Peter Murray examines the shifts in fortune surrounding the magnificent suite of paintings by the Guardi brothers brought to Ireland by the Earl of Bantry
Of all the treasures amassed by Richard White, 2nd Earl of Berehaven, the series of eight paintings illustrating Torquato Tasso’s poem La Gerusalemme Liberata, were undoubtedly the most precious. The work of Giovanni Antonio Guardi (1698-1760) and his younger brother Francesco (1712-1793), these paintings were displayed in the family’s magnificent house overlooking Bantry Bay for a century and a half. Today they are scattered across the globe, in museums in the United States, Canada, Britain, Denmark and Italy. A magnificent series of eight large canvases, the Guardis were brought to Cork in the 1820s, and, framed with elaborate gilt leather decorative borders, were mounted on the ceiling of a large drawing room at Bantry House. In her Rambles in the South of Ireland During the Year 1838, Henrietta Chatterton records her visit to the house, describing the interior as ‘quite a curiosity’: ‘The walls, stair-case, and bedrooms, are all covered with tapestry – even the ceilings of the staircases and passages. Some of it is very good, especially that in the drawing-room, which once adorned the palace of the Tuileries. The rooms abound with objects of virt√∫, and the ceilings of some are covered with paintings which formed the plafond of a palace at Venice. Most of the doors are covered with that stamped and gilt leather which was formerly so extensively used to decorate the palaces of Spain.’
What is it about the work of the Irish sculptor Eilís O’Connell that has led to her having created, in this most difficult and masculine medium, over thirty permanent site-specific installations in Britain and Europe, including the sensual, orchid-like Unfurl (Fig 1), a bronze commissioned by Kensington Borough Council and the residents of Kensington Gate, to celebrate the Millennium?
O’Connell subtly combines a number of different elements that give her work both a sense of physical vitality and poetic metaphor. It is monumental yet intimate, atavistic yet contemporary. From discarded agricultural tools to birds’ nests and whale bones she appropriates the quotidian and the natural to create dynamic forms in stone, steel, resin, plaster and bronze. Like her poetic compatriot, Seamus Heaney, O’Connell looks to the archaeology and topography of her Irish homeland for inspiration but the ideas she finds there are filtered through a considered relationship to architecture and geometry. The work is never soft: emotion is always tempered by intellect and painstaking technique to combine something of the muscularity of Richard Serra with the female sensibility of Barbara Hepworth. Science and mathematics meet the natural world within her organic and biomorphic forms. Inside and outside coalesce. In the layered and slippery space of contemporary culture she has created objects that generate a unifying narrative and suggest a philosophy of interdependence rather than of confrontation, an openness and desire for contact and inclusivity, rather than a brittle postmodern autonomy, which unapologetically recalls the timeless resonances of Brancusi.
Anne Hodge and Peter Harbison examine the visual evidence of Daniel O’Connell’s unusual conditions of imprisonment in the Richmond Bridewell, Dublin
Ursula Burke, Emma Donaldson and Deirdre McKenna explore the mutable topic of time at the F E McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge. Claire Dalton looks at their responses