The National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin, has holdings from many places, some of them quite good, like the collection of paintings from the Lowlands, and also the very good “The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4th November 1779” wherein Francis Wheatley, a recently arrived Britisher, painted a public and historic scene. The painting flatteringly captures Irish sunshine bathing a busy urban square, people gawking out of Georgian windows at the moment that an honorary gun salute has sent clouds of smoke into the air around a statue of King William III, the smoke billowing like Rubens’ clouds. So the picture may be taken as signifying the connection of Ireland to Britain as a long time thing. Wheatley’s painting also has the slightly higher than eye-level, straight on point of view that since Poussin has given seriousness to paintings by portraying the mythic as historical. The painting was not well appreciated at the time because of what I will consider an Irish aversion to overt political paintings.
All museums answer queries that are asked and some that go unasked. The question I have is this: what is the relationship of the Irish as a people to Ireland as a nation? Ireland is a geographical entity that became an ethnic group long before that term became fashionable as well as long before Ireland struggled for national independence, which was 300 years, or more, depending on when you start the count, before it succeeded in wrestling itself from Great Britain. Ireland had been the off-shore thinking house for all of Christendom when Christendom was relatively young. The struggles with the British conquest that make up what is known as Modern Irish history created that other struggle about whether to be Irish is to be a resident of Ireland or a resident of Catholic Ireland or just connected to Irish nationalism. It is to be remembered that De Valera was an American citizen. Or else Irish ethnicity can be defined as a comic garrulousness founded in a deep sorrow which an anthropologist might trace the distinctiveness of the Irish to the lack of primogeniture or to infant swaddling practices or child rearing practices which tend towards tough love, all of these post hoc explanations in that any difference in an antecedent can be treated as the cause of a cultural difference. Whatever the explanation, the fact of the matter is that the Irish, as Kennelly has said, have moved around the world and not only made an impact on it but retained their identity, whatever became of their nation, which is now independent but had its rebellion too late to save its language or, later, its family structure and distinctive class and family structure, from Westernization.
Two Irish sociologists, Hilary Tovey and Perry Share, distinguish three things: the Irish as a people, which is based on inherited cultural characteristic; the Irish as a nation, which is based on the nationalist ideology developed in many European places during the course of the Nineteenth Century; and the Irish as a state which imposes an identity on the people living there so that they can trade off of it in contacts with Europe and America. The nationalist phase was therefore an interlude between the worldwide scattering of the Irish people and the adoption and fostering of Irishness as a kind of tourist culture, a brand name within Europe.
There is a problem with the second part of this simultaneously historical and conceptual triple. If the legitimacy of the state is based on the nationalism of the people, it would follow the two great events that preceded the establishment of the Irish state would loom large in the cultural heritage of the Irish as a nation, just as the era of the Founding Fathers and, four score and some years later, the American Civil War, serve as the defining events of the American experience, of what it is to be American, the Frontier and Immigration being merely ways in which the American Dream became realized. The two events in nationalist Irish history that would qualify for that role would be two events that are replete with sadness and defeat rather than with, as in the American case, idealism crowned by victory. Those events are the Famine and the Easter Rising. The Famine, however, is hardly represented either in art or in popular culture (there is one statue in memory of the Famine to be found in a Dublin public park, and that is of recent vintage); and the Easter Rising fills only the popular imagination. These subjects, according to the views of Jeffrey Alexander and other contemporary sociologists of culture, would be the subject of interpretation and reinterpretation, a never ending series of ever more refracted and reflected images which could be traced along a time line, from their origin in the events themselves, each point along that line serving as a definition of the culture of its time, sort of like the characteristic mode of a mixture of radioactive and non-radioactive atoms in the course of radioactive decay.
The history of Irish culture doesn’t work that way, at least if you can use as a gauge the history of Irish art that is collected in the National Gallery of Ireland. There is very little portrayal of either of the Famine or the Rising, and even what there is makes less of an impression if you pay attention to the extent to which the art discounts its subject matter. There are no heroic portraits peasants dying or rebels at war. Rather, as far as the Famine is concerned, there are some sentimental genre pictures, more about a late lamented pastoral life than about a cataclysm. One is by Erskine Nicol, a Scotsman: “An Ejected Family” shows a family driven from its cottage for non payment of rent. There is also Daniel MacDonald’s “The Discovery of the Potato Blight”, though this seems a forced subject made to fit the formal requirements of a classical painting, the peasants neatly and interestingly arranged as they are surprised and devastated by the sight of the damaged potatoes. Were they surprised that such a thing could happen or that their own potatoes were so damaged? It all seems posed anyway, a Baroque painting set in the realist Nineteenth Century without the fluidity and detail of the Baroque.
A different thesis about nations is required if one is to make sense of Irish painting in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. John Motley and other Nineteenth Century historians thought that the character of a people is forged at the dawn of that people by the physical environment which tests them. So the Lowlanders are formed, according to Motley, by the marshland and the heavy seas that surround them, which also turn out to be a strategic location from which to build up a seafaring power serving and serviced by a vigorous agriculture pursued by having tamed the seas. The Irish, for their part, also have the strategic advantage of being a place where the cultures that surround them wash up upon their shores, the Scots, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Scandinavians all connected to them only across water.
The Irish, if Motley is correct, are a people rather than a nation, and their state does not foist but rather cannot quell the Celtic inheritance, as that has been specialized by their island environment, which creates a melancholy disposition that pervades the culture and explains a preference for moody landscapes in somber colors as much as does the quality of light available in the northern latitudes. There is not much room for politics here because what is felt is a despair about individual and collective selves that is beyond political solution. Unlike the Romans and the British and the Americans, there is no political genius here (despite Pat Moynihan’s insistence that a genius for politics was what the Irish immigrants brought with them when, in fact, it is what the Irish created here, their secret being their ability to adapt family structures having to do with patience and obedience to the organizations that can come to dominate the larger community). Rather, there is only the genius of a soul permeated with the sense of life as infinitely sad and therefore to be mocked with a gallows humor applied to everyday experience.
The image that can serve as an icon of that perception is Walter Frederick Osborne’s “In a Dublin Park: Light and Shade” (1895), which is usually noted only as the result of Impressionist influences. A Nineteenth Century interest in the portrayal of the poor is indeed combined with Impressionist brushstrokes and multi-sourced light. But look more carefully at the overt subject matter and its arrangement. The people in the picture might be sitting for a family group portrait except for all the ways they are not posed according to the conventions known to family portraiture. They do not turn on smiles for the portraitist; they do not relate to one another or find ways to shed light on their family story, as would happen in portraits of the rich. Rather, each are in isolation and each conveys sadness, the mother holding the child, the man in the family who already seems old, and what is perhaps the grandfather in his campaign hat, looking gnarled and frail. The little boy is already overwhelmed by his sorrow. Moreover, they are sitting together on a crowded bench, though barely touching, and so do not convey any group solidarity. In the background is a wall too high for the viewer to see over and so barring the viewer from the expansiveness that is characteristic of Impressionist painting. The flower covered wall also shrouds those on the bench in a complicatedly presented set of shadows that allow the old man’s beard and the woman’s white skirt to catch highlights. You wonder why they bothered to come to the park if they were going to sit in shadow. They are a sad lot, not a poor lot. Nor is this sadness attributable to some deficiency of the modern world which is moving peasant traditions out of the way. There is no reason to think these people have been displaced from their homes or are doing anything but taking an afternoon on a park bench. It is just that they bring their sadness to the bench and will take it home with them.
The same mood is conveyed by Sarah Purser in “Le Petit Dejeuner” (1881), a portrait again referred to the Impressionist influence that is clear from both its title, the Parisian training of the artist, and the subject matter. I would hazard, however, that there is little reason to read alienation into the picture, that making more sense, for example, as a way to describe the barmaid in Manet’s “Le Bar aux Folies-Bergere” (1881-2) who is nothing more than a reflection in the glass caught unawares by a customer about to ask her for a drink and only then having to return from her reverie and take up her role again. There is nothing that signals that the person in “Le Petit Dejeuner” is unhappy with her life, only that she is unhappy as she sits there in a comfortable room eating her breakfast at a public café, one presumes, because she is a bit dressed up to be eating in her own dining room. The nice artistic touch in the painting is the white ruff that serves as a collar and then descends down the front of her brown dress and contrasts, as well, with the brown hat and its tie around her neck and with the third color in the room, the shades of olive that are the wallpaper, the lamp decoration and the cabinet holding the china. The cup and the scone in front of her stand out as contrasting colors to the three color design, as does one cup in the cabinet (it has a red and green pattern) and, perhaps the table cloth on which the cup and scone rest, which is beige and so perhaps more like the chair off to the side rather than the background in olive. That is not to speak of the mirror which has much going on within it. All in all, a complex composition that makes the stillness of the woman all the more visible, something less explained than observed.
Sadness with a biblical ring is the subject of William Orpen’s “The Holy Well” where the scene of a peasant traditional ritual is used to imagine a collective reenactment of the banishment of Adam and Eve from Eden. Couples undress and then are sent away from the site of the cross crestfallen at their embarrassment, the priest looking at them censoriously while another figure a bit higher than the priest looks down at them while standing before a tree that may be a rather shabby rendition of the tree of knowledge. Sexuality is thus made tawdry, the shame of immodesty the kernel of the Adam and Eve story, when that story is really a Promethean image of a god defying couple, and the Eden that is left in this picture is the church that has been visible since the coming of Jesus but that has always been there, even in the time of Eden. The allegory has the church replace the idea of the natural state as the context in which the human race lives, the church punishing an immodesty that can no longer be conceived as natural, as the opposite of civilization, but only as perverse, the opposite of what the church dictates.
This painting of 1916, so modern in its colors, perspectives and loose arrangement of figures, is contrary to the discovery of sexuality so prevalent in Modernism, in Irish authors at least as much as in any other set of artists. The picture suggests a clericalism so dominant as to defy contradiction, something which those two Irish sociologists, Tovey and Share, say takes hold after the Famine and from which Ireland is not released until recent years, which is another reason to think that the Rebellion was only a passing moment in the adaptation of ancient Irish ways to the modern world, however much Irish writers and poets during the time surrounding the Rebellion were, for the most part, on the forefront of Modernism. Moreover, the sexual prurience of the picture—that is its subject as well as its theme—is represented, perhaps, by the full frontal nudity of the males in both Hugh Douglas Hamilton’s “Cupid and Psyche in the Nuptial Bower” (1792-3) and James Barry’s “The Temptation of Adam” (1767-70). The female figure in each of these duets has her genitals covered, suggesting that there is more immodesty in a woman showing her private parts than a man doing so because men have no natural (or post-Edenic) modesty. This double standard is just the opposite of the one that dominates other Western art, where women become open to view without the use of mythologizing only in Nineteenth Century art while, for the most part, men do not show themselves until the late Twentieth Century.
Tovey and Share also point out that the Church became overwhelmingly important in Irish life after the Famine and did not loosen its grip until quite recently, and so it is perhaps better to call that same set of years Ireland’s clerical period rather than its nationalist period. References to politics in this period are oblique, more concerned with references to the pathetic condition of mankind rather than to the particularities of the historical moment. It should be remembered that even before clericalism became so dominant in Ireland, not many direct political pictures of the sort abundant in David and Goya and Turnbull were found in the Irish art that is supposedly derivative of Continental styles of painting. Rather, politics is allegorical and so only psychologically presented, the exceptions to this rule largely coming from before the Nineteenth Century. A premier example of the oblique style is Richard Moynan’s “Military Manoeuvres” (1891), which is one of the artist’s many genre paintings of village street life. In this one, an officer of a red uniformed regiment is mocked by boys from the village and is faced off by a boy in a military like costume who stands at the other end of the picture. The two stare one another down across the picture, the boys distributed across the middle of the picture taking the side of the older boy while an older girl forward of but sharing the same narrow left hand piece of the picture with the officer also stares at the mock soldier. There is something ominous about this picture, the mock soldier a threat from the future, those ragtag irregulars who will loose Ireland from Britain. That is not just hindsight borne by history and the knowledge that Moynan was a unionist cartoonist. It comes from the structure of the picture whose angles set up the opposition of the two parts and allow the ragamuffin soldier to be as large as the regular officer and where most of the picture is taken up by the motley army.
A second premier example of politics subsumed by other themes is Sean Keating’s “An Allegory” (1922) which portrays men of power and a woman and child and a slumbering or dead man next to a gravedigger on a lawn before a great house. This picture is read as a despairing image of a civil war in which some of those who waged a war of independence bury former comrades they turned upon or who turned upon them. Even if that were the case, it would point to a sense of Ireland as a place of damnation, a kind of circle of hell for those who betray their own and their cause in the name of a heightened rhetoric. It can also be read as another version of “In a Dublin Park”: Irish people sitting close next to one another without significant communication, the politician and clergyman talking only to one another while the mother tends to her child, the gravedigger tends to his task, and the dead or sleeping man attending to no one.
Irish art is often enigmatic rather than merely oblique. A particularly problematic painting is William Mulready’s “The Toy Seller”. It is reminiscent of the American William Mount because its central figure is a black man. He is offering a toy to a child who is turning away and a mother who is distant. Is this a scene from everyday life, in that there were perhaps itinerant toy sellers who were ex-slaves who had escaped from America and whose strangeness might make them frightening or off-putting despite the evident desire of this toy seller to please the child? Whatever, there is more in the picture than that. The setting of the picture is an extended background of trees and hills that are culled from a Netherlandish painting of Mary and Child. So Mulready’s is a picture of Mary and Child favored by the attendance of an angel. In this version, however, Gabriel is frightening although approachable, Mary is stoic rather than overcome with ecstasy, and the child is fearful, which is not how the Jesus child is often imagined. That is very different from William Butler Yeats’ view in his poem “The Magi” that the child Jesus is awesome because it is God who has become this baby. That is the presence which the Magi attended too, finding that more satisfying than the Crucifixion. The Incarnation, which is at the beginning rather than the end of the story, is at the heart of the glorious mystery of Christianity, however pagan a notion that might be. “The Toy Seller” is therefore another version of that Irish melancholy which identifies the church with gloom and shame rather than joyousness.
Irish art is thought of as derivative in that it is an inevitably inferior copy of the styles from which it draws, which is to be expected of an artistic community made up mostly of a small number journeymen not much better than illustrators or low bore family portraitists who received not the best of training at secondary art schools on the Continent. The truth of the matter is more complex. There are, indeed, few innovations in style, and even the use of color is in mimicry of places where the light is “better” and colors more vivid. But the color is true to the light of its own place, however it fails as a representation of elsewhere, and the themes are distinctively Irish in the Nineteenth Century and later, and even Celtic before that and aside from the Celtic Revival at the end of the Nineteenth Century. This is to say that there is little that can suppress the spirit of a people even if its matter and its themes are expressed through the spirit of an age.
Western nations make signal contributions to the Western enterprise. Indeed, what may be one of the hallmarks of the West is that there are national differences in what are the always international movements of Western art (and culture and politics) that are known as the Renaissance and the Baroque and the Romantic. Indeed, what else does it mean to be a nation (a very Western notion) than that a people find and give voice to themselves in their art? Europe (and America) are not just in civil war between their parts (until the Pax Americana came to prevail after the Second World War); they are also in a competition in which each nation understands what are the rules for being the best or being worthy in the arts and the sciences, in technology or scholarship, in religion and political structure. The nations know where they rank in these various fields of endeavor. The Irish, a small nation, have done well for themselves over the millennia in the arts and in scholarship and in religion, though strikingly less well in some other fields, as they are well aware. Perhaps the Nobel people are right in thinking that awards (at least in literature and peace) honor nations and not just individuals. There should also be a Nobel Prize for art so that small nations can get their due.