges to link communities and provide essential elements of the transportation infrastructure to facilitate the development of commerce. The authors set out the historical procurement processes for bridge construction in the country from Norman times through the Highway Act of 1613 establishing Surveyors and Orderers, the subsequent Grand Jury system established in 1710, the Turnpike act of 1727 up to the Local Government Act of 1898 which established the local authority system we have today. The narrative in subsequent chapters provides the reader with technical descriptions of the various materials used in bridge construction at different times, structural types and methods of construction employed from the earliest stone clapper bridges to the best examples of bridge construction of today which includes the cable-stayed Taney bridge carrying the Luas light rail system in Dublin, the spectacular cable-stayed Boyne Bridge, and the sculptural James Joyce Bridge by the Spaniard Santiago Calatrava. The authors, while avoiding being too technical in their descriptions of bridge types, and thereby alienating a general audience, have included sufficient information to make the narrative credible and informative from an engineering perspective. The historic development of materials such as reinforced concrete is dealt with in a non technical but informative fashion. The copious illustrations provide a photographic record of the various bridge types together with some background information on the particular bridge history, type, designers and builders. However these excellent caption notes are sometimes let down by the poor quality and composition of the accompanying contemporary photographs. Infrastructural development affects and influences the social development of society and it is felt that an opportunity was missed to explore some of the sociological affects arising from the construction of these bridge links. In addition bridges are utilitarian objects conceived, designed and built by man and perhaps some background on the bridge builders themselves, even short biographical notes, would have added to the significance of the work. One is reminded of Ultan Cowley’s fine book, The Men who Built Britain, also published by Wolfhound, which provided a fascinating insight into the lives and travails of the Irish navvy working on developing the British infrastructure in previous centuries. This, perhaps, is the subject matter for a different book. On a slightly critical note the graphic design of the book and juxtaposition of photographs, captions and general text is somewhat confusing and detracts from the excellent and comprehensive content of what could otherwise be described as being a definitive book on the subject. Peter Anthony is Managing Partner of Horganlynch Consulting Engineers.   Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, Vol. VI Various authors, Editor: Nicola Figgis Irish Georgian Society 2003 pp240 fully illustrated e19.00 ISBN 0946846 979 Judith Hill The first thing to say is that this is an enormously enjoyable collection to read, as opposed to study; the personality of each essay is vivid, the texture of the whole is rich. Moving on: the scholarship is consistently reliable and careful. This is a standard that was set when the Irish Georgian Society’s Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, with its remit to cover post-medieval art and design, emerged in 1998 from its predecessor, the Quarterly Bulletin, with its orientation towards 18th-century architecture. The new journal reflects the significant growth in research into Irish architectural and design history in recent years. There is a wide range of subjects in this volume —early 18th-century wallpapers, Swift’s satires, Waterford glass, railway stations, Newman’s University Church, a kennel design for the Bishop of Derry by a young and hopeful John Soane—and an interesting focus in many essays on patronage— John Troy, the controversial Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Hugh Lane and the Gallery of Modern Art, and the Irish patrons of the Venetian pastelist, Rosalba Carriera — patronage being a focus for contemporary scholars interested in linking art and society. Most of the writers start with a newly discovered or recently exploited source, and contribute by filling a gap, giving a new angle or correcting an error. David Skinner throws light on the ornamentation of early 18th-century private apartments and on Dublin wallpaper production with a perceptive analysis of three scraps of wallpaper. Anna Moran, using the business records of the Waterford glassworks, first archived in the 1950s, and discussing them in the context of the early 19th-century economy, shows the importance of previously ignored plainer glass in the struggle of the company to maintain a share of a declining market. Michael Gould and Ronald Cox make a valuable inventory of George Wilkinson’s eclectic railway stations, focusing on a neglected building type and an ignored period in the work of a fairly well-researched architect. An analysis by Patricia McCarthy of a unique document instructing the household of the Duke of Leinster in rules and regulations significantly increases our understanding of domestic activity in the upper echelons of 18th-century society. The riskier approach, and one which offers the possibility of entering a new field, is to start with an idea. There is always the danger that the material will not oblige. This seemed as if it would be the case for Joseph McMinn in his study of Swift’s attitude to contemporary architecture, for Swift’s satires reveal that he had little interest in the form and aesthetics of the new classical buildings of early 18th-century Dublin, persisting instead in viewing them merely as symbolic of their function. However, McMinn turns Swift’s disinterest to good account by interpreting it, provocatively, as symptomatic of Irish inability to engage fully with Renaissance ideology at this date. Toby Barnard has started to open up the area of material culture in 18th-century Ireland. Here he investigates the neglected subject of collecting. Flexible in his approach, and prepared to ferret around for information, he has shown that this most material of subjects is an excellent conductor of 18th century values and ideas. Judith Hill is a writer and an architect.   Irish Historic Towns Atlas No. 13 Fethard Tadhg O’Keeffe Royal Irish Academy 2004 pp 24 e30.00 ills 5 col maps & 5 col plates 7 b/w maps & 7 b/w plates ISBN 0-9543855-7-8 Lynda Mulvin The Irish Historic Towns Atlas project was established in 1981 with the aim of recording the topographical development of certain towns, selected according to size, region and importance, in the Republic and in the North of Ireland. The project has an important European and comparative dimension as part of a European programme whereby town atlases containing similar information are available from a number of other European countries, thus allowing for the wider study of Irish towns in a European context. The maps are prepared in association with the Ordnance Survey of Ireland and the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland and each atlas, published as a Royal Irish Academy publication, is planned in accordance with a dedicated format and style established over time by a prestigious editorial board. All in all, therefore, the project has a first rate pedigree, and on the evidence of the latest town atlas in the Irish Historic Towns Atlas series, launched in February 2004 as Irish Historic Towns Atlas, no. 13, Fethard by Tadhg O’Keeffe, the fruits of its labours do not disappoint. In accordance with the series format, the Fethard atlas is published as a stand-alone large format fascicle containing historical, thematic and aerial maps together with historical photography and illustrations. It opens with an assessment of the historical, geographical and morphological development of the town, followed by a detailed section containing topographical information. Tadhg O’Keeffe is to be highly congratulated for drawing together from a wide range of sources every known detail of the town in this meticulous and fascinating study. The opening sentence refers us to ‘the small market town of Fethard’, which in no way prepares us for the great historic significance of this modest town. The first page of the study is illustrated with an elegant artist’s impression of the churchyard c. 1650, also by the author. The name Fíodh Áird —the high wood—suggests a wooded setting for the town of Fethard which despite some pre-historic activity in the area was founded in the main in the early 13th century as an Anglo-Norman town. Some early documents make reference to its status as a borough by 1208 under the chief tenancy of William de Braose. The church is the only building of this period to survive and its transverse arches vaulting the aisles suggest a building of some significance. Fethard passed from the Crown to the Archbishops of Cashel in 1215 and remained part of the archiepiscopal estates until the 16th century. The history of the town walls, which are 1.1 km in length and enclose 7.5 hectares, begins with a royal provision in 1292. Land was similarly endowed to the Augustinian friars in 1305 for the construction of the friary outside the town walls. Most important in this particular study is the detailed examination by the author of the underlying structure of the town including the burgage plots of the town. Mr O’Keeffe through detailed survey work has determined that the town was planned in one campaign and that it is similar in scale to Cashel in the 13th century. During the following centuries Fethard endured a period of prosperity, and this is reflected in the architecture including the addition of a west tower to the Augustinian Friary. The Friary was dissolved in the middle of the 16th century, following which the existing historical layout underwent a period of development including the growth of an extra-mural settlement that had become part of the greater town by the mid-17th century. Notable family patronage also recurs as an interesting theme in the town. According to the historical documentary sources, the Everard family was present from the 1300s and their involvement in the town’s affairs was most notable during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, ending ultimately with the sale of their estates to Thomas Barton in 1757. Barton made improvements to the town that were noted by Bishop Richard Pococke in his Irish Tours in 1758. The town experienced further growth and development in the 18th and 19th centuries when it become a garrison town and later when the Waterford and Limerick railway line was extended to Fethard. The relative isolation of Fethard means that the historic town has remained fairly intact, which is good news for the visitor. The fascinating historical geography of the town, now available and accessible in the form of the atlas, should be a ready encouragement and a valuable resource for interested visitors and travellers who in the words of Pococke will find a ‘small walled town’. The atlas is of high quality and large format, and is carefully laid-out with precise headings acting as signposts for the researcher and visitor alike. The only hesitation one might have is that its very fine production and quality may be spoiled by the elements, but fortunately the project team has thought of everything—there is even a plastic sleeve for its protection. A must! Dr Lynda Mulvin is a lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at University College, Dublin.   Sean Scully David Carrier Thames & Hudson 2004 pp224 h/b£42.00/ e61.00 ills 205 col and ills 9 b/w ISBN 0500 093121 Peter Murray A handsome book, published by Thames and Hudson, this monograph on the painter Sean Scully gives both an intimate feel for the artist as a person and also a detailed appraisal of his work. In the first chapter author David Carrier provides a biography, tracing the painter’s early years in Dublin, then his schooling and art education in London, followed by periods in New York and other cities. In the following two sections of the book, Carrier analyses Scully’s development as an artist. The fourth section is devoted to an interview, or conversation, between the artist and Kevin Power. However, throughout the book, Scully’s own voice is strong, with quotations by the artist interspersed within the text. This is in marked contrast to the first twelve pages of the book, which contain no text whatever, being reserved for a compelling photo essay charting the making of a painting in the artist’s studio. Commencing with a large white canvas—with Scully’s trademark cutout in the lower center—hanging on the wall, the photographer follows the artist as he deliberates, paints, scrapes out and over-paints. Scully’s paintings are built up in layers, with the colour of the final paint layer being subtly modified by the underlying colours. Unperturbed by the camera, Scully, dressed in white overalls, is shown first sketching out a series of rectangular shapes on the canvas, which is then transferred to the floor. After the first stage of painting takes place, the canvas is transferred back to the vertical, where the artist continues applying layer upon layer of paint, building up that rich visceral surface for which he is famous. Scully’s paintings derive from his experiences. Born in Dublin in 1945, at the age of three he was brought by his parents to London. The shock of landing in working-class London was softened by his attending a local Catholic convent school, but after a disagreement between his parents and the priest, he was enrolled in a state school. The cultural collisions he experienced in these years remain at the heart of his paintings, which balance the emotional and fragile against the harsh impersonality of the grid. After a somewhat turbulent youth, Scully enrolled at Croyden School of Art, and then at Newcastle. Seeking to measure himself against the great Abstract Expressionists, he then moved in 1975 to New York, but arrived as that great movement was tailing off. In large measure, his achievement as an artist has been to revitalise that tradition, and give it a new lease of life, in an international context. In marked contrast to Francis Bacon who lived in London in the fifties and sixties and repudiated his Irish background, Scully, who now maintains studios in New York, Barcelona and London, asserts his Irish roots with confidence, gauging perhaps it to be an advantage rather than an impediment to maintaining success in the contemporary international mainstream. From his days of brawling in London nightclubs, he is now the recipient of honorary doctorates and fellowships. Although working within the framework of geometric abstraction, Scully is a subtle painter. Typically, in the photo essay at the beginning of this book, the canvas he is painting at first sight appears square, but is in fact slightly rectangular. The centre cutout section is also slightly offset. What appears at first sight to be mechanistic is activated by subtle variations and quirks. This is what separates Scully’s painting, and more recently sculpture—notably the new work at the University of Limerick—from artists who explore the Modernist grid, or who have taken on the mantle of Abstract Expressionism. Few if any artists have managed to bring to this well-travelled area of art practice anything like the consistent originality of Scully. It has been David Carrier’s good luck to follow, and write knowledgeably about, Scully’s art over the past twenty years. He freely admits that Scully remains a hero in his eyes, and as freely admits that this both aids and hampers his attempts to place the artist in the context of late 20th- century art and to reach objective conclusions regarding his work. It was always going to be a difficulty, but by stating his position at the outset, he at least displays the same honesty of approach that characterises the artist he writes about. The book is large format and over two hundred pages long, with superb colour illustrations. Clearly a labour of love, it will arouse the ire of those who believe that the grand old European tradition of painting is passé, and will probably inspire a new generation of young painters to set themselves the challenge in life of carrying on this tradition. Peter Murray is Curator of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork.   The Decorated Bindings in Marsh’s Library, Dublin Mirjam Foot Ashgate 2004 pp 152 h/b £40.00/ e58.40 ills 8 col and ills 52 b/w Joseph McDonnell Marsh’s Library is to be congratulated for the prompt publication of a book devoted to its bookbindings, unlike the Chester Beatty library, which has still not produced Anthony Hobson’s catalogue of its holdings of European bindings, including some very important Irish examples. Compared to the riches of the Chester Beatty, Marsh’s collection of fine bindings is more modest, though it was known to contain some rarities, such as the early gold-tooled English binding from the library of King Henry VIII, which was published by that inspirational and generous scholar, the late Howard Nixon, of the British Library. The author of the work under review, Mirjam Foot, has published extensively on bookbinding history, though this is her first published work dealing with an Irish library. The book is divided into five chapters with a useful introduction on the history of bookbinding. The first three chapters are devoted to bindings from Britain, Ireland, and France, respectively, while the remaining two are given over to examples from Spain, Italy, Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany. The chapter on Irish bindings is, regrettably, a disappointment, especially in the discussion of the binders responsible for covers of the manuscript Journals of the Irish Parliament, the finest series of bookbindings in the world before their destruction in the bombing of the Four Courts in 1922. Dr Maurice Craig had, with exemplary clarity, set out in his book, Irish Bookbinding 1600-1800, the different characteristics and tools of the main work-shops which produced the finest bindings of the parliamentary journals. The two most important craftsmen he called Parliamentary Binders A and B. Parliamentary Binder A, according to Dr Craig, was responsible for binding the Journals during the 1740s, not from 1697 as stated by Dr Foot. The highly improbable claim that Parliamentary Binder A was active as late as the mid-1760s, is made, citing as an example of his work the vellum binding of Watson’s Compleat Memorandum Book for the Year 1764, illustrated in Craig’s monograph (plate 39). Dr Craig has singled out Parliamentary Binder B, who followed Parliamentary Binder A in about 1749, as the most innovative binder of the 18th century with his dazzling technique, which he termed ‘featherwork’. Other binders tried to copy his technique with varying degrees of success, such as the binder Craig termed the ‘Rawdon Binder’. Dr Foot now confusingly calls him Parliamentary Binder Bc. [sic] and reproduces in colour (plate V), as an example, the binding of an Abstract of the Bylaws… of the Royal Hospital, Dublin, Dublin, George Faulkner 1752 (Craig pl. 30). Unfortunately the author has not backed up her arguments by reproducing any of the tools she alludes to in the text. Let us hope that Dr Foot’s long-awaited catalogue of the late Lord Iveagh’s unigue collection of bindings, now on short-term deposit at Farmleigh, will be speedily published and that it will throw more light on the subject of Irish bookbindings. Dr Joseph McDonnell lectures in the Department of the History of Art at University College, Dublin and is currently completing a book on the destroyed 18th-century Irish Parliamentary bindings.