An Exhibition of 17th - 20th Century Irish Paintings

Transcription

G O RRY G ALLERY
‘On Seeing Mulvany’s Battle of Aughrim’ by Anne Weber (Great Grandniece of the Artist)
The very word ‘Aughrim’, like ‘Custer’, carries with it current connotations as well as historical ones. I know the facts of the Battle of
Aughrim, but I lack the deep emotional connection of the native born Irish to her history. Nevertheless, I reacted strongly.
The little shop was dark, narrow and crowded. There was a three-foot path through the jumble of tables, statuary, baskets and antiques.
The walls were covered with paintings, hung salon style, in every technique imaginable, nothing newer than the 1940s. We, my brother, the photographer and I, stopped just inside the door while the owner moved through the maze to turn on a light switch, somewhere in the back of the shop.
Once the small ceiling light was on, we walked forward, single file. The painting hung mid-way into the shop on the right hand wall in
a narrow, plain frame labeled ‘John Mulvany c. 1839-1906’. This could be bad, I thought. Was it the original? I asked myself. I immediately
looked to the right hand corner. And there it was, Uncle John’s signature. I had a million questions but I couldn’t say a word. I tried to step
back to take in the entire image and bumped into my brother. Both of us were silent. To actually see this painting, to know it was our uncle’s, to
know what he had gone through to paint it, what his hopes had been for it, to know what had happened to those hopes and his career, was incredibly
bittersweet. My eyes filled with tears.
INDEX OF ARTISTS
Page
Page
Bradley, Basil .........................................................23, 24, 25
Kavanagh, Joseph Malachy .............................................19
Burton, Frederick William ................................................27
Lawless, Matthew James .....................................16, 17, 18
Collins, Charles ...........................................................10, 11
Luttrell, Edward.................................................................21
Colvill, Helen ....................................................................30
Marquis, James Richard....................................................28
Danby, James Francis .......................................................22
McCloy, Samuel ................................................................26
Faulkner, John .............................................................19, 29
Mulvany, John...................................................................2-7
Hayes, Edwin ..............................................................22, 31
O’Connor, James Arthur ......................................12, 13, 14
Helmick, Howard ...............................................................8
O’Kelly, Aloysius ..............................................................30
Hone, Horace ....................................................................21
Topham, Francis William..................................................26
Hone, Nathaniel ..........................................................20, 21
Watkins, Bartolomew Colles ...........................................29
Inglis, J. Johnston ..............................................................15
The owner opened the curtains at the front of the shop and more light seeped in. I stepped
close again to look at the brush strokes. I marveled at the loose layering of subtle color in the foreground.
My eyes followed the compositional elements to the center where one stroke of color held the plane, defined the form and marked the middle space. He knew what he was doing; he was a good painter;
this is in good shape. I hope Niamh agrees.
I began to ask my questions. Mulvany’s commitment to the painting, and the cost he paid,
were all there in the journey the painting had taken since it left his easel – from great praise in Ireland to being found in a storage shed of a consignment dealer somewhere north of San Francisco, one hundred and twenty-five years later.
We are grateful to the following for their kind assistance in the preparation of this catalogue:
Christopher Ashe
Gillian Buckley
Dr. Paul Caffrey
Claudia Kinmonth M.A. (R.C.A.) PhD
William Laffan
Susan Mulhall
Prof. Niamh O’Sullivan
Colin Rafferty
F. GlennThompson
Anne Weber
Joe Woods
GORRY GALLERY LTD., 20 MOLESWORTH STREET, DUBLIN 2. TELEPHONE and FAX 679 5319
The Gallery is open Monday - Friday 11.30 a.m. - 5.30 p.m.
COvER:
JOHN MULvANY C. 1839 - 1906 (DETAIL)
CATALOgUE NUMbER 11
© GORRY GALLERY LTD.
Saturday (during Exhibition only) 11.30 a.m. - 2.30 p.m.
www.gorrygallery.ie
Origination and Printing by Colorman (Ireland) Ltd.
GORRY GALLERY
requests the pleasure of your company at the private view of
An Exhibition of 17th - 20th
Century Irish Paintings
Please note change of date
on Sunday 5th December 2010
Wine 3 o’clock
This exhibition can be viewed prior to the opening by appointment also
Wednesday 1st - Friday 3rd December 11:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.
and Saturday 4th December 2 - 5 p.m.
and at
www.gorrygallery.ie
Kindly note that all paintings in this exhibition are for sale from 3.00 p.m.
5th December - 18th December 2010
11. JOhn MuLvAnY c. 1839 - 1906
‘Battle of Aughrim’
Oil on canvas 88.6 x 198.1cm
Signed and Dated 1885
PROVENANCE: Nathan Brothers, Tailors, 201-204 Colorado Blvd., Denver, Co. (1914); San Francisco, 2010.
EXHIBITED: Paris, 1885; Dublin, 1 July 1885; Hospe’s Art Store, Omaha, January 1887; Bazaar for St Vincent’s
Foundlings Home, Exposition Building, Chicago; Loeser’s Art Gallery, Brooklyn, July 1909.
ENGRAVED: Goupil, Paris, 1885, as The Cavalry Fight at Urachree, 12 July 1691.
LITERATURE: Courier-Journal, 28 July 1883; “Aughrim” A Superb Picture of the Terrible Cavalry Fight at the Pass of Urachree
at the Opening of the Famous Battle of Aughrim on Sunday, July 12, 1691, Painted by John Mulvany; Freeman’s Journal, 30 June
1885; Irish Times, 1 July 1885; Freeman’s Journal, 11 July 1885; United Ireland 11 July 1885; The Nation, 8 August 1885;
Chicago Current, 22 August 1885, p. 125; Brooklyn Eagle, 23 August 1885; Boston Pilot; undated and unidentified
newspaper cutting, Alice Garvey Collection; Chicago Citizen 1885; Dublin University Review, August 1885; Dublin
University Review, September 1885; Omaha Sunday Bee, 9 January 1887; The Nation, 15 January 1887; ‘Nutshell
Biograms’, Irish Monthly, vol 5, 1887, p.110 ; United Ireland, 14 February 1891; Thomas Tuite, Gaelic American, 3 April
1909, 10 April 1909; New York Sun, 23 May 1906; Anne Weber-Scobie, The Life and Work of Irish-American Artist John
Mulvany (1839-1906) (Binghamton, NY: 1993); Shane Hegarty, Irish Times, 2 October 2010; Niamh O’Sullivan, Irish
Times, 2 October, 2010; Conor O’Clery, www.globalpost.com/dispatch/.../battle-of-aughrim-john-mulvany
Forget not the field where they perish’d,
The truest, the last of the brave
All gone - and the bright hope we cherish’d
Gone with them, and quench’d in their grave!
Thomas Moore
This Flintlock Pistol, traditionally believed by the family to have been carried by Captain Brian McMahon at
the Battle of Aughrim, 12th July, 1691 (On loan from the County Museum, Dundalk)
2
Bee, 30 November 1890)
F
ollowing a series of disastrous defeats, notably at the
Boyne, Lieut.-General St Ruth, commander of the
Jacobite forces regrouped 20,000 men on the Hill of
Aughrim in Co. Galway. On 12 July 1691, Godert de
Ginkel, commander of the Williamite forces, came
through the Pass at Urraghry, intent on finishing off the
army of King James. But the Jacobites put up a valiant
fight and, briefly, it looked as if they might win. The
moment was short-lived, but is perpetuated for future
generations in Mulvany’s Battle of Aughrim.1
During the Civil War, he knew Generals Sheridan,
Custer, Logan and Meagher, and painted many
monumental works such as Sheridan’s Ride from
Winchester, McPherson and Revenge and the Battle of
Atlanta. Following the war, he enrolled at the Academy
in Munich in 1869, where he was awarded the medal of
honour. He then went to Antwerp, Paris, Amsterdam and
The Hague. Finally, he visited Ireland to work on his
scheme to produce a pictorial Irish history. Confident
that he would find patrons in the US, he returned there
with the material for a series, which was to include such
landmarks in Irish history as The Siege of Athlone and The
Battle of Benburb. While visiting friends, the contents of
his studio went up in the great Chicago fire in 1871. Left
with the clothes on his back, he went west. From 1872 to
1883, he painted western American subjects. In 1876, he
came to critical attention with The Preliminary Trial of a
Horsethief – A Scene from a Western Court, exhibited at the
National Academy of Design.
In 1885, Mulvany brought the huge cavalry fight back to
life. Hear the strike and clash of swords and bayonets;
the neighing and snorting of horses; the crackling and
sparking of flintlock and musket; the blare and whirr of
trumpets and hautboys; the grunts and roars of men;
and the weeping and wailing of women and children
who paced the periphery of the battle field.
Contemporary descriptions include harrowing accounts
of terrain slippy with blood, and the screams and moans
of thousands of wounded soldiers, as they begged and
prayed to be taken out of their agony. What possessed an
artist in the late nineteenth century to paint such a scene?
But his breakthrough at a national level in the United
States came in 1876 with General Custer’s defeat on the
Little Big Horn by Sioux warriors. In the immediate
aftermath of the historic battle, Mulvany travelled to
Montana and embarked on the epochal painting, Custer’s
Last Rally (1881) – some seventeen years later, it was still
on the move around America, drawing the crowds and
making Mulvany a fortune. Other Western subject
pictures by Mulvany include Lynch Law, Back to the
Wigwam, Scouts of the Yellowstone and Perils of the Pony
Express. In addition, Mulvany had an extensive and
prestigious portrait practice, including General T.F.
Meagher, Brigham Young, Robert Emmet and Sitting Bull.
Following the ravages of the Great Irish Famine, in 1851,
John Mulvany emigrated from Moynalty, Co. Meath, as
a child stowaway to the US, where he worked on the
canals. Not surprisingly, his early Irish experiences had
shaped his political sensibility. According to The Gaelic
American (6 March 1909), Mulvany was ‘of an
imaginative and inquiring mind, his teacher’s favourite
… they both loved Ireland and hated the Sassenach.’
Master Rogers travelled the country searching for
monuments and traditions redolent of Ireland’s past.
Indeed, according to Thomas Tuite, Mulvany’s erstwhile
biographer, ‘the repeated beating back of the combined
English, Dutch and Danish cavalry at the Pass of
Urachree by the magnificent Irish horsemen under St
Ruth ‘was a theme upon which [Master Rogers] grew
eloquent’; erudite, passionate and zealous, his teacher
held forth on Owen Roe O’Neill, Father Murphy and the
Emmets. (Gaelic American, 6 March 1909) All of this,
Mulvany took with him to America.
Following the remarkable success of Custer’s Last Rally,
Mulvany was at the peak of his artistic powers. When
the Irish-American Club in Chicago wished to decorate
their new rooms with Irish pictures, one of the committee
was deputed to scour Boston, Philadelphia, New York,
Baltimore and Washington, but returned empty-handed.
They sought Mulvany’s advice. He explained that the
wealthy Irish had little time for national art, nationalists
could not afford to buy art, and painters could not live by
ideals alone. It was at this point that Mulvany began to
turn his attention once again to Ireland and the study of
the momentous battle that finally settled the Williamite
Wars.
In America, according to The Nation (15 January 1887)
‘he became an infant phenomenon as a colourist… and
was soon earning thousands of dollars a month’.
Notwithstanding the hyperbole of late nineteenth
century art criticism, the reviews of his work bordered
on the ecstatic. His years at the front during the Civil War
would suggest that he was physically adventurous.
Professor John Mulvany (as he was known) was,
according to the many newspaper reports of the day,
charming and witty, erudite and an excellent linguist. He
was known as more than an occasional ladies’ man, with
‘an army of admiring and devoted friends.’ (Omaha Daily
WHY AUGHRIM?
The myth of Aughrim is largely built on the randomness
of the Jacobite defeat – the decapitation of St Ruth – as
one stray cannon ball consigns Ireland to another two
hundred years of subjugation. As if to emphasize this,
the decapitation of the British soldier in Mulvany’s
painting signals, in its one-on-one combat, the valour of
3
the Diaspora, Mulvany was able to reach international
audiences.
the Irish by comparison with the contingency of the
British victory. From near triumph, to resounding defeat,
the story of Aughrim was subsequently reclaimed in
Irish cultural memory as an enduring symbol of
entitlement, a site for future resurgence.
THE WAR
In the conflict between the Protestant William of Orange
and the Catholic James 11, the crown of England,
Scotland and Ireland was at stake, as part of the wider
European wars of the seventeenth century: James was
supported by Catholic Jacobites in Ireland and France,
William was supported by English, Scottish, Dutch,
Danish, French Huguenots and Ulster Protestants; the
Dutch Republic was at war with France, and the Stuarts
were allies of the Catholic Louis X1V.
When James’ wife gave birth to a son in 1688, the
prospect of an enduring Catholic Stuart dynasty
impelled Parliament to issue an invitation to William of
Orange to take the throne with his wife, Mary, daughter
of James. The Catholics of Ireland were prepared to fight
for James in the hope of regaining political and religious
lands and freedoms. Although there was no love
between them, James looked to Ireland to regain his
kingdoms and landed in Kinsale in 1689. Louis X1V sent
Lieut.-General St Ruth to Ireland with officers, troops
and supplies. William needed to quell the Jacobite
opposition in Ireland to secure British dominance and the
Protestant Settlement whose power was based on land
ownership.
Mulvany’s painting is an audacious revanche. In a
striking pre-figuration, he depicts a Williamite officer in
the centre of the picture being beheaded by his Jacobite
opponent, who wrenches the battered royal cavalry
standard from his dying enemy, and holds it victoriously
(albeit prematurely) aloft. Mulvany thus chose his
moment carefully – the short-lived victory by Jacobite
forces over the Williamite army at Urraghry, before they
were vanquished on the hill of Aughrim. But by showing
the weakest link in the Jacobite position, Mulvany
illustrates the bravery of the Irish, as they took on the
superior forces of William.
But why did Mulvany select Aughrim as his plumb line
to the past? In the late nineteenth century, radical
nationalism focussed not only on peasant proprietorship
but on political independence. Such boldness required
representation on a large scale: galvanising, iconic
images that had the power to incite action. Mulvany’s
Aughrim was begun only fifteen years after the 1867
insurrection, six years after the formation of the National
Land League, and the bicentennial of the battle was less
than ten years hence. This was no incidental exercise in
nostalgia then, but a purposeful, positioning image,
designed to press powerful memories into a
contemporary political use. If out of violence and trauma
comes renewed resolve, the Battle of Aughrim may be seen
as an exemplification of Ireland’s glorious past, and a call
to arms in the present. Moreover, by creating Aughrim for
Aughrim was one of the bloodiest battles ever fought in
Ireland, with 7,000 slain out of the 40,000 engaged in the
confrontation. Following the defeat, Galway and
Limerick fell fast. For these reasons, Aughrim rather
than the Boyne can be considered the decisive battle of
the Williamite wars in Ireland. In its subsequent mythic
versions, the battle functioned much as the loss of
Meagher’s Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg, or Pickett’s
men charging to their deaths at Gettysburg – celebrated
defeats resounding to the credit to the losers. Indeed, the
characterisation of Aughrim as the Gettysburg of Ireland
4
The large house, Kirwan’s Lodge, rises full square, ‘like
a sullen barrier to retreat’.2 The huge cavalry horses, with
flaring nostrils and bulging eyes, force their way through
the fray, while a barely discernible ghostly squadron
emerges from the very centre of the painting. The
dichotomous handling extends the sense of space and
conveys the impression of unlimited action, of a battle
that was both terrifying and terminal, but had infinite
ideological possibilities.
would have not displeased the Irish-American Mulvany,
himself a Civil War artist and an ardent Irish nationalist.
Inevitably, it was also likened to Ireland’s Little Bighorn.
Although Mulvany engaged in extensive research, he
was not hidebound – his inability to gain access to the
royal armouries was a factor – but he was decidedly
more interested in the narrative than the detail. For
dramatic effect, no less than legibility, he colour coded
elements of the painting. Glenn Thompson notes that
‘the Williamite cavalry wear scarlet coats with yellow
facings and white laced tricorn hats’ ( in reality they wore
a number of different types and colours), the Jacobites
wear green (naturally) and crimson. Thompson explains
that ‘no record of any Jacobite regiment wearing green
has so far come to light’, but there is much that is not
known about the uniforms of the period and certainly
‘sources of information on military costume from that
period were scarce when Mulvany commenced his work
on this painting.’ The Williamite horses are all black and
greys, the Jacobite, browns and bays. The Williamites
wear tricorns, and the Jacobites wear moustaches. Glenn
Thompson explains that ‘it was highly unlikely that any
uniform relating to the Williamite Wars was on display at
the Tower of London’ anyway, with the result that
Mulvany’s research threw up uniforms that are more
eighteenth than seventeenth century 3. This was not just
evidence of the unavailability of seventeenth century
military imagery, but also of Mulvany’s historical
interests being predominantly painterly and political
rather than literal.
JOhn MuLvAnY (courtesy of Anne Weber)
THE PAINTING
Mulvany was absorbed by the battle and spent
considerable time on the battlefield. And although the
terrain is clearly indentifiable by its contours, his
deployment of details is governed by artistic
considerations.
Although no slave to detail, in other respects, the
painting is full of it: the pairs of pistols, worn on either
side of the saddle, carried in embroidered holsters in
regimental colours, the blanket rolls carried behind the
saddle, the bandoliers, cuirasses, sashes, spurs, boots and
gauntlets, and, of course, the white plumes of Navarre in
the heavy steel caps. These have different functions in
the painting – they expand the drama, they authenticate,
and they have symbolic value – which all goes to show
that Mulvany knew his stuff, as an artist, an historian,
and a polemicist.
The morning mist and swirling gunpowder are not
merely descriptive of the battle conditions then, but
devices that function aesthetically and narratively; they
obliterate parts of the field and allow Mulvany the
freedom to be at times meticulous and detailed, and at
others atmospheric and evocative.
When he went to London to do the research into the
uniforms and weaponry, Mulvany had difficulty gaining
access to the Tower, as his republican views and
associates were known. The early 1880s in London were
characterised by violence, instigated by the dynamiting
campaign funded by Clan-na-Gael in America. In
January 1885, there was an explosion at London Bridge.
5
unharmonious note throughout the whole mass of
painting. In technique and handling he follows the
broad and realistic style in which de Neuville was so
effective; and, indeed, there is a good deal in the whole
complexion of the work to remind one strongly of that
artist. As an historical picture, “Aughrim” is deserving
of the attention of every Irishman, and if an
opportunity for its exhibition be afforded we would
advise everyone who wishes to see the subject
sympathetically as well as poetically treated to avail
of it immediately.
Mulvany, a member of Clan-na-Gael, fled to Paris with
the painting; he believed that if he had not, he would
have spent the rest of his life in an English prison. In
Paris, the famous Goupil engraved it, and Mulvany then
took the painting back to Dublin.
DUBLIN REACTION
When the Fenian and founder of the Irish National Land
League, Michael Davitt, saw the Battle of Aughrim in July
1885, he wrote to Mulvany, declaring:
you deserve the thanks of the entire Irish race;
for in it you have not only upheld the artistic
reputation of Ireland, but your genius has transferred
to canvass [sic] the dauntless bravery of those
‘Who died, their land to save,
On Aughrim’s slope.’
But not everyone was so well disposed. On approaching
‘a certain print seller not very far from Grafton-Street’5
in the hope of showing the painting, Mulvany was
chided for turning ‘his talents to the promotion of
discontent’. The Dublin University Review picked up the
story and reported that the behaviour of the ‘loyalist
shopkeepers of Ireland will astonish even those who had
the strongest notion about their snobbery, their want of
patriotism, their narrow bigotry, and the low nature of
their general intelligence’. According to the Dublin
University Review, the same print seller has for months
been exhibiting in his windows ‘a large engraving of two
half-naked cocottes fighting a duel’, commenting
sardonically that
Davitt went on to commend Mulvany for teaching
‘subsequent generations the great lesson in a nation’s
march to freedom which your brush now most
eloquently enforces.’4
In Dublin, the Freeman’s Journal (11 July 1885) announced
that
no one but an artist of genius could possibly have
produced such a masterly and realistic picture… Not
only are the faces of the men great studies of triumph,
despair or ferocity, but even the horses have been
treated with a power that Landseer might envy. The
work may be said to be of the school of De Neuville –
the manipulation is broad, rapid, and consequently
singularly effective, the drawing is perfect, and the
colour masterly.
Art, or what passes for such, can foster worse things
than “discontent”.’ … We suppose there is hardly
another quarter of the civilised world where such a
man and such a picture would have met with such a
reception; but, then, scarcely any other quarter of the
world is cursed with the presence of a faction so bitter
in their hatred of the land of their births as ‘the loyal
minority’ of Dublin and Ireland. 6
Stylistically, the composition of Aughrim is circular,
cyclonic and sweeping: full of verve, dynamism and
energy, and the handling is consummately skilled and
inventive.
Happily, Mulvany was not reliant on such begrudgery.
He had his own plans for the painting, packed it up and
returned with it to Chicago.
CHICAGO
In 1858, Irish immigrants founded the Fenians, an
extension of the Irish Republican Brotherhood back
home. Initially the movement spread amongst Irish
troops in the Union Army during the Civil War. After
the war, they combined their politics with their military
training. Two abortive raids on Canada in 1866 and 1870
led to internal factionalism, forcing the disintegration of
the Brotherhood and the take-over by Clan-na-Gael,
which had been founded in New York in 1867. Mulvany
was a member of the Brotherhood and attended the
important 2nd Congress of the Fenian movement in
Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1865. And he continued his
association thereafter with Clan-na-Gael.
United Ireland (11 July 1885) concurred:
As a composition it is extremely clever and wholly
natural; apparently untrammelled by conventionality,
yet in this respect suggestive of the rule of ars celare
artem. The lights are extremely well managed, and the
sweep of country taken in, by means of the shape of
the painting and adequate treatment, imposing….
Action and movement are everywhere, and some of
the groupings of the combatants are so effective and
life-like that it wants but life-size to make the beholder
fancy that he is present amid the carnage and the roar
of battle in the very truth. The tone of the picture is
worthy of high praise. In the treatment of the
unmanageable British red, Mr Mulvany has shown
great skill, so that it is impossible to detect a single
Clan-na-Gael was a physical force movement, 40,000
strong at this time. Chicago was a major stronghold, and
6
Famous Battle of Aughrim on Sunday, July 12, 1691.
Wakeman founded the influential literary magazine, the
Chicago Current, in 1883, and was a writer of considerable
contemporary importance. In his preliminary review in
the Louisville Courier-Journal (28 July 1883), before it was
even finished, he declared that the painting ‘will stand
as the grandest possible representation of the most
desperate encounter in that awful cavalry
struggle…which ruined the fortunes of the Stuart
dynasty, and set the seal of servitude, but never of
servility, upon the people of Ireland’. He went on to say
that ‘No country possesses such an instantaneous
expression of all qualities of sublimity and power’.
it raised significant funds for revolutionary activity in
Ireland. Alexander Sullivan, its leading light, had quite a
reputation in Chicago. Sullivan pledged the support of
Clan-na-Gael to certain politicians in return for
preferential treatment. This increased his support
amongst the Irish, to whom he passed on favours; hence
bribery, kickbacks and nepotism were common
occurrences. Sullivan established an unshakeable
connection between Irish nationalism and the shady side
of machine politics. And his gang were known ward
‘healers’, thugs and liquor dealers.
At the Clan-na-Gael convention in Chicago in 1881,
Sullivan, Michael Boland and Denis Feeley were
appointed as the Revolutionary Directory, and became
known as the Triangle. Sullivan’s power was now
unbounded. They supported ‘active policy’, but not
dynamiting per se (although Sullivan later took it upon
himself to extend approval). Doubting the resolve of the
more conservative Land League, Sullivan extracted half
the raised money to get revolutionary activity going (but
also allegedly diverted funds into his own project, to
speculate on the Chicago Board of Trade). In 1885, the
year Mulvany returned to Chicago with his Battle of
Aughrim, there was a move to curb Sullivan. Dr Patrick
Henry Cronin, Professor of medicine at St Louis College
of Physicians and Surgeons, a prominent member of the
Clan, initially friends with Sullivan, became his
implacable enemy. Anticipating his assassination, Cronin
entrusted Thomas Tuite, a friend of Mulvany, with his
‘evidence’ to implicate Sullivan. And, sure enough, in
1889, Cronin’s death followed suit.
Although Aughrim was initially rapturously received,
there was a sudden froideur. As a supporter of Cronin,
Mulvany was to be taught a lesson, and the sale of the
painting fell through. He was now disillusioned and in
debt. But, as Anne Weber, great grand-niece of the artist,
says, Mulvany ‘was skilled enough to incriminate those
he held responsible’.7 The trials that followed Cronin’s
murder were inconclusive. Everyone knew who
committed the murder but convictions proved
impossible. Around 1901, Mulvany began work on The
Anarchists, a painting that showed a group of men cutting
a pack of cards to see who would commit murder…
Thereafter, as if life imitated art, Mulvany himself was
found dead, drowned in the Hudson River.
There is a common assumption that Irish artists of the
late nineteenth century transcended the harsh realities of
political and economic life either by emigrating and
assimilating, or staying put and avoiding subjects that
might mirror or create discontent. The finding of the
Battle of Aughrim places visual art at the centre of an
emergent cultural and political nationalism, traditionally
perceived as the preserve of poets and playwrights,
journalists and politicians. Michael Davitt’s closing
words to John Mulvany in 1885 were: ‘I envy Chicago
that picture. If I were a wealthy man it should never
leave Ireland.’8 Its return in 2010 is thus a matter of
considerable interest, not least in that amongst those who
did go, many were undeservedly forgotten.
When Mulvany showed Aughrim in Chicago, the Citizen
(1885) pronounced it ‘admirable’ and ‘magnificent’. The
Chicago Current (22 August 1885) noted that it was ‘a
masterpiece on the one hand and a superb testimonial to
patriotic valor on the other’. The two main Chicagoan
sources for the painting are John F. Finerty and Edgar L.
Wakeman – two heavy hitters of Chicago journalism and
literary life. The fiery Hon. John F. Finerty, editor of the
Citizen, orator extraordinaire and one-term Congressman
from Illinois, wrote many of the paeans of praise in the
pamphlet, “Aughrim” A Superb Picture of the Terrible
Cavalry Fight at the Pass of Urachree at the Opening of the
1
I am grateful to Anne Weber, Glenn Thompson and Professor Luke Gibbons for discussions and advice on this painting. A short version of this
appeared in the Irish Times, 2 October 2010.
2
Quoted from a contemporary undated and unidentified newspaper cutting, Alice Garvey Collection. There is a small sketch in a notebook of
Mulvany naming the house as Kirwan’s Lodge. I am grateful to Mrs Jo O’Sullivan Scannell and Canon Trevor Sullivan for confirming this
identification. Originally known as Tristane’s Lodge, it was renamed Kirwan’s, and was the house of wealthy landowning gentry, one of the 12
tribes of Galway. Sarah Kirwan married Edward Carson in 1879; as ever, as a bastion of colonialism, Mulvany chose his markers carefully. Nothing
remains of the house, but some stables.
3
I am very grateful to Glenn Thompson for conversation and correspondence on the military aspects of this painting.
4
13 July 1885, “Aughrim” A Superb Picture of the Terrible Cavalry Fight at the Pass of Urachree at the Opening of the Famous Battle of Aughrim on Sunday,
July 12, 1691, Painted by John Mulvany.
5
Thomas Cranfield, 115 Grafton Street, Dublin.
6
Dublin University Review, August 1885, also reported verbatim in The Nation, 8 August 1885.
7
Anne Weber-Scobie, The Life and Work of Irish-American Artist John Mulvany (1839-1906), Binghamton, NY, 1993, p. 56.
8
“Aughrim” A Superb Picture: This letter was also quoted in the Boston Pilot, July 1885 (I am grateful to Dr Carla King for bringing this to my
attention).
7
22. hOWARD hELMICK R.B.A. (1845-1907)
Probably ‘The Village Schoolmaster’ as exhibited Irish Exhibition in London 1888 (lent by J.J.)
Signed and dated lower left, H. Helmick 1881
Oil on canvas, 59 x 48cm.
Britain, and during the 1870’s and 1880’s set up two
studios in the south and west of Ireland. Some of his
finest work dated from the 1880’s, and his studies of Irish
farmers, priests, squires, lawyers, teachers, doctors and
country people provide us with detailed insights into
rural life at that time.
B
orn in Zanesville, Ohio, Helmick was trained in Paris
at the Academy des Beaux Arts, under the academic
guidance of Alexandre Cabanel, subsequently working
as a genre and figure painter, an etcher and an illustrator.
He moved to London and studied from a capacious
studio in Holland Park, becoming a member of the
Society of British Artists and the Royal Society of Painters
and Etchers. He exhibited nearly four dozen paintings in
His studies of schoolmasters and teachers include ‘The
Country Dancing Master’, ‘The Schoolmaster’s moment of
8
leisure’ (both exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874)[i],
and subsequently ‘A Schoolmaster’ (watercolour) and ‘The
Village Schoolmaster’ (both exhibited at The Irish
Exhibition in London in 1888).[ii] Other titles are also
suggestive of his interest in the same subject, for example
‘The Disciplinarian’, and ‘Le Maitre d’ecole de village’ (of
1881), which may possibly be a French title for this one.
‘The Schoolmaster’s moment of Leisure’ shows a similarly
dressed man, evidently in an Irish schoolroom, playing
his flute while a small boy sits in the corner wearing a
conical dunce’s hat as a punishment. That scene suggests
that the child has been detained alone after school as a
punishment, and the teacher sits beside a table, which is
laden with books, a candle and a small switch or whip.
One is invited to sympathise with the small boy amidst
the symbolic narrative. Helmick would have been aware
of the rough atmosphere prevalent in some Irish country
schools, and other painters before him had visited that
uncomfortable subject more overtly, namely William
Mulready (with ‘Idle Boys’ of 1815 and ‘The Last In’,
1835).[iii] This comparatively contemplative, peaceful composition
shows the master alone, in the corner of his schoolroom,
concentrating on preparing a quill pen. Accordingly,
beside him on the table, is an inkwell, and a piece of
paper. Low light rakes across the scene from a window
(out of view), to the left, suggesting an early morning
scene, before the childrens’ arrival. Since the 6th century,
some of the best feathers for making into writing quills,
were the flight feathers of the geese (which would have
been easily available in rural Ireland). For hardening the
tip, the feather was heated or dipped into alum, then
carefully shaped and split with a blade (hence the ‘pen
knife’) to hold ink and produce an even line. Each quill
pen lasted about a week before it wore and needed
attention. Such preparation, which is what Helmick
delineates here, was laborious and time-consuming, and
would also have been a skill taught to his pupils. By the
mid nineteenth century, metal dipping nibs were being
mass-produced; the forerunners of the fountain pen.
Helmick may be suggesting that this elderly teacher was
old fashioned, or more likely that he could not afford to
buy the newer, readymade pens for himself and his
pupils. The state of rural schools at that time was indeed
neglected, and an Irish contemporary of Helmick’s,
James Brenan, addressed that issue by graphically
portraying poverty in the Irish classroom in 1887, with
his detailed oil, ‘Bankrupt’. This painting does seem likely
to be Helmick’s ‘The Village Schoolmaster’, which was
exhibited along with ‘Bankrupt’ in 1888 at the Irish
Exhibition in London.[iv] Helmick’s portrayal of this
benevolent and learned character, is further emphasised
by the inclusion of piles of books, and an alphabet chart
on the wall on the right, above the end of a long form
where the pupils would have sat. As in his ‘Schoolmaster’s Moment of Leisure’, the table to
the left is of mahogany, with pad feet, and seems to have
come down in the world to the humble schoolroom,
perhaps donated by benevolent local gentry. Since
teachers often relied on the generosity of parents and
local people to run their schoolrooms, such an item
seems appropriate. In many schools, pupils arrived
carrying their own contributions of turf for the fire which
kept the schoolroom warm in winter. Despite often
enduring conditions of poverty, according to Crofton
Croker, ‘the village schoolmaster forms a peculiar
character; and next to the lord of the manor, the parson
and the priest, he is the most important personage in the
parish’.[v] Here he wears the long swallow tail coat and
breeches, practical for riding a horse, which were only
just still fashionable at that time. He sits on a distinctive
Sligo chair, with arms, which features in some of
Helmick’s other paintings.[vi] Such a distinctive chair
was typically confined in a relatively small area, around
Sligo and Galway, so it seems probable that the painting
was produced when he worked from his Galway studio,
rather than the one he also used further south, in Kinsale.
Other objects appear and reappear in his paintings,
suggesting that he resorted to props, so the jug on the
floor behind the chair, and the blue book hanging from a
nail on the wall, look the same as those in ‘Warming
Hands by the Fire’ (1880).[vii] On the table, amongst the
piles of books, is a combined candle and rush light
holder, which would have enabled children to read and
write into the evenings, on the darkest winter days.
Dr Claudia Kinmonth
[i] A.Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts, A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their works…1769-1904, vol. 2 (Kingsmead, 1970), 63. A
Watercolour of this title was sold through the Gorry Gallery in 2008, see Gorry Gallery Catalogue (March 2008), p. 49.
[ii] A.M. Stewart, Irish Art Loan Exhibitions 1765-1927, Index of Artists, vol.1 (Manton, 1990), 319.
[iii] C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), figs 240, 241.
[iv] C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), fig. 250. Another painting, entitled ‘An Old master’ is a possible
match, it was exhibited in Liverpool between 1876-1887.
[v] A. MacManus, The Irish Hedge School and its Books 1695-1831 (Four Courts Press, 2004), 95.
[vi] Notably in ‘A Difference of Opinion’ reproduced in C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), fig. 215. C.
Kinmonth, Irish Country Furniture 1700-1950 (Yale University Press, 1993), 51-2, figs. 60-63.
[vii] C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), p.ii.
9
8. ChARLEs COLLIns died c. 1744
‘A Still-Life with Pears, Peaches, Apples, Plums, Grapes, Hazelnuts and Flowers on a Bank’
Oil on canvas 63.5 x 75.5cm
Signed and dated C.Collins. FEC. 1734
to be inferior to none’. Seemingly this formed a pendant
to another work by the artist showing live fowl. A further
still-life was included in the collection of James Digges
La Touche that was auctioned in Geminiani’s rooms in
Dublin in May 1764, while the Kildares of Carton also
owned an example of his art.
B
iographical evidence is scarce for Charles Collins,
which is disappointing as he is of immense interest as
a rare, and highly talented, Irish still-life painter. Indeed,
Collins is one of the most significant Irish artists to have
emerged since the publication of Crookshank and Glin’s
groundbreaking work, The Painters of Ireland. Although
mentioned by Strickland as working in Ireland, he had
fallen into obscurity and, by 1981, when his striking Still
Life with a Lobster on a Delft Dish was purchased by the
Tate Gallery in London, the little that was known of his
life was confused; his dates and place of birth were
routinely wrongly given. It has now been shown that
Collins cannot be identical with his Chichester namesake,
and he has since been reclaimed for the Irish school; he is
in fact one of the most accomplished artists to have
worked here in the early and mid-eighteenth century.
As is shown in the current display, Collins worked in
both oil and watercolour and seems to have been
exclusively a painter of still-life. Vertue referred to him
as a ‘bird painter’, although also noting a self-portrait,
while Horace Walpole described him as a painter of ‘all
sorts of fowl and game’. Certainly game predominates in
Collins’s oeuvre, as is evident in the 1730 still-life in the
National Gallery of Ireland, a work very much in the
Dutch tradition of seventeenth-century artists such as Jan
Weenix, Franz Snyders and Jan Fyt. Instead, however, of
being stylistically retardataire, here he is working in a
manner comparable to his most advanced French
contemporaries such as Alexandre-François Desportes
and Jean-Baptise Oudry. More narrowly, within British
art, Collins has been lauded – despite the lowly ranking
of the genre in which he worked – as being among those
artists whose ‘feeling for paint and colour...heralded
Collins is specifically referred to as an ‘Irish Master’ in
the Dublin Evening Post for 4 May 1786 in connection with
the sale of the collection of the doctor, and property
developer, Gustavus Hume in which a game still-life was
favourably noted: ‘a dead hare, dead birds etc...allowed
by the first judges in point of elegance and performance,
10
the windows of Parson’s shop (now alas no longer
there) filled entirely with birds by Collins. It was then
the worst moment of the slump and the drawings
were marked at what even then were fantastically low
prices....Even at these prices the family finances
...would not allow me to buy more than two – but I
never got better value or more pleasure for about 30s.
In two or three days the whole lot were gone.
Reynolds’.
Collins is perhaps the only Irish artist of the period to
consistently explore the genre of still-life in oil. It is
noteworthy how William Ashford, for example, quickly
abandoned still-life for landscape after painting a few,
rather naïve, flower pieces early in his career. There was,
however, a market for the genre, though not comparable
in scale to that for portraiture or landscape, and many
still-lives were exhibited at the Society of Artists in
Dublin, though often by amateurs. At the same time, stilllife flourished in media other than oil, most notably in
the art of Samuel Dixon and his Capel Street apprentices
such as Daniel O’Keeffe, James Reilly and Gustavus
Hamilton, whose ‘Still Life with Cherries’, exhibited in this
gallery in December 2008, makes for an interesting
comparison with the still-life of fruit shown here. The one
other eighteenth-century artist in oil who worked in a
manner close to Collins in Dublin was the slightly later
Charles Lewis. Indeed, it is noticeable that still-life was
not much practiced by Irish artists even of a later date:
William Scott is of course the great exception, though
William Orpen’s occasional essays in the genre, notably
‘Reflections – China and Japan’ are also masterly (Dublin
City Gallery, The Hugh Lane).
Collins completed several hundred sheets for White,
10. ChARLEs COLLIns died c. 1744
‘A Silver Pheasant’
Watercolour on paper heightened with white 34.3 x 49 cm
Signed and dated Charles Collins Fecit 1737
Exhibited: The Art of A Nation: Three Centuries of Irish
Painting, Pyms Gallery, London 2002 Number 2
Collins’s ‘Still-Life with Fruit’, signed and dated to 1734,
is an altogether more attractive subject than some of the
artist’s game-pieces. Here, as if to illustrate the bounty of
nature, pears, peaches, apples, plums, grapes, hazelnuts
and flowers are piled up on a bank. Collins gives full rein
to his masterly, illusionistic technique, beautifully
expressing the succulence of the fruit. His use of colour
is vibrant and his forms are powerfully modelled. The
composition, though artful, is simple and unaffected
rather more in the tradition of artists like Luis Meléndez
than the exuberantly baroque tromp l’oeil effects of some
eighteenth-century Dutch artists; this is a masterly piece
of still-life painting.
almost all of which are now in the collection of McGill
University, Montreal. One of the few of his bird drawings
not in a public collection, his Silver Pheasant is dated 1737.
Here Collins cleverly captures the haughty nature of the
bird. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable notes that the
character of the Silver Pheasant (or Lophura
Nycthemera) has led it to be used as a metaphor for a
beautiful young lady of the aristocracy. He quotes: ‘one
would think you a silver pheasant you give yourself such
airs’.
The fruit still-life dates from 1734, two years before
Collins embarked on what is perhaps his most famous
work, a series of twelve oil paintings of birds in
naturalistic settings. Nine of these are now owned by the
National Trust at Anglsey Abbey, three are in an Irish
private collection. Also in 1736, Collins, together with
Peter Paillou, embarked on a series of watercolours of
British birds and mammals for the collector Taylor White.
These sheets have long been admired. Perhaps the
greatest authority of English watercolours, Iolo Williams,
recounts an amusing anecdote which highlights how
much Collins’ watercolours have been treasured by
connoisseurs.
The bird is shown parallel to the picture plane in an
arrangement similar to that of his Egyptian Vulture (Paul
Mellon Center for British Art, Yale) but in contrast to
some of the more dynamic and active postures of other
birds such as the Common Buzzard (Cecil Higgins Art
Gallery, Bedford). The simplicity of line gives the
composition an almost calligraphic elegance. Collins
carefully distinguishes between the different textures of
the feathers and the skin of the bird’s feet with particular
emphasis placed on the pheasant’s alert, beady eye
which confronts the viewer with an almost knowing
glance. Works such as this fully confirm Iolo Williams’
judgment of Collins as the finest bird painter of the
period. His previously unknown fruit still-life must,
however, also give him a similar distinction in that genre
too.
One of my most exciting experiences as a
collector...was when, one day in, I suppose, 1931 my
wife and I got off a bus in the Brompton Road and saw
11
7. JAMEs ARthuR O’COnnOR c. 1792-1841
‘The Avenue, A View in the Parc de Bruxelles’
Oil on canvas 35.5 x 45cm
signed and dated: ‘J.A. O’Connor 1835’
Literature: Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, The Painters of Ireland (London, 1978) p. 212, illustrated.
John Hutchinson, James Arthur O’Connor (Dublin, 1985) p. 180.
Exhibited: National Gallery of Ireland, James Arthur O’Connor , 1985, no. 78
done when far from his native land, is correctly identified
here for the first time.
O
’Connor was an artist in constant need of
inspiration from the physical landscape. He
expressed this eloquently in relation to the Irish
landscape that he loved so well. ‘I am about [to go] to the
wild and beautiful scenery of my native country to
refresh my memory, and get some studies to help me in
future exertion of my profession – I know I will be
benefited by a sight of the grand....scenery that I will
meet with in Ireland and hope to show it on canvas’.
Among paradoxes that attend O’Connor’s feeling for
nature are the fact that he was a city dweller for almost
his entire life and also that he spent most of career as a,
somewhat reluctant, emigrant. One of his few cityscapes,
O’Connor was, in fact, a surprisingly adventurous, if
occasionally unlucky, traveller. From May 1826 he spent
a year working in Belgium ‘and there painted and
disposed of many pictures’ however ‘his success was
clouded; for while in Brussels he was swindled of a
considerable sum of money’; this was not the only time
such misfortunes happened on his travels. O’Connor
also enjoyed an extended sojourn on the continent from
September 1832 to November 1, 1833, primarily based in
Paris but also touring Germany. In between these dates
there is the suggestion of a further trip to Brussels in
12
Lambert Godecharle, completed in 1784. Indeed the
putto holding an artist’s palette in one of the groups may
have been what drew O’Connor’s attention to the spot
in the first place.
1830, the year of the Belgian revolution. Just as his trips
home to Ireland furnished him with subject matter for
the ‘exertion of his profession’ back in London, so too his
time on the continent also provided him with fruitful
inspiration.
The painting is dated by O’Connor to 1835 in which year
he was in London unless a further visit to the continent
is unrecorded – which seems unlikely. It is clear that he
completed the work based on sketches done on the spot.
We know that such drawings existed as in 1842, just after
the artist’s death, several watercolours of clearly related
subject matter were exhibited at the Royal Hibernian
Academy. Two were entitled ‘The Park at Brussels’, while
others showed the Place du Sablon and the ‘Market at
Brussels’. The fact that The Avenue was completed back in
London explains the inexactitudes as to topography and
particular as to the form of the sculptural groups. Equally
though O’Connor has deliberately improved on the
scene so as to include more prominently both of the
pedestals supporting their sculptures. As the
accompanying photograph illustrates, there is no spot
within the park from which they can simultaneously be
seen so clearly.
O’Connor seems to have benefited from the taste for
British landscape painting that a exhibition of
Constable’s works had engendered on the continent and,
according to his obituary, his paintings ‘obtained very
high prices in France and Belgium’. Mulvany further
notes that O’Connor ‘made valuable studies in France’;
this directly echoes O’Connor’s own phraseology in
relation to the ‘studies’ he executed in Ireland and both
the work that O’Connor completed on the continent and
that effected back in his studio from sketches done on the
spot are shown by the paintings in this selection.
Among O’Connor’s most famous works, and arguably
one of the finest he ever painted, is a View of an Avenue
(cat. no. 7). Reproduced in Crookshank and Glin’s The
Painters of Ireland and included in the seminal O’Connor
show at the National Gallery of Ireland in 1985, it has
been lost to public sight ever since. In the National
Gallery catalogue, John Hutchinson suggests that the
picture may represent a scene in Paris, and indeed given
the length of time the artist spent in the French capital
and his sketches of French parks such as the Bois de
Boulogne (NGI) this is wholly plausible. Hutchinson,
noting that the location of the painting has not been
identified, also suggests Brussels as the setting for this
rather haunting and mysterious work. In this latter
suggestion, he was correct, and here, admittedly with
some artistic license O’Connor shows the central avenue
of the Parc de Bruxelles.
1835 the year of the View of an Avenue saw the final great
flowering of O’Connor’s talent and from the same year
dates his masterpiece ‘The Poachers’ (National Gallery of
Ireland). The sheer quality and sparkle of the work with
its dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, based on the
strong perspective lines converging on a spot at lower
left make it among the most arresting, and at the same
time appealing, of all of O’Connor’s paintings.
If The Avenue was completed in his London studio from
‘studies’ made in Brussels, three others works seem
certain to have been done on the continent (cat. no.4, 5, 6
p.14). They are framed, en suite in distinctively French, or
Belgium, Empire-style frames which were clearly ‘made
to measure’ for the pictures. However, they are painted
on prepared boards of London manufacture. Two show
typical Wicklow views while the other, moonlit, scene
with canal barges and an elaborate hoist has a distinctly
continental feel. This together with the evidence of the
frames and the provenance from a French private
collection suggests that they were painted on the
continent with materials that O’Connor had brought
with him on one of the two, or possibly three, trips he
made. If this is the case, it is interesting that he paints the
Irish subject from memory - not difficult given his
intimate knowledge of the scenery of his native land.
Laid out in the years after 1775 on the ruins of the castle
of the Dukes of Brabant, the park is still one of the most
attractive green areas in the centre of Brussels, its
peaceful, verdant calm now giving little idea of the bitter
fighting that had taken place here in the Revolution of
1830, a year, in which as has been noted above, O’Connor
may have been in the city. Instead of choosing to paint
the more frequently depicted, monumental gateway on
Rue Royale, O’Connor shows the internal axis focusing
on the sculptures of the Arts and Sciences by Gilles-
The moonlit scene (cat no.4) in particular is a remarkable
work in terms of O’Connor’s technique. The saucer-like
moon is painted with a level of gutsy impasto that is
difficult to parallel elsewhere in O’Connor’s oeuvre. He
has clearly relished the effects to be had from thick,
buttery paint standing proud of the surface. Taken
together these works of continental influence present
another side of this much-loved artist.
13
‘Canal Dock, Moonlight’
Oil on Board, 17.8 x 22.9cm.
Signed with initials
Provenance: Private Collection, France
‘River Landscape with Figures on a Path’
‘Woodland Landscape with Woman on a Path’
14
12. J. JOhnstOn InGLIs R.h.A. fl. 1885-1903
‘The Conservatory’
Oil on Canvas, 99 x 90.5cm.
Signed, also inscribed on reverse
show’s distinct parallel’s with the work of Walter
Osborne and in respect of their similar social and artistic
Dublin background it would seem likely that they would
have known each others work well. This is borne out by
the fact that Osborne painted a portrait Sir Malcolm
Inglis in 1902 when he was Chairman of the the Dublin
Chamber of Commerce (Exhibited R.H.A., 1902, no.73).
According to an inscription on the reverse of the canvas
this painting was sold to another Dublin artist, Samuel
Rowan Watson (1853-1923) in 1905.
One of six sons of a successful Scots-born Dublin
businessman, Sir Malcolm Inglis D.L., J.P. J. Johnston
Inglis was a regular exhibitor at the R.H.A. from 1885
until 1903.
In 1892 he was appointed an A.R.H.A and later in the
same year, a full member. Judging from the subjects of
his exhibited paintings he seems to have travelled
extensively throughout Ireland and abroad particularly
in Scotland and the Lake District.
The brushwork and subject matter of our painting
15
15. MAtthEW JAMEs LAWLEss 1837-1864
‘Waiting for an Audience’
Oil on panel 45.7 x 30.2cm
Signed and Dated ‘M.J. Lawless’ pinxt 1861
Exhibited: Royal Academy, London, 1861, no. 316
16
Related to A Sick Call is another recent discovery An
Angling Party, acquired by the National Gallery of
Ireland in 2008 while other works by Lawless to have
also emerged from the shadows include A Sailor Waiting
Embarkation of 1859 (private collection) (below) and The
Reading Lesson of 1857 which was exhibited in this gallery
in December 2008.
J
ust a handful of works survive by Matthew James
Lawless who was described by Strickland as ‘one of
the most brilliant and promising young artists to whom
Ireland has given birth’. Indeed, for many years he was
known only by A Sick Call which has been one of the bestloved paintings in the National Gallery’s collection since
it was acquired as far back as 1925. However, his extant
oeuvre, tiny though it is, is a least an improvement on
the situation in 1987 when Christopher Bailey could
lament: ‘is it not...unfortunate that we, at present only
have “A Sick Call” to remember Matthew James Lawless
as a painter?’
It is pleasing then to increase our knowledge of the artist
with the publication of this important painting which he
exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1861: this now makes
a total of six paintings in Lawless’s surviving oeuvre. At
the same time it is gratifying to be able to unravel the
painting’s subject matter and iconography.
Matthew James Lawless was born in Dublin in 1837. He
came from an eminent and prosperous Catholic family
with strong legal and literary connections whose most
famous member was ‘Honest’ Jack Lawless, a leading
member of the Catholic Association and colleague of
Daniel O’Connell. At an early age, Lawless was sent to
school near Bath when his parents moved to London; he
also studied at Clongowes Wood. Lawless began his
artistic training under Francis Stephen Cary, continuing
under James Matthews Leigh. Around 1860, it seems
Lawless took a study trip to Bruges and Paris where he
came under the influence of continental artists, notably,
as we shall see, Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier
Always sickly, Lawless’s health deteriorated from the
end of 1860 and he died of consumption just four years
later. A Sick Call demands to be interpreted in light of his
consumption condition. It shows a solemn priest being
rowed across a river with his acolytes, summoned to
administer the last rites by the lamenting women to his
left. One of Lawless’s early biographers noted that the
model for the priest was a certain Mr Richardson and it
has been plausibly suggested by Bailey that this refers to
Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson (1828-1896) a physician,
who having trained in Glasgow, moved to London in
about 1853. In 1856 he was appointed to the Royal
Infirmary for Diseases of the Chest. Bailey writes: ‘It is
tempting to imagine that he attended Lawless in this
professional capacity. If this was the case, and
considering Lawless’s profound piety, it seems fitting
that Richardson should be portrayed in this redemptive
role’. Certainly the mood of quiet foreboding in A Sick
Call is made enormously poignant when one considers
Lawless’s health at this time. After completing it, Lawless
was unable to work. He wrote to Mrs Coltart, whose
husband had commissioned the painting, ‘if I can only
get to the easel again I shall be quite satisfied and happy’.
He died a year later, aged just twenty-seven, on 6 August
1864.
The influence of Meissonier has often been perceived in
Lawless’s work and now that we are in a better position
to reconstruct his oeuvre it can be demonstrated more
clearly. It is arguable that while Lawless was certainly
influenced by the older French artist, he was no mere
follower and in his work of 1861 The Dinner Party (above)
(private collection) and Waiting for an Audience (cat. no.
15) he was working along precisely similar lines to
17
Meissonier’s contemporary production. Signed and
dated 1861, and exhibited in that year’s Royal Academy
exhibition, The Dinner Party shows a courting couple at
table talking flirtatiously over a glass of wine. The
costume and interior are of the English Civil War period;
of particular note is the finely painted still-life of objects
scattered over the tiled floor.
Come Jack lets drink a pot of ale
And I shall tell thee such a tale
Will make thine ears to ring;
My coin is spent, my time is lost
And I this only fruit can boast
Writing before the rediscovery of these two paintings,
Bailey suggested from their titles that they were ‘small
conversation pieces set in the eighteenth century’, a genre
much associated with Meissonier. In fact both pictures
depict subjects from the previous century and so are
more akin to Lawless’s earlier Royal Academy exhibits
of cavalier subjects. Bailey’s general point though about
the influence of Meissonier is still valid and the French
artist had also painted seventeenth-century subjects.
Indeed his Game of Piquet (National Museum Wales)
(below) also of 1861 shares many compositional
That once I saw my King.
I went to Court in hope to find
Some of my friends in place;
And walking there, I had a sight
Of all the crew, but by this light,
I hardly knew one face.
(W. Chappell, Popular Music of Olden Times, London 1859,
358)
Affixed to the reverse of the picture is the second of the
verses quoted above which has enabled the subject
matter of the painting to be identified.
A specific grievance of the cavaliers was the fact that in
1661 thirty seats on the Privy Council went to men who
had fought against Charles I and that veterans, like the
cavalier in Lawless’s painting, were sidelined. A
manuscript copy of the poem is dated to 1661 (King’s
Pamphlets, No. 19, fol. 1661), and given his love of
antiquarian lore it may not be a coincidence that it was
exactly two hundred years later that Lawless exhibited
his work at the Royal Academy.
similarities – such as the diagonal placing of a stool.
Lawless had met Meissonier in Paris and won his favour.
As he recorded ‘I begged from his, as a relic, one of his
old brushes’. One further work by Lawless again done in
1861 is a fine and spirited drawing of related subject
matter: The Cavalier’s Escape. Engraved by Joseph Swain
(1820-1909) and published in the periodical Once a Week,
Lawless here illustrates a poem of the same title by
Walter Thornbury (1828-76). The drawing was also
recently acquired by the National Gallery of Ireland.
Waiting for an Audience epitomizes Strickland’s
description of the artist’s meticulous style, ‘painted with
great care and minute finish, full of character and
remarkable for [its] extraordinary correctness of
costume’. He brings great pathos to this scene of
memories of past glories and manly despair at rejection.
It is pleasing to add this fine example to the newly found
works by Lawless other than A Sick Call. A suggestive
link between the National Gallery picture and Waiting for
an Audience is the fact that the cavalier is likely to be
taken from the same model, Joe Wall, who is shown as
the oarsman in A Sick Call; it was recorded by White in
1898 that Wall ‘sat for many of [Lawless’s] cavalier
subjects’.
Again taking inspiration from a literary source and also
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861, Waiting for an
Audience is a powerful image showing Lawless’s
breathtaking technical ability. It illustrates a popular
ballad, The Cavalier’s Complaint, which bemoans the fact
that the restored court of Charles II had been filled with
pleasure seeking young favourites at the expense of those
who had fought and suffered for his father in the Civil
War:
18
14. JOsEph MALAChY KAvAnAGh R.h.A. 1856-1918
‘A Suburban Stream, Dublin’
Oil on Board 33 x 40.5cm
Signed, also signed, inscribed and dated July 1907 Verso
Exhibited: Royal Hibernian Academy 1909 Number 64
29. JOhn FAuLKnER R.h.A. c. 1830-1880
‘Fishermen by a Lake’ (Possibly Lough Dan, County Wicklow)
Oil on Canvas 59 x 90cm
Signed and dated 1862
19
set against an uncluttered background which focuses the
eye on the sitter. Hone did this in his earlier portraits in
miniature. In the oil portraits the children have large
eyes, slightly glazed expressions, fresh complexions and
red lips. The eyes are strongly painted with highlights
and the attention to minute details derives from Hone’s
background as an enamellist. Hone captures the innocent
charm of his young son in his white collar and double
breasted coat. The budding artist holds a neatly tied folio
under his right arm. One of Nathaniel Hone’s greatest
contributions to art in the eighteenth century was his
invention of this new type of picture during the 1760s
which was a combination of the `fancy picture’ with the
portrait. (1.) This is exemplified in his numerous portraits
of his children and grandchildren such as his Portrait of a
Boy Sketching (National Gallery of Ireland) and David the
Shepherd Boy (exhibited R.A. 1771) which are portraits of
his son Horace. These `fancy pictures’ of Hone’s children
and grandchildren were re-workings of the old master
classical tradition of depicting pastoral imagery and
allegorical figures from antiquity. The fact that they are
also portraits, full of character and conveying the
individuality of the sitters, gives great freshness to the
work. Hone also painted similar portraits of his
daughters and grand-daughters. His elder daughter
Lydia Hone (1760-1775) was the subject of a portrait in
which she holds a white rabbit which she saved from a
fox (engraved 1771). Hone did portraits of his granddaughter Eleanor or Mary Metcalfe (b.1767/8) in Miss
Metcalfe with a Pomeranian Dog (engraved 1772) and
Portrait of a Girl with a Pomeranian Dog (1776) (also
exhibited at The Gorry Gallery in 2003). Hone’s direct
approach to painting this group of portraits of children
anticipates the work of the next generation of portraitists.
9. nAthAnIEL hOnE thE ELDER R.A. 1718 - 1784
‘Portrait of John Camillus Hone holding a red folio’
(1759-1836)
Oil on canvas on panel 51 x 43.5cm
Painted c. 1771
N
athaniel Hone was born in Dublin and by 1748 he
had moved to London where he spent the most part
of his career. Although he visited Ireland regularly his
greatest contribution to Irish art was as the founder of
the Hone dynasty of artists which has lasted to this day.
Little is known for definite of his artistic training but
Hone must have been apprenticed to an enamellist who
would have taught him the difficult technique of
painting portraits on enamel. From c.1740 until the 1760s
Hone worked as a miniaturist on enamel and in
watercolours on ivory. Hone’s reputation is as an oil
painter and founder member of the Royal Academy
(1768) where he exhibited up to the year of his death.
Hone was a difficult man and he was irritated by Sir
Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), the president of the R.A.,
whom he satirized in his painting The Conjuror (NGI).
Hone was greatly influenced by Dutch and Italian old
master painting. He experimented with styles of painting
and approaches to portraiture in self-portraits and
portraits of his large family. Hone taught his sons Horace
and John Camillus to paint and they both became
prominent miniaturists.
John Camillus Hone became an accomplished
miniaturist (an example of his work is in the NGI). He
exhibited his work at the Royal Academy, London and
the Free Society of Arts. In about 1780 he went to India
where he lived for about ten years. He taught drawing
in Calcutta in 1785 before returning to settle in Dublin.
He was appointed to the post of engraver of dies at the
Stamp Office. In the Hone family tradition he married his
cousin Abigail Hone, the daughter of Joseph Hone of
York Street (his father’s brother) and widow of Reverend
John Conolly of York Street. John Camillus Hone died at
his house 14 Summerhill, Dublin in 1836.
Dr Paul Caffrey
Hone painted a number of portraits of his son John
Camillus Hone including A Boy Deliberating on his
Drawing (c.1766) (Ulster Museum), A Piping Boy (1769)
(National Gallery of Ireland) and The Spartan Boy (c.1775).
A version of The Spartan Boy was exhibited at the Gorry
Gallery in March 2007. In this group of pictures, painted
by Hone during the late 1760s and 1770s, the sitters are
1. Martin Postle, Angels and Urchins The Fancy Picture in 18th Century
British Art, London 1998, p. 64.
20
3. nAthAnIEL hOnE thE ELDER, R.A. (1718-84)
Portrait of a Gentleman
2. hORACE hOnE A.R.A. (1754-1825)
Signed: NH (monogram) and Dated: 1761
Portrait of a Lady,
Medium: watercolour on ivory. 3.3 x 2.8
Signed: HH and Dated: 1777
Framed in a gold locket case.
Watercolour and gouache on ivory. 4.7 x 3.7
H
one’s watercolour on ivory technique, which he
developed and perfected during the 1760s, is
exemplified in this miniature portrait. The portrait is
relatively small and despite the technical difficulties of
painting in watercolours on ivory this portrait is crisply
executed. Hone uses minute dotted stipple in painting
the grey shaded areas of the face.
Set in a contemporary 1770s gold locket
H
orace Hone was the second son of Nathaniel Hone
RA. Although he was taught to paint by his father
he also attended the Royal Academy Schools in London
in 1770. He exhibited at the RA from 1772-1822 and was
elected ARA in 1779. Horace Hone settled in Dorset
Street, Dublin in 1782 and worked almost exclusively in
Ireland until 1804. Hone had been brought to Ireland by
Lady Temple when her husband was viceroy. Lady
Temple was Baroness Nugent of Carlanstown in her own
right in the peerage of Ireland and through her social
connections in Ireland and with the backing of the viceregal court she ensured that Hone received ample
patronage. Hone was so successful that he was
appointed Miniature Painter to the Prince of Wales in
1795. He had an extensive practice which was badly
affected by the Act of Union when many of his
fashionable patrons moved to London. He spent 1804 in
Bath. For some time afterwards he lived in London, in
the house of his patron, Richard, 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam
of Merrion (founder of the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge), where he re-established himself as a
miniaturist. Hone had long suffered from mental illness
and his decline is recorded in The Diary of Joseph
Farington. He died in London and is buried in the
grounds of St George’s Chapel, Bayswater Road.
1. EDWARD LuttERELL (ACtIvE 1673-1724)
Portrait of a Gentleman,
Pastel on a grounded copper plate 24 x 20
Signed: Lutterell fe
Dated: 1692
A
ccording to Strickland (1913, vol. II, p. 29) Lutterell
was born in Dublin. He worked as a mezzotint
engraver in London. Lutterell adopted the use of copper
plates and developed the technique of painting pastel
portraits on small oval pieces of copper. This portrait is in
excellent condition and shows Lutterell’s skillful
handling of pastel in the painting of the sitter’s wig and
the lace at his neck. A slightly later portrait, painted in
1699, is in the collection of the National Gallery of
Ireland.
This beautifully painted miniature portrait of an
unknown lady is typical of Hone’s early, very neat, style.
The portrait is built up in layers of grey watercolour
which are made up of tiny parallel lines. Hone’s
characteristic grey shading may be seen in the painting of
the face. The highlights of her dress, the lace and hair are
painted in gouache. This lady would have been a
member of fashionable society in London in the 1770s
with her high hairstyle and beautiful clothing. She is
respectably presented wearing a fichu or fine shawl
covering her décolletage.
Dr Paul Caffrey
21
28. EDWIn hAYEs R.h.A., R.I (1820-1904)
‘Dordrecht on the Maas.’
Oil on Canvas, 30.5 x 51cm.
Signed, also signed, inscribed and dated 1881 on reverse
Exhibited: R.H.A. 1882. No. 144
25. JAMEs FRAnCIs DAnBY 1816-1875
‘Dysart, East Coast, Scotland’
Oil on Canvas, 76 x 122cm.
Signed and dated 1865
Exhibited: Royal Society of British Artists 1865. No. 596
Dysart is located on the south-east coast of Fife in Scotland.
The six storey tower visible in our picture is St Serf’s Tower, all that remains of St Serf’s church which was abandoned
in 1802 and largely cleared to make way for the building of a new road in 1807. The tower is considered to be one of
Scotland’s finest examples of a battlemented church tower. The Dutch influenced buildings at the foot of the tower
are collectively known as Pan Ha’ and have been restored in recent times by the National Trust for Scotland to a state
not dissimilar to their depiction in our painting.
Beyond Pan Ha’ lies the harbour and hidden by the trees, Dysart House, then a home of The Earl of Rosslyn.
22
26. BAsIL BRADLEY R.W.s. (1842-1904)
‘Interior of a Cabin, Connemara, Ireland.’ Signed and dated 1880 l.l., inscribed verso in the same hand,
with title, artist’s signature and date.
Oil on canvas, 37 x 57cm.
the sweetness of their breath and the pleasing noyse they
made in ruminating or chewing the cudd [which] would
lull a body to sleep as soon as the noys of a murmuring
brook and the fragrancy of a bed of roses’. The poet
William Moffat later described an Irishman’s house in the
1720’s:
‘A House well built and with much strength,
Almost two hundred feet in length…
In one of th’ends he kept his cows,
At th’other end he kept his spouse…’
By the 1770’s, Arthur Young wrote about ‘the family
lying on straw, equally partook of by cows, calves and
pigs, though the luxury of styes is coming to Ireland ,
B
orn in Hampstead, this talented English genre
painter specialised in landscape and sporting
subjects, having studied at the Manchester School of
Art.[i] He was also an accomplished painter of wildlife
and farm animals. He exhibited at a number of British
galleries, most often at the Old Watercolour Society from
1866, where he was elected Associate and Member in
1867 and 1881.[ii] His titles reveal that he worked in
England and Scotland, the Isle of Man, New South Wales
and more recent research has discovered some highly
detailed paintings from the west of Ireland. These two oils of Irish cabin interiors, together with a
third detailing the processes of wool production (‘Irish
Cabin, Spinning’) reveal the artist’s fascination with the
minutiae of work in the Irish farmhouse.[iii] His
paintings explain accurately what many foreigners had
written about in their travel journals, yet seemed too
familiar for native Irish painters to bother with.
In Ireland, the ‘byre dwelling’ described the widespread
custom of living beneath the same roof, in the same room
as the cattle, and was long established. John Dunton,
travelling through Connemara in the c17th, was initially
perturbed when at night, he settled to sleep upon the
floor, the cows and sheep were ushered in to sleep next
to him, for fear of wolves. But soon he remarked upon
Interior of a Kerry cottage c. 1840’s
23
which excludes the poor pigs from the warmth of the
bodies of their master and mistress.’ By 1880, when
Bradley was painting in Connemara, poor families living
on that coast were suffering from ‘the great calamity’ of
the decline in catches of fish and shellfish. Many
households combined fishing with farming, so their
cattle were crucially important, and brought indoors for
security as well as mutual warmth.
farmer’s marriage dowry for his daughter, along with a
sum of money. Behind the countryman and beautifully
framed in the doorway, we are provided a vignette of the
coast of Connemara, with its rocky sea inlets. This
glimpse of the outdoors from inside the farm kitchen is
reminiscent of paintings of the same decade by artists
such a George W. Brownlow, James Brenan and Aloysius
O’Kelly, who also used such a device to augment the
narrative of their paintings.[vi] Landlords who considered such arrangements primitive
discouraged their tenants from bringing cows indoors,
and in mid c19th Sligo a journalist wrote how ‘it was a
common thing to see three or four cows tied up inside
the farmer’s dwelling, whilst the pig had the run of the
house at all times, and was a recognised member of the
family. The Marquess [of Sligo] will not allow this
practise to be carried on.’[iv] By this time it was
considered sufficiently remarkable for the newspapers to
publish illustrations of such arrangements (see ‘Interior
of a Kerry Cottage’, c.1840’s illustration). Page 23.
The young woman looks up as she milks. As in the c17th
Dutch genre paintings, which were the inspiration for the
c19th Irish scenes such as this, the actions of the people
are mirrored and given further meaning by the way the
artist juxtaposes the animals. So here the older woman
observes the activities of her daughter, just as the cow
watches over her calf.
In some byre dwellings there was a trench separating the
animals at one end from the family quarters at the other.
Here the delineation is made by the bed of purple
heather that the cattle rest on. Details such as the unlined
thatch of the roof, the roughly rendered walls, and the
shawl and other clothes hanging from a beam above
them, were all characteristic of such cabins. Both women
wear homespun shawls and red petticoats which were
dyed with madder, and were also typical clothing of the
west. In another of Bradley’s Connemara interiors, he
describes minutely the stages of carding, spinning and
winding the wool into large balls ready for weaving.[vii]
This was an important home industry usually done by
woman, while the men generally operated the looms that
were also a feature of some Irish farmhouses.
Although there is one surviving watercolour showing a
small cow tethered indoors, this is the first proper oil
painting of the subject to come to light.[v] The fact that
Bradley is painting a scene in an inhabited cabin, rather
than an outhouse, is reinforced by his inclusion of such
details as the form and table, and the striped cup and
saucer, upturned plate, and jug placed upon it. On the
wall hangs a griddle, that was used for cooking over the
open hearth (which one would expect to have been at the
other end of this room). The young woman sits to milk
her red and white cow (complete with impressive horns),
and her mother sits watchfully, smoking her pipe. Far
from being considered primitive, the family would have
been considered comparatively well off, especially by the
visitor, who stands admiringly on the threshold, as a
potential suitor. A cow was traditionally part of a strong
Dr Claudia Kinmonth
[i] C. Wood, Victorian Painters, Dictionary of British Art, vol. IV (Antique Collector’s Club, 1995), 65.
[ii] H.L. Mallalieu, The Dictionary of British Watercolour Artists up to 1920, vol.2 (Antique Collector’s Club, 1986), 49.
[iii] C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), fig. 84.
[iv] Henry Coulter (1862) quoted in C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), 46-7.
[v] C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), fig.47 shows a detailed watercolour of a county Mayo
byre dwelling by Frances Livesay, dated 1875. [vi] C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), figs.62, 115, 165.
[vii] C. Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 2006), fig. 84.
24
27. BAsIL BRADLEY R.W.s. (1842-1904)
‘Soogaun (or Straw and Hay rope) making, Connemara, Ireland.’
Signed and dated 1880, inscribed verso on canvas with title, artist’s signature and date
Oil on Canvas, 37 x 57cms.
he pair to the byre dwelling image reveals the artist’s
complete understanding of the technique of making
hay or straw rope. Commonly known as súgán, it was
the type of homemade rope that was important for
dozens of uses such as tying down thatched rooves and
haystacks against the westerly Atlantic winds, for
binding the farmers’ legs to protect against mud, for
weaving into the seats of chairs,[i] for tethering animals
or even, when made from shredded bog timber, for
anchoring boats. The painting shows how a heap of hay
or straw is being gathered together and skilfully fed into
a continuous taut twist of rope. The young girl is keeping
the tension even on the rope while twisting it with a hook
(known in some parts of Ireland as thraw hook), and she
walks backwards as the rope lengthens. Viewers of this
image in the c19th might have speculated about the old
man being either a suitor, or her father. The ritual of
twisting rope was often linked to courtship, and a well
known play ‘The Twisting of the Rope’ relates how a
woman who disliked her suitor, waited until he walked
backwards out of the door, and then she dropped the
rope and slammed the door to get rid of him.[ii] Once the
rope is made, then it is rolled back up into a ball (while
keeping it taut, because it is a single twist), and put aside
ready for use. Bradley understood this process and must
have observed it well, because he places such a ball
beside the man’s chair to illustrate the finished product.
shows the girl wearing a ribbon in her hair and a crios, a
belt that she might have woven herself, and which hangs
from her waist. These colourful narrow belts were
typically made and worn on the Aran Islands off the
Galway coast. She is stylish in her nicely cut wool jacket,
with its fitted waist and black lines delineating the hems.
The older women sit by the floor level hearth in the
background, observing the proceedings; attitudes which
are mirrored by the collie dog watching her puppy in the
foreground. The woman who sits with her back to the
window is wearing a brown cloak that probably covers a
basket which is attached to her back. Creels (such as the
one seen inside the doorway) were used for carrying
things, attached around the womens’ heads or shoulders
with straw ropes or súgán. In this way women would
have carted seaweed, fish, potatoes or turf from the bog,
and this is further suggested by the fact that she is the
only woman wearing shoes.
In both this pair of paintings, the young women wear
their red petticoats, without shoes, and have their heads
uncovered as befitted unmarried women. This one
Dr Claudia Kinmonth
T
The cabin interior is sparsely furnished, with a wall
behind the man, which in many houses divided the
fireside bed from the rest of the room. The table, which
bears the artist’s signature and date, is old and worn, and
there are jugs, part of a loaf of bread, and a milk pail on
it. In the absence of a wardrobe, clothes chest or press,
people often hung their clothes up on a length of rope
(again of straw) as can be seen here close to the fire,
where they could be kept dry and clean.
[i] C. Kinmonth, Irish Country Furniture 1700-1950 (Yale University Press, 1993), 52-9, figs 66-7, fig.121.
[ii] Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope) became a one act play by Douglas Hyde in 1901.
25
17. FRAnCIs WILLIAM tOphAM R.W.s. (1808-1877)
‘Gossips at the Holy Well’
Watercolour on paper, 30.5 x 45.5 cm.
Signed and dated lower left, F.W. Topham 1874
B
orn in Leeds, this skilled watercolourist and genre painter visited Ireland repeatedly from the 1840’s onwards,
focusing on the peasantry in the Claddagh and around Connemara. Here he shows children gathering water at a
well, and characteristically he uses body colour, with some scratching out on the girl’s hair in the foreground. Related
titles exhibited by Topham include ‘Gossips at a Well’ (London, Guildhall Art Gallery), ‘The Holy Well’ (Blackburn
Museum & Art Gallery) and ‘At the Holy Well’ (Glasgow Art Gallery)[i]. A father of twelve, he often favoured scenes
of women and children. His work was often engraved for the Illustrated London News, and he was a member of The
Artist’s Society in Clipstone Street, devoted to ‘The systematic study of veritable rustic figures from the life’ (rather
than artists’ models dressed up). He also painted in Wales, Scotland and Spain, where he died in 1877.
[i] C. Wright, with C. Gordon & M. Peskett Smith, British & Irish Paintings in Public Collections (Yale University Press, 2006), p.772.
Dr Claudia Kinmonth
19. sAMuEL McCLOY. (1831-1904)
‘Grand Papa’s Pet’
Watercolour on paper, 24.5 x 33.5 cm.
Signed with monogram
T
his was probably painted in Mc Cloy’s home, 117 Fernlea Road, Balham, London, and the young girl is most likely
one of his daughters. The same interior is depicted in a painting in the Ulster Museum and the Lisburn Museum
26
20. sIR FREDERICK WILLIAM BuRtOn R.h.A. (1816-1900)
‘Elizabeth Emily Vandeleur (1807-60) (née FitzGerald) and her son Crofton Thomas Burton Vandeleur
(1842-81)’,
Signed with the initials: FWB
Dated: 1851
Watercolour on card 66.5 x 46.5cm
Provenance: by descent in the family of the sitters.
B
urton was born into a distinguished family who lived
at Corofin House, County Clare. At an early age he
came to Dublin to study at the Dublin Society’s schools
of drawing where he was taught by Robert Lucius West
and Henry Brocas senior. For the first part of his career he
worked as a miniaturist in watercolours on ivory. He had
been taught the technique by Samuel Lover and Burton’s
style of miniature painting was greatly influenced by
him. Burton’s early training in watercolour painting
influenced his entire artistic life so much so that he
worked entirely in this medium. Burton had a precocious
talent and he first exhibited at the RHA when he was
only 16. Burton was a friend of Thomas Davis, the leader
of the Young Ireland movement. During the 1840s it was
his aim to create a new cultural identity for Ireland and
he hoped that Burton would create a new visual identity
for this vision. Burton travelled extensively in Germany
and eventually gave up painting when he became the
director of the National Gallery, London, in 1874.
There was a family connection between the Burtons and
the Vandeleurs of Kilrush, County Clare. Burton
delighted in painting large watercolour portraits which
gave plenty of scope for capturing the details of dress
and costume. In this portrait the shawl and details of the
boy’s costume are beautifully handled.
Elizabeth Emily Vandeleur was born the daughter of
the Right Hon. Maurice FitzGerald, 18th Knight of
Kerry, MP for County Kerry (1794-1831) and his wife
Maria, daughter of the Right Hon. David Digges La
Touche of Marlay, County Dublin. In 1835 she married
Crofton Thomas Croasdaile Vandeleur (d.1876) captain
of the 34th Regiment, of Wardenstown, County
Westmeath. Their son, Crofton Thomas Burton
Vandeleur was commissioned in the City of Dublin
Artillery and the 12th Lancers. He married Hon.
Maletta Yelverton, the daughter of Viscount Avonmore
and Cecilia O’Keefe. They lived at Moyville, County
Galway and at Wardenstown, County Westmeath. He
was later High Sherriff of County Westmeath.
21. Crofton Thomas Burton Vandeleur (1842-81)
Oval Watercolour on ivory 7.5 x 6.3cm
Inscribed on the backing paper: Crofton T Vandeleur/
afterwards…[indistinct]/of the army…of Wardenstown Westmeath and
Moyville Co. Galway
Framed by Cranfield, 115 Grafton Street, Dublin.
This unfinished miniature by Burton would have been painted c.1848. It was
traditionally thought that by the 1840s he had abandoned miniature painting
altogether for the much larger watercolour portrait. This portrait shows Burton’s
debt to Samuel Lover in the loose handling of the watercolour which he floats in
heavily laden brushstrokes on the ivory surface.
Dr Paul Caffrey
27
23. JAMEs RIChARD MARquIs R.h.A. fl. (1853-1885)
‘Dublin Bay - and Kingstown
Oil on Canvas, 30.7 x 56.3 cm.
Inscribed on original label verso from Cranfield’s, 115 Grafton Street, Dublin
24. JAMEs RIChARD MARquIs R.h.A. fl. (1853-1885)
‘Estuary with Shipping’
Oil on Canvas, 30.7 x 56.3 cm.
Provenance:
Col. Edward James Saunderson PC,JP,DL,MP (1837-1906)
By descent to S. Burdett - Coutts esq., Dorset
B
orn at Castle Saunderson between Butlersbridge and Belturbet, Co. Cavan, the son of Col. Alexander Saunderson,
MP for Cavan and Hon. Sarah Juliana Maxwell, daughter of 6th Baron Farnham.
Having succeeded to his families Cavan estates, in 1865 he married Hon. Helena Emily de Moleyns, daughter of 3rd
Baron Ventry the same year he was elected Liberal MP for Cavan for the first time. Losing his seat in 1874, by the time
he was re-elected to the seat for North Armagh in 1885 he had become a prominent Orangeman and Conserative and
was elected the first leader of the newly formed Irish Unionist Party. He was to lead the party from 1885 until his death,
from pneumonia, in 1906. He was noted for his uncompromising and morally exact speeches thankfully tinged with
a wry sense of humour.
He entered the Cavan Militia (4th battalion Royal Irish Fusiliers) in 1862, was made major in 1875, colonel in 1886 and
ultimately commanded the battalion from 1891-93. In 1900 he suceeded his cousin, Lord Farnham as Lord Lieutenant
of Cavan, a post he retained until his death.
Privately, Col. Saunderson was a keen yachtsman, designing and racing his own yachts on Lough Erne against local
opposition.
A commemorative statue to Col. Saunderson was erected on Market Street, Portadown in 1910.
28
31. BARthOLOMEW COLLEs WAtKIns R.h.A. c. 1833-1891
‘The Old Weir Bridge, Killarney’
Oil on Canvas 33.7 x 52.5cm
Signed, also signed and inscribed on original label verso
Exhibited: Royal Hibernian Academy 1862, Number 298
13. JOhn FAuLKnER R.h.A. c. 1830-1880
‘On the Vartry, County Wicklow’
Watercolour on Paper 45.5 x 79.5cm
Signed and dated 1877 also inscribed on reverse
29
Measurements in centimetres, height precedes width
GALLERY II
GALLERY I
1.
16.
EDWARD LuttRELL fl. 1673-1724
‘From Howth Looking North East’
Illustrated page 21
2.
3.
hELEn COLvILL 1856-1953
Watercolour on paper 30.5 x 40
hORACE hOnE A.R.A. 1754-1825
Signed, also inscribed with Title Verso
Illustrated page 21
Illustrated below
nAthAnIEL hOnE thE ELDER R.A. 1718-1784
Illustrated page 21
4.
JAMEs ARthuR O’COnnOR c. 1792-1841
Illustrated page 14
5.
Illustrated page 14
6.
Illustrated page 14
7.
Illustrated page 12
8.
ChARLEs COLLIns died c. 1744
Illustrated page 10
9.
17.
Illustrated page 26
nAthAnIEL hOnE thE ELDER R.A. 1718-1784
Illustrated page 20
10.
11.
18.
ALOYsIus O’KELLY 1853-1936
ChARLEs COLLIns died c. 1744
‘An Oriental Encounter’
Illustrated page 11
Watercolour heightened with white on card 21x28
Signed and inscribed lower right,
JOhn MuLvAnY c. 1839-1906
Aloysius O’ Kelly, Cairo
Illustrated cover and text pages 2-7
12.
FRAnCIs WILLIAM tOphAM R.W.s., 1808-1877
J.JOhnstOn InGLIs R.h.A. fl. 1885-1903
Illustrated page 15
13.
JOhn FAuLKnER R.h.A c. 1830-1864
Illustrated page 29
14.
JOsEph MALAChY KAvAnAGh R.h.A. 1856-1918
Illustrated page 19
15.
MAtthEW JAMEs LAWLEss 1837-1864
Illustrated pages 16 - 18
O’Kelly first went to Cairo in 1883 and continued to
exhibit Orientalist paintings internationally for almost 30
years. This watercolour features a musician on the right
and is probably connected to the unlocated Soudanese
Minstril exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1891. The
musician is recognizable from an illustration by O’Kelly
in the Illustrated London News (29 November 1890)
which also features a ghaziya, a public dancing girl.
Ghaziyas were highly disapproved of by the authorities.
30
Usually, the husband was subject to the wife; he was her
musician, servant and procurer.
24.
Illustrated page 28
Orientalist paintings are often now understood to
represent the moral negative of the West, but given the
occupation of Ireland by Britain, the very concept of an
Irish Orientalist is fraught with difficulty. The inclusion
of racist or salacious details, therefore, is very rare in
O’Kelly’s work. Apart from the rather unusual figure of
the musician, the painting shows a family group going
about its daily business. O’Kelly tended not to paint
anything that would represent the indigenous
population as debased or degraded,concentrating, as he
does here, on the everyday prose of the city
25.
26.
27.
BAsIL BRADLEY R.W.s. 1842-1904
Illustrated page 25
28.
EDWIn hAYEs R.h.A. R.I. 1820-1904
Illustrated page 22
29.
JOhn FAuLKnER R.h.A. c. 1830-1880
Illustrated page 19
sAMuEL McCLOY 1831-1904
30.
EDWIn hAYEs R.h.A. R.I. 1820-1904
Illustrated below
sIR FREDERICK WILLIAM BuRtOn, R.h.A.
1816-1900
31.
Illustrated page 27
21.
BAsIL BRADLEY R.W.s. 1842-1904
Illustrated page 23
Illustrated pages 26
20.
JAMEs FRAnCIs DAnBY 1816-1875
Illustrated page 22
19.
JAMEs RIChARD MARquIs R.h.A. fl. 1853-1885
BARthOLOMEW COLLEs WAtKIns R.h.A
1833-1891
Illustrated page 29
sIR FREDERICK WILLIAM BuRtOn, R.h.A.
1816-1900
Illustrated page 27
22.
hOWARD hELMICK R.B.A., 1845-1907
Illustrated page 8
23.
JAMEs RIChARD MARquIs R.h.A. fl. 1853-1885
Illustrated page 28
30. EDWIn hAYEs R.h.A. R.I. 1820-1904
‘Poolbeg Light House, Dublin Bay’
Oil on Board 12.7 x 21.6cm
Signed, also signed and inscribed on original label verso
31
NOTES
32

An Exhibition of 17th - 20th Century Irish Paintings

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