The Knight’s noble rescue
John McEwen
PAINTING IN IRELAND: TOPOGRAPHICAL VIEWS FROM GLIN CASTLE edited by William Laffan Churchill House Press, 45 Euros, pp. 269, ISBN 0955024617 This handsome and scholarly book is a catalogue of a selection of pictures of Ireland, all, remarkably, collected over the past 30 years by Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glin, for his famous country seat in west Limerick, where his family have held sway since 1350. It whets the appetite for the next major publication by the Knight (with James Peill), a history of Irish furniture.
Forty years ago, when the Knight first made his scholarly mark as a collaborator with Desmond Guinness and others on the pioneering exhibition ‘Irish Houses and Landscapes’, Ireland was an economic and cultural backwater. Today, as 250,000 people annually up sticks to escape the horrors of London, civilised and prosperous Ireland is of course acclaimed one of the most desirable places on earth.
The Knight has been a considerable force in the renaissance, which accounts for this tribute on behalf of 16 of his peers, the cream of Irish academe. The breadth of knowledge exemplified by these experts indicates the collection’s scope. Inevitably, when architecture is the dominant subject, attention centres on the Protestant Ascendancy; but urban scenes, landscapes, gardens, cottages, ruins and interiors encompass art, architecture, sociology and local history; and a similar breadth informs the choice of artists, which ranges from the 18th century to the present and includes the often charming views by amateurs, anonymous or otherwise.
It is interesting to see so many women painters and, sign of the times, to find the majority of the specialist contributors are women. Two of the finest historic artists are Susanna Drury (173376), with two views (one spectacular) of the Giant’s Causeway; and the watercolourist Mildred Anne Butler (18581941); while Lindy Guinness helps fly the contemporary feminine flag with a dashing gouache in pinks and duck-egg green of ‘The Music Room, Clandeboy’, her home in County Down.
The notable support of contemporary artists is refreshing. Louis le Brocquy, with the wateriest of watercolours, a ‘rain watercolour’ as he calls it (several Irish artists have succumbed after a soaking), is one of several who make their modern contribution to the long history of pictures of Glin. And among the few pure landscapes are a sunny pair by the unfairly unsung portraitist Oswald Birley (1880-1952) and a dark one of Ben Bulben by Derek Hill (1916-2000) at his peaty best.
Each picture is discussed in an exemplary entry in accordance with the Knight’s own rigorously factual method of investigation, which disdains the woolliness of theory and criticism and has accordingly been decried in one instance as the ‘preciosity of connoisseurship’ — which is baloney. The bedrock of connoisseurship is correct attribution and one of its practical consequences is accurate conservation, not least of buildings and archaeological sites. The mess that Irish art history used to be was epitomised by two representatives of Christie’s who visited Glin in 1938 and noted ‘a few poor 18th-century portraits which they think far too much of’. The portraits are now known to be important works by the likes of Latham and Hussey.
Some of the finest of Glin’s topographical pictures have been similarly identified. Even the Knight, who, ironically, is a Christie’s consultant, in his youth had never heard of the splendid Limerick artist Jeremiah Hodge Mulcahy (1804-89). This painstaking research continues, as a charmingly ‘Italianate view of Dublin Bay from Blackrock, Co. Dublin’ demonstrates. Thought to be by William Ashford, it has now been correctly attributed by the Knight to John Thomas Serres (1759-1825). Such studious scholarship is giving back Ireland its history — and its rightful pride.
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