By D.J. O'DONOGHUE,
_Librarian, University College, Dublin_.
It would be difficult to dispute, in view of her innumerable and
excellent artists, that there has always been in modern times an art
consciousness in Ireland, but it is impossible to assert that there
has been any artistic unity in her people. She has produced no
school, but merely a great number of brilliant painters, sculptors,
and engravers, chiefly for export. With all our acknowledged artistic
capacity, we have not, except in one notable instance, produced a
cumulative art effect. The history of Irish art is almost uniformly a
depressing narrative. During a comparatively brief period in the
eighteenth century--significantly enough, it was while the country
enjoyed a short spell of national life--there was something like a
national patronage of the artist, and the result is visible in the
noble public buildings and beautiful houses of the Irish capital,
with their universally admired mantelpieces, doors, ceilings,
fanlights, ironwork, and carvings. In short, while Ireland had even a
partly unfettered control of her own concerns, the arts were
generously encouraged by her government and by the wealthy
individual. When other European capitals were mere congeries of
rookeries, Dublin, the centre of Irish political life, possessed
splendid streets, grandly planned. But there was little solidarity
among the artistic fraternity. Various associations of artists were
formed, which held together fairly well until the flight of the
resident town gentry after the Union, and many admirable artists were
trained in the schools of the Royal Dublin Society, but, since the
opening of the nineteenth century, there has been almost no visible
art effort in Dublin. True, there have been many fine artists, who
have made a struggle to fix themselves in Dublin, but, as with the
Royal Hibernian Academy, of which the best of them were members, the
struggle has been a painful agony. Usually the artist migrated to
London to join the large group of Irishmen working there; a few
others went to America and obtained an honored place in her art
annals. Those who went to England secured in many cases the highest
rewards of the profession. Several, like Barry, Hone, Barrett, and
Cotes, were founders or early members of the Royal Academy; one, Sir
Martin Shee, became its President. Nevertheless, many distinguished
artists remained in Dublin, where the arts of portrait-painting and
engraving were carried to a high pitch of excellence.
This record must necessarily be of a chronological character, and can
only take note of those whose works have actual value and interest,
historical or other. Edward Luttrell (1650-1710) did some excellent
work in crayon or pastel, while Garrett Murphy (fl. 1650-1716),
Stephen Slaughter (d. 1765), Francis Bindon (d. 1765), and James
Latham (1696-1747), have each left us notable portraits of the great
Irish personages of their day. To fellow countrymen in London,
Charles Jervas (1675?-1739), Thomas Hickey (d. 1816?), and Francis
Cotes, R.A. (1725-1770), we owe presentments of other famous people.
George Barrett, R.A. (1728-1784), one of the greatest landscapists of
his time; Nathaniel Hone, R.A. (1718-1784), an eccentric but gifted
painter, with an individuality displayed in all his portraits; James
Barry, R.A. (1741-1806), still more eccentric, with grand conceptions
imperfectly carried out in his great historical and allegorical
pictures:--these, with Henry Tresham, R.A. (1749?-1814), and Matthew
Peters, R.A. (1742-1814), historical painters of considerable merit,
upheld the Irish claim to a high place in English eighteenth century
art. A little later, miniaturists such as Horace Hone, A.R.A.
(1756-1825), George Chinnery (1774-1852), and Adam Buck (1759-1844),
also worked with remarkable success in London. Among resident Irish
artists, the highest praise can be given to the miniature painters,
John Comerford (1770?-1832) and Charles Robertson (1760-1821), and to
the portrait-painters, Robert Hunter (fl. 1750-1803) and (especially)
Hugh Douglas Hamilton (1739-1808), of whose work Ireland possesses
many distinguished examples. Some day Hamilton's pictures will appeal
to a far wider public than his countrymen can provide. One must omit
the names of many clever Irish artists like the Wests, Francis and
Robert, who were the most successful teachers of perhaps any time in
Ireland, and come at once to that branch of art in which Ireland
stands second to none--mezzotint-engraving.
One of the earliest engravers in this style was Edward Luttrell,
already named as a painter, but it was John Brooks (fl. 1730-1756)
who is justly considered the real founder of that remarkable group of
Irish engravers whose work may be more correctly described as
belonging to a school than any other of the period. For many years in
Dublin, and afterwards in London, a succession of first-rate artists
of Irish birth produced work which remains and always must remain one
of the glories of Ireland. Limits of space allow only the bare
mention of the names of James McArdell (1728?-1765), Charles Spooner
(d. 1767), Thomas Beard (fl. 1728), Thomas Frye (1710-1762), Edward
Fisher (1722-1785?), Michael Ford (d. 1765), John Dixon (1740?-1811),
Richard Purcell (fl. 1746-1766), Richard Houston (1721?-1775), John
Murphy (1748?-1820), Thomas Burke (1749-1815), Charles Exshaw (fl.
1747-1771), and Luke Sullivan (1705-1771)--artists of whom any
country might be proud, and whose works have in most cases outlasted
the remembrance of the persons whose likenesses they sought to
reproduce. Separate monographs might be justifiably written on most
of the gifted artists here enumerated, and one can only regret not
being able in short space to compare and estimate their various
qualities. Thomas Chambers, A.R.A. (1724?-1784), William Nelson
Gardiner (1766-1814), James Egan (1799-1842), and William Humphreys
(1794-1865) are other Irish engravers who cannot be overlooked in a
survey of the art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.
Contemporaneously with the remarkable development of the art of
engraving arose a group of Irish architects. Rather earlier in point
of time was Sir Edward Lovat Pearce (d. 1733), who was one of the
chief architects of the Irish Parliament House, and Thomas Burgh (d.
1730), to whom we owe the Library of Trinity College, Dublin; but
Thomas Cooley (1740-1784), designer of the handsome Royal Exchange of
that city; Richard Castle (d. 1751), a foreigner who settled in
Ireland and built a number of beautiful Irish residences; Francis
Johnston (1761-1829), an excellent architect whose chief claim to
remembrance, however, is as founder of the Royal Hibernian Academy;
and, above all, James Gandon (1743-1823), whose superb Custom House,
Four Courts, and part of the Irish Parliament House will perpetuate
his name in Dublin while that city lasts--each helped to make the
capital, even in its decay, one of the most interesting in Europe.
Nor should we forget Thomas Ivory (d. 1786), whose Foundling Hospital
is another of Dublin's many graceful edifices; nor Sir Richard
Morrison (1767-1849) and his son William (1794-1838), much of whose
work remains to testify to their skill and ingenuity.
Ecclesiastical architecture in Ireland is indebted to Patrick Byrne
(fl. 1840), James J. McCarthy (d. 1882), J.B. Keane (d. 1859), and
James Murray (1831-1863), for many well designed churches and chapels
throughout Ireland; but the great names in modern Irish architecture
are those of Benjamin Woodward (1815-1861), whose premature death was
a serious loss to Irish art; Sir Thomas Deane (1792-1871); and his
son, Sir Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-1899). The elder Deane was, with
Woodward, the architect of the Oxford Museum and of the splendid
Engineering Hall of Trinity College, Dublin, buildings which have
elicited enthusiastic praise from John Ruskin and other eminent
critics. Deserving of respectful mention, too, to come down to our
own days, are Sir Thomas Drew (1838-1910) and William H. Lynn, who is
still living.
In sculpture, again, Ireland has done memorable work. In the
eighteenth century she gave us admirable craftsmen like Edward Smyth
(1749-1812), John Hickey (1756-1795), and Christopher Hewitson (fl.
1772-1794), whose dignified monument of Bishop Baldwin is one of the
most distinguished pieces of sculpture in Trinity College, Dublin.
But it was not till the appearance of a later group of sculptors,
including John Hogan (1800-1858), John Edward Carew (1785-1868), John
Henry Foley, R.A. (1818-1874), and Patrick MacDowell, R.A.
(1799-1870), that Irish sculpture obtained more than local renown.
Fortunately, most of the best work of Hogan and Foley remains in
Ireland; that of Carew and MacDowell is chiefly to be found in the
Houses of Parliament and other institutions in London. The
incomparable "Goldsmith," "Burke," "Grattan," and other statues by
Foley, together with an almost complete collection of casts of his
other works, are in his native country. Hogan is represented in
Dublin by his "Thomas Davis" and his "Dead Christ," to name but two
of his principal works. The names at least of James Heffernan
(1785-1847), of John Edward Jones (1806-1872), of Terence Farrell
(1798-1876), of Samuel F. Lynn (1834-1876), and perhaps of
Christopher Moore (1790-1863), an excellent sculptor of busts, may be
set down here. Sir Thomas Farrell (1827-1900) and the living
sculptors, John Hughes, Oliver Sheppard, and Albert Bruce Joy, are
responsible for some of the more admirable of the public monuments of
Dublin. It is much to be deplored that of the work of one of the
greatest of Dublin-born artists, Augustus Saint Gaudens, we have only
one example--the statue of Parnell. Ireland may surely claim him as
one of her most gifted sons. And perhaps a word might be said in this
place of some of the other Irishmen who made their home in America:
of Hoban the architect who designed the White House at Washington,
modelling it after Leinster House in Dublin; of painters like Charles
Ingham, W.G. Wall, William Magrath, the Morans, James Hamilton, and
Thomas Hovenden; and of sculptors like John Donoghue, John Flanagan,
Andrew O'Connor, John F. Kelly, Jerome Connor, John J. Boyle, and
Martin Milmore. But they belong rather to the history of American art
than to that of Ireland.
Before leaving the subject of Irish sculpture, the work of the
medallists, an allied branch of the art in which Irishmen did much
valued work, should not be overlooked. The medals of William Mossop
(1751-1805), of his son, William Stephen Mossop (1788-1827), and of
John Woodhouse (1835-1892), to mention only three of its chief
representatives in Ireland, are greatly prized by collectors.
Most modern Irish art of high importance has been largely produced
out of Ireland, which has been perforce abandoned by those artists
who have learned how little encouragement is to be met with at home.
One can blame neither the artist nor the Irish public for this
unfortunate result; there is sufficient reason in the political and
economic condition of Ireland since the Union to explain the fact.
But for this cause men like Daniel Maclise, R.A. (1806-1870), William
Mulready, R.A. (1786-1863), Francis Danby, A.R.A. (1793-1861), and
Alfred Elmore, R.A. (1815-1881), might have endeavored to emulate the
spirit of James O'Connor (1792-1841), the landscapist, Richard
Rothwell (1800-1868), a charming subject painter, and Sir Frederic W.
Burton (1816-1900), one of the most distinguished artists of his
time, who at least spent some of their active working career in their
native land. The same words apply to artists who succeeded in other
branches of the profession, men like John Doyle (1797-1868), a
caricaturist with all the power, without the coarseness, of his
predecessors; his son, Richard Doyle (1824-1883), a refined and
delicate artist; John Leech (1817-1864), the humorist, a member of an
Irish Catholic family; Paul Gray (1842-1866), who died before his
powers had fully matured; and Matthew James Lawless (1837-1864), who
also died too early. William Collins, R.A. (1788-1847) and Clarkson
Stanfield, R.A. (1793-1867), both eminent representatives of English
art, though of Irish extraction, more properly belong to England than
to Ireland.
Not discouraged by the melancholy history of many gifted Irish
artists, Ireland still produces men who are not unworthy of
association with the best who have gone before. Our most recent
losses have been heavy--notably those of Walter F. Osborne
(1859-1903) and Patrick Vincent Duffy (1832-1909), but we still have
artists of genius in the persons of Nathaniel Hone, a direct
descendant of his famous namesake; John Butler Yeats; John Lavery,
A.R.A.; and William Orpen, A.R.A. Many other names might be given,
but already this attempt at a survey suffers by its enumeration of
artists, who, however, could hardly be neglected in such a record.
Crowded as the list may be, it is a careful selection, and it
demonstrates that, notwithstanding all the disadvantages under which
Ireland suffers, the country has an almost unlimited capacity for
fine achievement, and that, with prosperity and contentment, she may
be expected to rival the most illustrious of art centres. It is only
within living memory that any attempt has been made to direct the
known artistic skill of the Irish people to industrial effort. But
the remarkable success achieved in the modern designs for Irish lace
in the English art competitions is an instance of what might be done
generally in the applied arts. Though they are in their infancy, the
new carpet and stained glass industries in Ireland also hold out
considerable hope for the future. But one can only barely indicate
what has been and might be done in the furtherance of Irish art. If
we only had under one roof a judiciously made collection of all the
best work done by Irish artists of all styles and periods, it would
more eloquently justify our claim than endless columns of praise.