Did Edward Glew’s painting of the colourful but notorious Donnybrook Fair borrow too much from Samuel Watson’s earlier study of the same subject? Brendan Rooney certainly thinks so
In 1870, the Irish artist, Edward Lees Glew (1817–70), published Life in Dublin or Donnybrook Fair in its Palmiest Days in Newark, New Jersey.¹ In this sixty-eight page book, Glew provides an entertaining, albeit selective, history of Dublin, a lengthy account of the development of Donnybrook Fair, and a detailed description of his painting of that subject and its reception in the United States. Glew’s style is anecdotal and also polemical, as the text is interspersed with various political comments and asides. It is not a manifesto, however, but essentially a vehicle for self-promotion, as the final self-congratulatory pages present reprints of positive American reviews of his own painting entitled Donnybrook Fair (Fig 1) which inspired the book. But what Glew fails to acknowledge is that his painting is, in fact, an embellishment of a work (Fig 3) completed nearly two decades earlier by his compatriot, Samuel Watson (1818–67)
The National Library of Ireland recently acquired an album of thirty-six watercolours and prints made by James Cavanah Murphy in Portugal between 1789 and 1790. Michael McCarthy recalls the career and travels of this unusual draughtsman
The Smurfit Art Collection spans three continents and contains some of the best 20th-century Irish art. Ciaran MacGonical reviews a new catalogue of the collection