Patrick Tuohy: From Conversations With His Friends Patrick J Murphy Townhouse 2004 pp 206 h/b €30 fully illustrated ISBN 1-86059-228-7 Brian Lynch Patrick Tuohy (1894-1930) was born with a deformed left hand. In his schooldays he wore a wooden glove. How he later hid the deformity is not explained here. In fact, if we are to believe the evidence of a remarkably ominous work, Self-Portrait with Two Girlfriends, Tuohy painted with the deformed hand. One way or another, the disability weighed upon the artist and seems to have become a focal point for the manic depression that culminated in his suicide in New York at the age of thirty-six. Bipolar disorders have long been associated with creativity. What is curious about Tuohy’s case is how little evidence for instability there is in his work. Between the extremities of depression and disinhibition his art maintains a studied calm. But there is a fevered air to the stillness, and it is this underlying sense of over-concentration, allied to prodigious natural gifts (he had Ingres-like skills as a draughtsman) and his timorous, perhaps self-protective, submission to the academic standards of his time, that places him in the front rank of Irish artists. He was a visionary realist, sustained and crushed by the everyday ideal. Sean O’Casey, who commissioned Tuohy to do his portrait, wrote of the experience of sitting for him that ‘life was too much of a battle to give thought to one cowering before it; and the timid pencil in the quavering hand forced scorn into the fighter’s mind.’ Lady Gregory told O’Casey, ‘Tuohy has made you look like a butcher.’ But no more insightful and incisive likeness exists of that bloody-minded pacifist. Tuohy also painted other portraits (James Joyce’s father for instance) that are of lasting value. Less convincing are the religious pictures, which are sometimes tinged with a Nazarene insipidity, perhaps because faith moves whereas Tuohy’s true instincts were faithless and static. On the other hand he was capable of painting haunting group portraits, moments of dramatic immobility, full of foreboding, after the psychological manner, though not the style, of Sickert. While Tuohy had a genius for the character of genius–Austin Clarke refused to sit for him because he considered his realism ‘too brutally honest’ –his own character remains as nebulous as his family history was remarkable. His father, born dirt-poor in Mayo, rose to become a successful doctor in Dublin, with a Georgian house in North Frederick Street. He was also a fervent nationalist, sending his son in 1908 to Padraic Pearse’s then newly founded St Enda’s. Not surprisingly, Pearse exerted a profound influence on his young pupil. It is, however, astonishing to learn that both Tuohys took part in the 1916 Rising in the GPO. Patrick Murphy’s book is itself indicative of a revolution in the study and appreciation of Irish art. Much of it is based on conversations the author had with relatives and friends of Tuohy in the late 1960s, but personal circumstances (an intensive business career, much of it abroad), the indifference of publishers and what Hilary Pyle believed, correctly, was ‘little enough interest’ in the artist, have delayed its appearance until now. The book is invaluable on two counts. First, it includes a detailed record of 243 works by Tuohy, which establishes the basis of a future catalogue raisonné and a proper retrospective exhibition. Secondly, it presents us with an outline of a tragic life which is of colossal significance in Irish art and social history–but it is only an outline. A full-scale biography is vital to our understanding of both the man and his work. In this age of prosperity there surely must be some person, or some institution, willing to ensure that what Pat Murphy has started is brought to fruition. In the interim this book provides food for thought and delight for the eye. Brian Lynch compiled and edited Tony O’Malley (Scolar Press 1996) a third edition of which has recently been published by New Island Books. He is a member of Aosdána.    O’Riordan Staehli Architects Gandon Editions 2003 pp108 p/b e20.00 ills 108 col/ills 192b/w ISBN 0946846 987 Work: McCullough Mulvin Architects Anne Street Press and Gandon Editions, 2004 pp144 p/b fully-illustrated e20.00 ISBN 0946846 251 Gemma Tipton Two books to have joined Gandon’s growing library on architectural practice are Work: McCullough Mulvin Architects (published in association with Anne Street Press), and O’Riordan Staehli Architects. Both practices have contributed a share to the fabric of life here. Working primarily in the south and west, ORSA have created schools, university buildings, hospitals and office buildings, an intriguing planned visitor centre for the Cliffs of Moher, as well as private houses. McCullough Mulvin’s projects include art galleries (Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Gallery 2 at the Douglas Hyde), libraries, county halls, a monastery, and private houses and apartments. Both books are well-illustrated, and include floor plans and elevations, as well as notes on the context and rationale of the buildings. The introduction to Work also features little sketches, accompanying Raymund Ryan’s introductory essay. These are the preliminary scribbles that give you a sense of how buildings take their shape in the mind of an architect. But perhaps this is where one of the problems of documenting and discussing architecture lies. Where architecture differs from art it is in its practical purpose and function, and it is interesting to see the developing convention that most models are created with models of people in them, but completed spaces tend to be photographed, like installation art, empty. Floor plans can be difficult for those outside of the profession to decipher fully, while scale and space are experiential, and impossible to adequately depict on the two dimensional plane of the page. In an age of Bilbao Guggenheims, and coffee table books on architecture, what succeeds are buildings whose internal and external shapes function as a two-dimensional photograph. The Milwaukee Art Museum extension (Santiago Calatrava) and the Disney Concert Hall (Frank Gehry) are coffee table architecture; functioning more effectively in a book than in practice. Meanwhile, the extremely successful concourse area of Dun Laoghaire County Hall (McCullough Mulvin) for example, translates less well to the page, as its clever flexibilities, and the absolute appropriateness of the sense of space and scale are missed. Understanding questions of architecture are as fundamental as understanding questions of how we want to live. The work of O’Riordan Staehli and McCullough Mulvin Architects provide a hopeful note that we can all aspire to live and work in architecture rather than in mere buildings, while the dedication of Gandon Press in continuing to promote this vital area of the arts underlines how much we should continue to consider what it is we want from architecture, how it affects us, and how, by becoming more informed, we can influence its development in the future. Gemma Tipton is a writer on art and architecture based in Dublin. She is editor of Contexts and of the forthcoming book Architecture For Art.    The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision Virgina Teehan and Elizabeth Wincott Heckett (eds.) Cork University Press 2004 pp 288 h/b €59.00/ £39.00 Fully illustrated in colour ISBN 185918 346 8 Joseph McBrinn In 1914 the Dublin lawyer Sir John O’Connell was entrusted with overseeing a bequest to University College, Cork, by a local benefactor, Isabella Honan. The result was the Honan Chapel which today occupies a central place in discussions of the Celtic Revival as it embodies many of its ideals–social, political and aesthetic. Three publications have so far chronicled the chapel’s history, first of all by O’Connell himself, and later by Rev. Patrick Power and Michael J Kelly, and although running into several editions these are today no longer in print. This new book, edited by Virgina Teehan and Elizabeth Wincott Heckett, brings to life again this remarkable building and collection. Based on the papers delivered at the ‘Craftsman’s Honoured Hand’ conference organised by UCC in 2000, it also includes an introduction by Mairéad Dunlevy, an inventory, and up-to-date bibliographies. Sir John O’Connell’s original idea was to create a building with a harmonious exterior and interior, which would clearly reflect an indigenous Irish culture; past and present. He turned to James McMullan, a local architect, and their design is a complete embodiment of the Ruskinian ideal of simple and sincere craftsmanship. For inspiration O’Connell turned to the works of Ireland’s distinguished antiquarians, such as Margaret Stokes and George Coffey, and even consulted Belfast lawyer, antiquarian and Celtic Revival patron, F J Bigger. O’Connell wrote to Bigger in 1914 that his choice of Romanesque was to reflect a distinctly Munster heritage (based on prototypes such as St Cronan’s Church, Roscrea and Cormac’s Chapel, Cashel), but he wanted ‘to do more’. And more he did in the internal decoration which is a rare example in Ireland of a complete commission in the tradition of the European Gesamtkunstwerk. The list of O’Connell’s designers reads like a role-call of the major figures of the period, including Oliver Sheppard, William Scott, Edmond Johnston, Harry Clarke, Evelyn Gleeson, Sarah Purser and Percy Oswald Reeves; also present are important Cork names such as John Lees, John Sisk and William Egan. It is thus not surprising to learn that O’Connell was an active member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. Only the opus sectile and mosaic floor were imported from Oppenheimer in Manchester. In 1914 Sarah Purser’s stained glass studio An Túr Gloine looked set to win the entire commission of nineteen windows. From An Túr, Alfred Child, Catherine O’Brien and Ethel Rhind completed eight windows but following O’Connell’s introduction to Harry Clarke in 1915, the remaining eleven were completed by Clarke alone. Here Clarke’s genuine stylistic and technical innovation was first seen. His glowing and mysterious Symbolism, his antiquarian researches and Byzantine style overwhelmed O’Connell. In her essay Nicola Gordon Bowe chronicles Clarke’s rich sources, his deeply spiritual colours, especially in his masterpiece the St Gobnait window which recalls Chartres and Ravenna, Renaissance portraiture, Kandinsky and the Vienna Secessionists. Clarke’s vigorous craftsmanship, which Bowe illuminates through Ruskin’s quip that windows should be ‘serene, intense, brilliant like flaming jewellery’, was in perfect harmony with O’Connell’s ideals. Particularly revealing are Mairéad Dunlevy and Paul Larmour’s contextual essays although no connection is made to the similar Rundbogenstil chapel designed by Cardinal Newman and John Hungerford Pollen in 1856 for Dublin’s Catholic University. The chapters by Peter Lamb, especially the section on furniture, and Jane Hawkes on the iconography of the mosaic floor, provide new fresh insights. The mosaic floor’s symbolic ‘hymn to creation’ is carefully elucidated by Hawkes, who highlights the use of the ‘Benedicite Omnia Opera’, a beloved theme of many Arts and Crafts artists. This is an exemplary publication and the authors, editors and publishers are to be congratulated, and it is also a timely publication as 2004/5 sees the reassessment of the Arts and Crafts Movement in two international exhibitions. This book is an exemplar to further studies and highlights what needs to be done to rescue Ireland’s rich heritage of Celtic Revival buildings and artefacts from their current ignominy. Joseph McBrinn is a Lecturer in Design History at the School of Art and Design, the University of Ulster, Belfast.    Irish Art Historical Studies in Honour of Peter Harbison Edited by Colum Hourihane Index of Christian Art, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University in association with Four Courts Press 2004 pp352 h/b €55.00 fully-illustrated ISBN 1-85182-847-8 Conleth Manning Peter Harbison is well known in Ireland and abroad as an archaeologist and author of many books and articles mainly on Irish medieval art and sculpture. His great achievement is his three-volume encyclopaedic work on Irish high crosses, while his Guide to the National Monuments of Ireland, first published in 1970 and still in print in a revised form, remains indispensable. I own three copies of the older edition of the Guide, one of which I keep in the car, one in the office and one at home. Through the Guide and through his other writings Peter has been a great populariser of the subject as well as being a thought-provoking and inquisitive scholar. For all of this and his truly prodigious output of publications, this fine volume, produced in his honour, is well deserved. The preface consists mostly of Peter’s own account of his career and achievements, almost a ‘confession’ in early medieval style such as that of St Patrick. It makes interesting reading and is characterised by Peter’s infectious enthusiasm, even when talking about himself. The book contains thirteen written contributions ranging from prehistory up to the 19th century as well as a number of illustrations contributed by Louis le Brocquy and Imogen Stuart. The first contribution, by Otto-Herman Frey, formerly professor at Marburg, is the only one on the prehistoric period and serves as a reminder that Peter’s doctorate, awarded by the University of Marburg, and his early publications were on the Bronze Age. Frey’s paper is an important study of the Celtic gods and how they were depicted. The second paper, by Lawrence Nees, on early medieval texts, glosses and illustrations, brings us into the historic period, where Peter’s research has been firmly rooted for many years. This is followed by four important studies on early medieval metalwork: Niamh Whitfield discusses in detail how penannular and pseudo-penannular brooches, such as the Tara Brooch, were worn, while Michael Ryan, Paul Mullarkey and Griffin Murray discuss the Loughan Brooch, the Soiscéal Molaise book shrine and the St Lachtin’s arm reliquary respectively. Considering Peter’s great contribution to the study of the high crosses, it is disappointing to find only one paper on the subject, Heather King’s on the excavation of a cross at Ballymore Eustace. This is followed by Roger Stalley’s fine reappraisal of Corcomroe Cistercian Abbey and Patrick Wallace’s account of the restoration of Ballyportry tower house, both in Co Clare, with which Peter has many connections. The collaborative article by Mary Cahill, Aideen Ireland and Raghnall Ó Floinn on the Belfast collector, James Carruthers reflects Peter’s great interest in recent years in the work of antiquarians such as Gabriel Beranger and Austin Cooper. Rose, a daughter of James, made fine drawings of antiquities in the collection of her father and his friends and put them together as an album, now in the National Museum. This album is particularly important because many of these objects were not otherwise recorded and cannot now be traced. Margaret McEnchroe Williams describes the importance of Dublin’s Industrial Exhibition of 1853, which included two high crosses and casts of others. The final contribution, by Alan Borg, describes the career of Theodore Jacobsen, an English gentleman architect, who designed the West Front of Trinity College, Dublin. This is a fine production, clearly printed and well illustrated, and a must for anyone interested in the history of Irish art, especially that of the medieval period. Conleth Manning is an archaeologist with the National Monuments Service and is currently president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.    Philip II of Spain: patron of the arts Rosemarie Mulcahy Dublin: Four Courts 2004 pp 352 h/b e65.00 ills 16 col ISBN 1-85182-773-0 Terence O’Reilly Although the essays gathered in this book have been written for various occasions and over several years, one’s impression on reading it is of their unity. Their common focus is the artistic projects patronised by Philip II, in which Dr Mulcahy finds ‘the beginnings of picture collecting in the modern sense’. In the time of his ancestors, Ferdinand and Isabella, the works of art held by the Crown formed part of the royal tesoro or ‘treasure’, but his acquisitions paved the way for the picture gallery, which became common in the century following. They also made possible the magnificent collections of his grandson, Philip IV, which nowadays form the core of the Prado Museum in Madrid. The works of art that Philip owned reached him by several routes, which Dr Mulcahy carefully describes. Some he inherited from his forbears, including religious paintings of the Flemish School, to which he was much attached. Others he chose himself, and either obtained (among them, works by Hieronymus Bosch) or arranged to have copied (for instance, van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb). A number were presented to him as diplomatic gifts, including the wonderful Christ Crucified by Benvenuto Cellini. Many, finally, he commissioned himself, especially those required in the Escorial, whose construction filled most of his reign (and which several of these essays discuss). Considered as a whole, Philip’s collecting reveals how widely his interests ranged, from natural history and topography to mythology and theology. It also indicates the nature of his artistic tastes, which were formed, as Dr Mulcahy points out, at an early stage, during his travels in Europe as a prince. It was then that he met Titian, whose paintings he was to admire for the rest of his life, though it took him time to appreciate fully the Venetian’s innovatory techniques. Like other patrons of the period, he enjoyed the company of artists and took a lively interest in their work, but more important to him than the art object itself was its function, and therefore its location and use. The collection in El Pardo, for example, which Dr Mulcahy describes as ‘one of the earliest and best documented portrait galleries’ in Europe, was assembled, first and foremost, with political ends in mind, while the religious works in the Escorial belonged to an iconographic scheme shaped by the liturgy, and were intended, like the sacred drama itself, to inspire prayer. The essays are graced throughout by the author’s style, which conveys a warm interest in people and a judicious appreciation of individual works of art. These qualities are particularly to the fore in the chapter on one of Philip’s favourite artists, the deaf mute Juan Fernández de Navarrete, whose career she lovingly reconstructs, drawing attention to his Abraham and the three angels (National Gallery of Ireland) which first sparked her interest in his work. There are occasional misprints in the text, but the book has been handsomely produced, in collaboration with the Patrimonio Nacional, and it contains over 140 reproductions in black and white, thoughtfully placed at apposite points, as well as 16 plates of fine quality. Terence O’Reilly is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Hispanic Studies, University College Cork.    The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650-1750 Muriel McCarthy and Ann Simmons (eds.) Four Courts Press: Dublin 2004 pp 288 h/b €55.00 ills 8 b/w ISBN 1-85182-730-7 Michael Brown In 2001, Marsh’s Public Library in Dublin was 300 years old. The first public library in the country, its significance is celebrated in this volume, which derives from a three-day conference held that year. The collection highlights the significance of the library in four distinct ways. First, it details, in essays by Michael Hunter, Raymond Gillespie and the introduction by the current librarian, Muriel McCarthy, the personality and the pugnacious perseverance of its founder. Narcissus Marsh (1638-1713), successively archbishop of Cashel (1690), Dublin (1694) and Armagh (1703) was a political defender of the Church of Ireland, an active member of the international republic of letters and a devout Protestant. It was his ambition to found a library providing facilities for ‘all graduates and gentlemen,’ holding the highest achievements in theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and beyond (p.146). Although the personality of the founder is a central theme in this book, it is more than a eulogy of Marsh. A number of essays take a second vantage point to survey the library. The essays by David Hayton, Edward McParland, Ruth Whelan and Toby Barnard assess the library as an institution, a working, vibrant centre of scholarship and reflection, and of gossip and tittle-tattle too. Hayton, in recounting the passage of the bill of foundation through the Irish parliament, observes how the idea of the library got entangled in the petty obsessions and personal interests of the period’s politics. In contrast, McParland views the library as a building, tucked snugly beside St Patrick’s Cathedral and echoing in miniature some of the architectural conceits of Marsh’s Oxford college, Exeter. Whelan explores the mentality of the first librarian, the Huguenot refugee, Élie Bouhéreau, who brought to the office European contacts, and a sideways view of his adopted Anglicanism. Barnard then situates Marsh’s within the development of libraries in the British Isles, from private collections to public foundations, and as part of the public sphere in Ireland’s capital. A third vista this fine collection offers is of the library as a warehouse of learned tomes collected for scrutiny. Thus, Stuart Clark, Thomas O’Connor, Andrew Carpenter and William Horbury offer overviews of some of the more esoteric elements of Marsh’s holdings; a project which is complemented by Colin Wakefield survey of Marsh’s bequest of Oriental manuscripts to Oxford University. The purpose of these endeavours is–as Clark makes clear in his offering on witchcraft books–to provide a context for the collection in which it contents ‘cease to be surprising’ (p.115). This involves the reconstruction of the mindset that brought these books together on Marsh’s imposing shelves, and Clark’s essay, treating of the debates about demons and magic, is a model of this type. It is complemented by the intriguing tension between the holdings of Roman Catholic writing studied by O’Connor and the sectarian attitudes displayed in the writings of the period examined by Carpenter. As O’Connor makes plain, Catholic theology, apologetics and history were not merely collected so that Protestant clergy could refute the arguments of their enemy. Rather, shared concerns occasionally drew the two confessions together, as when confronted by the Presbyterians of Ulster. Horsbury unveils similar complexities in his reflections on Christian attitudes towards Jewish scholarship, for while much effort went into producing weapons of theological controversy Christian writers also appreciated and used the learning of the Judaic tradition in encountering scripture. This raises the final perspective within the book; the pragmatic use of Marsh’s holdings in the period of its construction and early operation. In complementary mediations, Justin Champion and JGA Pocock explore how these books were used–and abused–by their scholarly readers. Marsh’s was the product of a late form of Christian scholasticism where the citation of authorities was considered sufficient in defending orthodoxy. Yet, as both Champion and Pocock recognise, that world was coming to a close. Readers soon reneged upon this intellectual legacy, renounced the authority of elders and undermined the scholarship gathered in places like Marsh’s. In short, this collection is greater than the sum of its already impressive parts. While it highlights and celebrates Marsh’s Public Library, an undervalued gem in Dublin’s cultural firmament, it raises the stakes considerably higher than that. The editors have been brave and wise in delimiting the project to the period before 1750. By doing so they have allowed their formidable team of contributors to debate the development of the public sphere, the public function of scholarship and the very nature of the pursuit of learning . Michael Brown is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies, Trinity College, Dublin. The author of Francis Hutcheson in Dublin (2002), he is currently writing a study of the Irish Enlightenment.     The Burren and the Aran Islands: exploring the archaeology Carleton Jones The Collins Press Cork 2004 pp268 h/b €35.00 ills 240 ISBN 1-903464-61-7 Paul Gosling If the title of this book resonates it is because it is one of a growing series of texts in which the heritage of north Clare is linked to that archipelago of islands which straddle Galway Bay. One thinks of P M McCarthy’s Lichens of the Burren Hills and the Aran Islands (1988) and C E Nelson’s Wild Plants of the Burren and Aran Islands (1999), the latter also bearing The Collins Press imprint. At a deeper level, it also reminds us that just because these two corners of Ireland are divided by modern county and provincial boundaries, their essential characters are very simliar: indeed they are akin to that of non-identical twins. From their geology (limestone, karst) and climate (atlantic, maritime) to their culture (rural, pen-insular) and archaeology (use of stone, degree of preservation) they display connections that go way beyond the narrow limits of written history. It is to the realm of physical remains that Dr Carleton Jones, a professional archaeologist and lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the National University of Ireland, addresses himself. The book’s layout is generous and pleasing to the eye: the clearly drawn maps, wide margins and copious illustrations immediately spark one’s interest. Organisationally, it is divided into two parts in which details are given of circa sixty ‘key sites’ in the Burren and the Aran Islands. Amongst these, the entries on the Neolithic monuments at Poulnabrone Dolmen and at Roughan Hill (near Corrofin) are particularly fascinating for the details they provide of archaeological excavations at these places over the past twenty years. Indeed, it is in the summaries of archaeological excavations in general, be it at Dún Aonghasa on Inis Mór, or at Cahercommaun near Carron, that the book’s greatest strength lies. Many of these sites have not been fully published and even for those that have, the reader is presented with high quality photographs of the actual excavations. The entries on individual monuments are complimented by the occasional single-page ‘panel features’ dealing with specific themes, and by a series of introductory essays in which the sites are assessed against their wider chronological and cultural backgrounds. While this approach works reasonably well, the essays tend to be specific either to the Burren or the Aran Islands, e.g. ‘The First Farmers on the Burren’ versus ‘The Colonisation and Early Settlement of the Aran Islands’. Given that the whole logic behind the book is the close parallels between the Burren and Aran, these essays would surely have been more insightful if they had presented the story of the human settlement as a continuum. As with most books of this genre, one is often tempted to dive straight off into the body of the text, returning only later to practical considerations such as to how to find your way to individual sites. Unfortunately, this information is hidden away in the introduction. If the concise ‘panel features’ are relevant for explaining various aspects of the archaeology, they are surely also relevant for illuminating the time periods in Ireland’s past, what maps to use with the guide, and how to plot map co-ordinates. Minor gripes apart, this is a handsome book. But it is also quite heavy for its square format (244 by 244 mm) which makes the hardback version an easier read as well as a better value buy. Such mundane considerations are important for this is designed to be a book for the active traveller. However, travellers of the armchair variety need not despair, as there are almost as many illustrations as there are pages, many of them previously unpublished and in full colour. Paul Gosling is an archaeologist and lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Galway, where he co-ordinates the Diploma and BA programmes in Heritage Studies.   William Scott Norbert Lynton Thames & Hudson 2004 pp 500 h/b £40.00/ e57.00 ills 400 col/ills 100 b/w Catherine Marshall The Irish, like the Scots, like to claim William Scott as their own. He was, of course, born in Scotland in 1913, to a Scottish mother and an Irish father, but taken to Ulster when he was only a year old. And there he remained until he went to the Royal College in London in 1931. He always acknowledged a debt of gratitude to Kathleen Bridle, his first art teacher in Enniskillen, but apart from that and a six month period in Dublin in 1940, a commission to paint murals for Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry, and a couple of exhibitions in Dublin and Belfast, Scott seems to have had little or no contact either with this country or Scotland. He can hardly be blamed for turning his back on Ireland; it was not exactly a hot bed of the avant garde in visual terms and his mural for Derry was badly received and badly looked after, but he did request that his body be brought back to Enniskillen for burial. Despite Irish claims, Scott spent his working life in England joining another renegade, Irishman, Francis Bacon, to become the most important painters in Britain during the middle of the twentieth century. On page 42 of his new Thames and Hudson book on Scott, Norbert Lynton quotes the artist describing himself as the ‘English watercolour nationalist romantic patriotic, isolationist self-preservationist movement.’ The description is ironic; Scott had good reason to resist identification with all of the movements in British art that he ridiculed in that comment. When he made that remark he was more in tune with new movements in France than with anything happening in Britain and he remained, throughout his life, opposed to any attempt to force his painting into a political or narrative straightjacket. Scott’s interest in Bonnard and classical painting from the Continent is well documented, but was out of tune with the England he went to in 1931. The dramatic effect of his first encounter with the work of Picasso and Matisse in London in 1945/6 and even more so, the impact of American Abstract Expressionism on his development are also well known, but thanks to Norbert Lynton’s close acquaintance with Scott and with his work over many decades, these influences can now be fitted into a background of wider influences such as Piero della Francesca’s Baptism in the National Gallery, Cycladic sculpture, English Neo-Classical drawing and the paintings of Alfred Wallis. Lynton is an outstanding person to fit Scott into these different contexts, thanks to his knowledge of Modernism, his long acquaintance with the artist, and his familiarity with the artworld in Britain. His appraisal of the situation facing abstract artists in 1950s Britain is particularly worthwhile. It’s good for us in Ireland to be reminded that attitudes to the avant garde in Britain were no different to those here, and that Alfred Munnings’ dismissal of Picasso was not dissimilar to Sean Keating’s contempt for Rosc some time later. This reader was disappointed that the erotic material, a hugely important, though private part of the artist’s output was treated only from a formalist point of view and not informed by feminist or gender theory. Since some of it is accompanied by poetry, a new discovery for many people, that disappointment is all the greater. Much of the discussion in the book takes the form of description, and there is useful discussion of Scott in relation to contemporaries but no images of work by those contemporaries to prove the point. That is a serious omission although compensation in the form of luscious images of Scott’s work is hard to argue with and the book is full of these. Lynton argues that Scott saw himself, not as English but as Celtic although there is little evidence in the work to back up this preference and Scott himself must have been gratified with James Johnson Sweeney’s comment in 1953, ‘at last England has a painter’. Whatever Scott’s attitudes to Englishness or Irishness he has been a very important figure here. Ann Crookshank appealed to local patriotism to have Scott’s Brown Still Life bought by the Ulster Museum in 1959 and having done that, established a precedent for buying contemporary art for the collection there. With the publication of this book, so large and so heavy that it can only be read sitting at a desk, Scott may have initiated another important precedent. No Irish artist, not even Sean Scully has yet attracted such a status symbol. Given Scott’s place in Irish art maybe his influence will be significant in this regard too.n Catherine Marshall is Head of Collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.