‘England had conquered Ireland, so there was nothing for it but to come over and conquer England,’
G B Shaw

In this typically confrontational statement said to his friend the actress Lillah McCarthy (later Lady Keeble),1 George Bernard Shaw sums up the rationale behind an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, that runs from March to June 2005. Entitled ‘Conquering England: Ireland in Victorian London’ and curated by Fintan Cullen and Roy Foster, the exhibition highlights the achievements of Irish migrants to London in the Victorian period. By the time Bernard Partidge drew his delightful watercolour of Shaw (Fig 5) during a rehearsal of the playwright’s first great theatrical success, Arms and the Man (performed at the Avenue Theatre, London, in April 1894), W B Yeats was of the rather envious opinion that the play made his Irish rival ‘the most formidable man in modern letters’.

The aim of the exhibition and the accompanying book is to explore the diversity of the Irish in London and their influence in metropolitan arts, theatre, journalism (something of an Irish monopoly) and politics, where the ‘Irish Question’ dominated late-Victorian parliaments. The exhibition focuses on three groups: writers, politicians and visual artists while the objects assembled come from a wide range of collections in Britain, Ireland and America and although portraits predominate, the exhibition contains sculpture, paintings, drawings, engravings, photographs, theatre posters and programmes and book covers as well as manuscripts by such writers as W B Yeats and Oscar Wilde.

The key visual attractions of the exhibition include portraits of Yeats, Wilde and Shaw as well as such political figures such as Daniel O’Connell, Isaac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell and works by such London-based Irish artists as Daniel Maclise, John Henry Foley and John Lavery. Subject images also feature such as the large oil on canvas (Fig 6) by Robert George Kelly entitled An Ejectment in Ireland (A Tear and a Prayer for Ireland), which is being borrowed from a private collection in the United States. Kelly’s painting has not been shown in London since its first exhibition at the British Institution in 1853 where it aroused concern among the establishment regarding Irish political pictures on display in the metropolis. As such the painting was, according to Walter Strickland, the authoritative author of A Dictionary of Irish Artists, ‘actually discussed in the House of Commons’.2 Hansard has not revealed any such discussion. But the painting was reviewed in the pages of the Illustrated London News,3 where it was criticised both for its ‘vulgar’ subject matter and its artistic deficiencies, but the armed police restraining the farmer who has tried to defend his home, while a priest calls on heaven as witness, makes a powerful political point.
In focusing on the 19th century ‘Conquering England’ stresses the fact that under the Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1800) the two countries were engaged in a relationship that was quarrelsome, contentious, and in many ways inter-dependent. Exploitative as the connection between the countries often was, it also provided a wider arena for certain ambitions, in literature, politics and in the arts. Irish talent was exported to London in the 19th century; by the turn of the 20th, it was being imported back, with interest, to an Ireland undergoing political radicalisation and cultural renaissance.

The reign of Victoria demarcates a convenient period in which to explore the contentious and contradictory relationship that existed between the two islands of Britain and Ireland. As well as being an era that consolidated the union of parliaments, it also witnessed the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland, and saw the Parnellite Irish Parliamentary Party come to hold the balance of power at Westminster in the mid-1880s. More tangibly, during this period London became the metropolis of the empire and the mecca to which all subjects were drawn. Irish politicians were obliged to attend Westminster, but the city also attracted Irish artists, writers, playwrights, actors, journalists and those seeking advancement in a wide range of human endeavour. The exhibition explores the cultural and political diversity of the Irish in London. The focus is on the visual representation of the Irish and as such it throws light for example, on the hitherto unacknowledged presence of a group of Irish women models in the London art world between the 1850s and the end of the century. By including a print such a Weary (Fig 4) by James McNeill Whistler of his mistress and muse, Joanna Hiffernan, who was born around 1843 in Ireland, and met Whistler in 1860, the exhibition enlarges our understanding of the integration and involvement of the Irish in all aspects of London life.

Hiffernan is well known in art historical literature as the model for such well-known works as Symphony in White, No. 1, The White Girl of 1862 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and Tate’s Symphony in White, No. 2, Little White Girl of 1864 (Royal Academy 1865). In Weary, an etching of 1863, Whistler represents Hiffernan resting, her famous ‘copper-coloured hair’ spread out across the back of the armchair. Hiffernan has been much discussed in the Whistler literature as the most exciting of his mistresses/muses.4 To the Pennells, early biographers of Whistler in 1908, ‘Joe’, as she is frequently called, is described as ‘Irish, Roman Catholic–a woman of next to no education, but of keen intelligence’.5 Her hair inspired, we are told, not only the American artist, who claimed that it was ‘like everything Venetian one had dreamed of’, but also his friend Gustave Courbet, who in 1865 was to paint her at least four times as La Belle Irlandaise. In Courbet’s composition, Hiffernan admires herself in a hand mirror and combs her tresses with her hand.6 In a letter of 1863, George Du Maurier, then a caricaturist and in time the author of Trilby (1894), the story of a half-Irish Parisian model, described Hiffernan as ‘fiery’ and wrote of how she was the cause of fierce jealousy on the part of Whistler.7 As Elizabeth Prettejohn has carefully argued, later accounts of Whistler, right up to the large exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1994, have maintained this caricature of the Irish model as a racy, ‘effervescent personality’.8 The fact that Whistler portrays her in Weary as a relaxed and detached individual is rarely commented upon. Instead, in keeping with the tenor of a century of observation on Hiffernan’s relationship with the male artist, the 1994 Tate Gallery catalogue goes so far as to say that, in the etching Weary, ‘with her beauty, the glossy texture of her dress and hair, she was voluptuous and tempting, a Danaë newly awakened’.9 In opposition to that viewpoint, it could be argued that what is happening here is that Hiffernan, an Irish woman posing in Whistler’s Chelsea studio, is participating in a modernist experiment that tested the boundaries between portraiture and subject scenes.

The exhibition, ‘Conquering England’ also highlights the London reaction to such events as the year-long hearings of the Special Commission on Parnellism and Crime in 1888-9 as sketched by Sydney Prior Hall (Figs 2& 3). In these drawings we see Oscar Wilde attending the hearings in Probate Court Number 1 at the Royal Courts of Justice on London’s Strand. The Commission was set up to investigate alleged connections between Charles Stewart Parnell and crime. The allegations were eventually dropped and Parnell was cleared. Sydney Prior Hall, one of the leading illustrators of the period, was commissioned by The Graphic, a leading illustrated London journal, to supply images for the year-long proceedings and a surprising cross-section of elite society went to the Strand to hear the cross-examinations. Hall’s drawing of Wilde’s profiled head with his flowing hair and fur-lined collar appeared a few days later in The Graphic (16 February 1889) in the centre of a long column describing the testimony of a government spy. Wilde himself does not feature in the text; he is but an element of a larger design.

The high-focus self-promotion of figures such as Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats and George Bernard Shaw features through a range of images produced for public consumption by either London-based photographers or through the pages of illustrated magazines such as The Graphic, The Tatler or The Sketch. At the very end of the period, with the Celtic craze and events such as the new Abbey Theatre’s visits to London, Ireland had become ‘fashionable’; it is at this point too that the focus of Irish cultural effort shifted back to Dublin, providing a logical closure.

In covering the period from the 1830s to the turn of the century, the exhibition moves from art through politics to literature and drama, while establishing cross-connections between these various worlds. The Irish were prominent in other spheres also, notably medicine and the law: in 1894 an Irish-born Catholic, Charles Russell, became Lord Chief Justice of England after an immensely distinguished career at the bar, combined with a political life spent supporting Home Rule at Westminster. But the worlds of the visual arts, politics, literature (both popular and highbrow) and the stage retain the most vivid impression of Irish influence in Victoria’s reign. At the same time, in exploring the presence of the Irish in London, this exhibition is not limited to artists of Irish origin. Some came to London from Ireland, such as: Daniel Maclise and John Henry Foley, as well as John Lavery, John Butler Yeats and lesser known figures such as John Doyle and Althea Gyles. Others like Ford Madox Brown, Sydney Prior Hall, Julia Margaret Cameron and Aubrey Beardsley, were English, yet were interested in representing Irish people and events at the heart of empire. And others were neither Irish nor English: James McNeill Whistler was American, while George Morosini, who produced a spirited crayon drawing of Lady Wilde (Oscar’s mother), was Italian (Fig 7). Unlike Whistler’s portrayal of his mistress Joanna Hiffernan in Weary the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Ford Madox Brown’s representation of the Irish in London (Fig 1) is focused on anonymous sitters whom he went searching for on the streets of the city. A diary entry for 1857 tells us that Brown, ‘went into Gray’s Inn Lane to look for Irish people & after some prowling about found a poor woman & baby in Holborn who next day brought me a young man & [in] six days I painted these 3 into the picture pretty satisfactorily although I can scarce make sure of what I am about as yet.’10

Painted in the artist’s London home in Kentish Town as he prepared for his more famous Work (1852?-65; Manchester City Galleries), The Irish Girl is an intense study of a London experience which Brown exhibited in 1860. Brown had observed an orange seller ‘from the sister isle’, as his first biographer, Ford Madox Hueffer, was to write years later but in the studio changed her to a girl holding a cornflower, a symbol of celibacy and delicacy.11 As John Lavery’s 1890 painting of yet another Irish Girl demonstrates (Fig 8), street sellers would continue until the end of the century as an acceptable trope for representing Irishwomen in London. The irony here is that the sitter, whom Lavery met when she was a flowergirl on Regent Street and later married, turned out to be most probably Welsh!12

In enlarging our choice of images when discussing the representation of Ireland, Fintan Cullen and Roy Foster have amassed a wide range of visual material which moves from objects exhibited at the highly respectable Royal Academy of Arts in London or the more progressive Grosvenor Gallery, founded in 1877, to pages from popular magazines, book illustrations, and theatre posters—ephemera which convey in retrospect a vital moment of cultural history. The final aim of the exhibition is to indicate the variety, achievement and impact of these artists in Victorian London.

Fintan Cullen is Professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham.

‘Conquering England’: Ireland in Victorian London by Fintan Cullen and R F Foster, foreword by Fiona Shaw is published to accompany an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 9 March–19 June 2005.

1 Quoted in Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, Vol. I, 1856-1898: The Search for Love; (Chatto and Windus, London, 1988), p. 60.
2 Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 vols. (Maunsel & Co., Dublin and London, 1913), vol.1, p. 573.
3 Illustrated London News, 26 February 1853.
4 Jill Berk Jimenez (ed.), Dictionary of Artists’ Models (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London and Chicago, 2001), pp. 275-8; Margaret F MacDonald, Susan Grace Galassi, and Aileen Ribeiro, with Patricia de Montfort, Whistler, Women, and Fashion (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003), pp. 76-91.
5 E R and J Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols. (London and Philadelphia, 1908), vol. 1, pp. 94-5.
6 The reference to Venetian hair is in Richard Dorment and Margaret F MacDonald et al, James McNeill Whistler (Tate Gallery, London, 1994), p. 74; for Courbet’s various paintings of Hiffernan, see Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1988), pp. 162-6.
7 Daphne Du Maurier (ed.), The Young George Du Maurier. A Selection of His Letters, 1860-67 (Peter Davies, London, 1951), p. 219.
8 Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Locked in the Myth,’ Art History, 19: 2, 1996, p.303, quoting Dorment et al., 1994, p. 75.
9 Dorment et al, 1994, p. 83.
10 Virginia Surtees (ed.), The Diary of Ford Madox Brown (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1981), p. 194, entry for 16 March 1857.
11 Ford M Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1896), 1896, p. 168; see also Fintan Cullen, Visual Politics. The Representation of Ireland 1750-1930 (Cork University Press, Cork, 1997), p. 140.
12 John Lavery, The Life of a Painter (Cassell & Co., Ltd., London, 1940), p. 66.