George Petrie: The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past Crawford Municipal/Gandon Editions, Cork & Kinsale, 2004 pp240, large format oblong p/b ills 24 col €20.00 ISBN:0948037105 Readability: 5 Reference Use: 4 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of Plates: 5 If you are at all interested in Ireland’s cultural history, then this is one book that should be on your bookshelves. It’s a first class catalogue, admirably researched, which gives a proper focus to one of the major figures of the 19th century: George Petrie. The man was a polymath. Not only was he a major landscape painter (and illustrator) but he collected folk airs – Tom Moore and Edward Bunting benefited – co-edited the Dublin Penny Journal, co-founded the Irish Archaeological Society, was librarian and eventually President of the RHA, played a major part in the Irish Ordnance Survey, steered the Irish Royal Academy from amateur antiquarianism to a scholarly sensibility and as if that wasn’t enough studied Ireland’s ancient architecture. Along with John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry, and especially in relation to the Survey, he was basically responsible for ensuring that the remains of Ireland’s native culture were saved for posterity. Much mischievous political capital has been quarried from the Survey, most notably in Brian Friel’s Translations, a great play but massively malicious in its utterly unhistorical depiction of the Survey. When I pointed this out many years ago in Fortnight, Friel claimed that he had inflicted only ‘a tiny bruise on history’ but anyone who has read J H Andrews magisterial book on the topic, or who reads this current volume, will have difficulty in endorsing Friel’s culturally manipulative claim. The Crawford’s Peter Murray writes the bulk of this book. He devotes substantial chapters to the Petrie of the Royal Irish Academy, and the Petrie of the survey but the heart of the book is contained in the elegantly written and researched sections on Petrie’s involvement with engravers and publishers andthe catalogue of paintings and drawings. There is a fine introduction by Joep Leerssen, a very useful essay ‘Towards a National Art’ by Tom Dunne and even an indexed (though un-numbered) list of illustrations. Hopefully the authors might think about doing similar volumes of O’Donovan and O’Curry. In a word: superb. Mark O’Neill: Chapters Frederick Gallery, Dublin, 2004 p/b, pp.48 ill71 col. Large octavo size. No ISBN Readability: 4 Reference Use: 2 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of Plates: 4 O’Neill is a young painter (b. 1963 to Irish parents), who produces still lifes, and various sequences of interior and exterior genre paintings: gardens, race-days, room interiors, and interiors of galleries depicting members of the public observing art. There’s a one-page intro, what seem to be good colour reproductionss, though no CV, list of illustrations or ISBN number. Attractively produced. Ceremonies The Hunt Museum 2004 (CDROM encased in small printed folder) Printed catalogue € 5.00 Readability: 4 Reference Use: 2 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of Plates: 2 This is an excellent idea. Basically it’s a forty-two-page catalogue (42 images, mainly in colour, with brief commentary on each) transferred to CD Rom. According to the folder, these are primarily works from private collections and span the period 1890-1950. Properly produced CDROMs are a boon as one can enlarge any section of the image and see the actual quality of the brushstrokes. This one, although one can enlarge the images, will not enable you to see fine detail, as it simply resolves down to pixels. The colour registration is very variable. On the two machines that I tried with this disc, there was a marked difference in quality between the 1930 painting Now or Never on the disc, and its reproduction on the folder. The printed version was vastly superior, especially in the registration of the reds. A list of illustrations would have helped. Colin Davidson: No Continuing City Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, 2004 36pp, p/b square format 25 ill col stg£5.00 ISBN:0 900903 95 3 Readability: 4 Reference Use: 4 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of Plates: 4 Attractively produced catalogue which gives a list of the plates (though it is not paginated). Contains a one-page CV, a brief biography from Martyn Anglesea and an equally brief notice by Amanda Croft. The oils as well as some pen-and-ink sketches are all bird’s eye views of Belfast. This is the first catalogue to celebrate Caldwell’s splendid new gallery on the Lisburn Road, Belfast. Jack B Yeats: Master of Marc Quinn: Flesh IMMA 2004 pp 21 ill s22b/w folio format h/b E35.00 ISBN: 1-903811-32-5 Readability: 5 Reference Use: 4 Design & Durability: 4 Quality of Plates: 5 This is a stylish publication. It’s almost an artist’s book with 23 folio-sized plates on heavyweight paper (unpaginated), and 22 interleaved pages of text on lightweight paper, all of which are half the size of the plates. Quinn is one of the BritArt success stories, a sculptor who, on this occasion, makes his work by cutting up hunks of meat, assembling them, and casting them in bronze. The result is remarkably like Rodin, though the three well-written essays, bound out of sequence, by Darien Leader, Susie Orbach, and Rachel Thomas, are keen to stress his contemporary street-cred. Excellent CV and bibliography, though no list of illustrations which, combined with the lack of pagination for the plates and the misbinding of the text, makes reference use less than it should be for an otherwise admirable volume. Brian McAvera is a playwright and art critic.