Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader

By Roisin Kennedy

Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader is an anthology of literary and critical sources for the study of visual art and Ireland. It is a completely new version of the 2000 publication, Sources in Irish Art with an additional editor, brand new texts with the historical range stretching from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Divided into four sections, Art historiography, Nationalism and identity, the Wider world, and Art and text, the sources included are taken from letters, travel diaries, antiquarian writings, art dictionaries, accounts of collections, memoirs, essays, exhibition catalogues and reviews, and government enquiries.The sources range from the letters of Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century regarding the conservation of funerary monuments in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin to a 2010 essay on the impact of the sexuality of the modern Irish artist, Gerard Dillon on his practice. While many of the earlier sources refer to art produced in the colonial period, those of the twentieth and twenty-first century relate to art produced in an independent Ireland and in the newly created Northern Ireland. In recent years there has been a dramatic upsurge in research and publishing on Irish art that has produced new writings and new approaches which has furthered the rediscovery of forgotten or overlooked texts. This anthology aims to make such texts easily available to the general reader, the student or teacher. While well-known names in Irish art from Jack B. Yeats to Alice Maher feature in this anthology, the editors also offer commentary from international voices such as Gustave Courbet, Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard and Thomas McEvilley. The diversity and broad chronological range of texts offer unique and exceptional insights into the issues and ideas that influenced the production and responses to art in Ireland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cork University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781782054689

Book preview

Sources in Irish Art 2

A READER

Figure 1, Janet Mullarney, Domestic Gods I, 1997, wood, mixed media, chair, gold leaf, 145 x 43 x39 cm, Collection of Irish Museum of Art, Donation, 2018

Sources in Irish Art 2

A READER

Edited by Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy

First published in 2021 by

Cork University Press

Boole Library

University College Cork

Cork T12 ND89

Ireland

© the editors 2021

Library of Congress Control Number: 00029026

ISBN: 9781782054573

Distribution in the USA: Longleaf Services, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known as hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2.

Book design and typesetting by Studio 10 Design, Cork

Printed by Gutenberg Press, Malta

Cover image: Janet Mullarney, Domestic Gods I, 1997, wood, mixed media, chair, gold leaf, 145 x 43 x 39cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Donation, 2018

www.corkuniversitypress.com

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

List of Illustrations

Copyright Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. ART HISTORIOGRAPHY

1. Thomas Wentworth and Jonathan Swift

1.i from Wentworth’s letters 1630s

1.ii from Swift’s letters 1729–30

2. John Dunton

from Journal of Thomas Dineley 1698

3. Edward Lhwyd

from Antiquities and Natural History of Ireland 1712

4. George Vertue

from Note Books, 3 1740

5. Beaumont Brenan, Robert Jephson, Matthew Pilkington

5.i from The Painter’s Breakfast 1756

5.ii from Jeoffry Wagstaffe 1769

5.iii from The Gentleman’s and Connoisseur’s Dictionary of Painters 1770

6. Edmund Powlett

from The General Contents of the British Museum 1762

7. On James Barry

from Public Characters of 1800–1801 1801

8. Nathaniel Hone

8.i from The Exhibition of Pictures 1775

8.ii from the Royal Academy of Arts Archives 1775

9. James Dowling Herbert

from Irish Varieties, 1836

10. Richard Sainthill

from Proceedings of the RIA 1857–61

11. Frances Power Cobbe

from ‘What shall we do with our old maids?’ 1862

12. Rosa Mulholland

from The Irish Monthly 1889

13. George Moore

from Modern Painting 1893

14. House of Commons Museums Committee

from Celtic Ornaments Found in Ireland 1898

15. Frederick Goodall

15.i from Reminiscences 1902

15.ii from The People’s Journal 1847

16. Thomas MacGreevy

from Father Mathew Record 1944

17. Nano Reid

from Envoy 1951

18. Dorothy Walker

from Hibernia 1970

19. Lucy Cotter

from Third Text 2005

20. Riann Coulter

from Éire-Ireland 2010

CHAPTER 2. NATIONALISM AND IDENTITY

21. Thomas Wright

from Louthiana 1748

22. Joseph Cooper Walker and Sylvester O’Halloran

22.i from List of Subjects for Painters 1790

22.ii from The Nation 1843

23. Waterhouse & Company

from Ornamental Irish Antiquities 1852

24. Henry O’Neill and Oscar Wilde

24.i from Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland 1857

24.ii from The Nation 1878

25. Matthew Arnold

from On the Study of Celtic Literature 1867

26. Margaret Stokes

from Early Christian Art in Ireland 1887

27. Grant Allen

from Fortnightly Review 1891

28. George Russell

from Daily Express 1898

29. Patrick Pearse

from An Claidheamh Soluis 1908

30. Jack B. Yeats

from Modern Aspects of Irish Art 1922

31. Mainie Jellett

from ‘A Word on Irish Art’ 1942

32. Brian O’Doherty

from Studies 1961

33. Françoise Henry

from Irish Art in the Early Christian Period 1965

34. Micheal Farrell

‘Artist’s Statement’ 1965

35. Brian Fallon

from Tony O’Malley 1984

36. Louis le Brocquy

from American Irish Historical Society 1981

37. Cheryl Herr

from Critical Inquiry 1990

38. Fionna Barber

from The Irish Review 2008

CHAPTER 3. THE WIDER WORLD

39. London-Derry Journal , John Gamble

39.i from London-Derry Journal 1783

39.ii from John Gamble, Society and Manners 1813

40. Thomas Hickey

from ‘Memorial to the East India Company’ 1804

41. John Sproule

from The Irish Industrial Exhibition 1853

42. Gustave Courbet

from letter to Champfleury 1854

43. Edward Lees Glew

from Donnybrook Fair 1865

44. Ford Madox Brown

from Exhibition Catalogue 1865

45. Evie Hone

from Exhibition of Cubist Paintings, Dublin Painters Gallery 1929

46. Samuel Beckett

from The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1938

47. Herbert Read

from The Bell 1944

48. Ernie O’Malley

from The Bell 1947

49. Clement Greenberg

from Artforum 1968

50. John Kindness

from Circa 1984

51. Lucy Lippard

from Divisions, Crossroads, Turns of Mind: Some new Irish art 1985

52. Thomas McEvilley

from From Beyond the Pale 1994

53. Daniel Jewesbury

from Circa 1998

54. Gavin Murphy

from Printed Project 2005

CHAPTER 4. ART AND TEXT

55. Susanna Drury

Inscription on Vivarès’ print after Susanna Drury 1743/4

56. George Petrie

from Proceedings of the RIA 1850

57. Whitley Stokes

from Fraser’s Magazine 1855

58. William Orpen

Letters, National Gallery of Ireland Archive 1907

59. Edward Delaney

from Wolfe Tone Memorial 1967

60. Alice Maher

from Distant Relations 1994

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To the various individuals who assisted us especially during the Covid-19 pandemic: Katie Blackwood, Mary Jane Boland, David Britton, Carla Briggs, Joyce Burnstein, Brendan Cassidy, Lucy Cotter, Riann Coulter, Anne Cormican, Philip Cottrell, Eamon Delaney, Tom Dunne, Nicola Figgis, Adrian FitzGerald, Margaret MacNamidhe, Alan Ford, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Anne Hodge, Liam Kelly, Pierre le Brocquy, Breandán MacSuibhne, Joseph McBrinn, Philip McEvansoneya, Emer McGarry, Niamh McNally, Bruce McPherson, Alice Maher, Con Manning, Joanna Marston, Patrick Maume, Jane Maxwell, Julia Merritt, Brenda Moore McCann, Lynda Mulvin, Gavin Murphy, Peter Murray, Cormac O’Malley, Laurent Olivier, Mark Pomeroy, Karen Reihill, Brendan Rooney, Nicky Saunders, Kim Sloan, Corinne Thonier, Robert Towers, James Whitman Toftness, Nicholas Wolf, Epifanio Vaccaro, and a special word of thanks to Janet Mullarney (1952–2020) for allowing us to use her work as the cover illustration.

A grant has been provided by the National University of Ireland towards the costs of this publication for which we are most grateful. Thanks also to Lucy, Leon and Andy Folan, and Dennis, Katherine and Diarmuid Kennedy; and to Felicity Woolf, Ruairí Cullen and Sam Cullen.

Many thanks to the two anonymous readers supplied by Cork University Press who read earlier drafts of the anthology and offered astute advice and comment, which we know has made this a better anthology of sources, and to Maria O’Donovan and Mike Collins at Cork University Press.

Our thanks also to the digital repositories of research material that have helped make so much of the material in this anthology accessible to a world readership. All these repositories are fully acknowledged with web links in the various entries that follow; most are free, some demand a fee while others are available through institutional libraries. These repositories include: aran.library (access to research at NUI Galway); archive.org; arts.ulster.ac.uk; biodiversity library; dib.cambridge.org; google books; hathitrust digital library; issuu; jstor; macgreevy.org; oxforddnb.com; project muse; tandfonline.com; v1. zonezero.com.

Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy

October 2020

ABBREVIATIONS

All sources are referred to as entries and are numbered 1–60.

In a few entries some of the sources’ original notes have been maintained and are indicated by [Orig. note]

Some entries have two or three subsections. These are clearly indicated.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Janet Mullarney, Domestic Gods I, 1997, wood, mixed media, chair, gold leaf, 145 x 43 x 39cm, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Donation, 2018 [cover and frontispiece]

2. Thomas Dineley, Boyle Monument, from ‘Observations in a voyage through the Kingdom of Ireland’, 1681, ink on paper, 24.5 x 16cm. Courtesy of the NLI, MS 392, f. 18

3. Edward Lhwyd/William Jones, survey of Newgrange, 1699, ink and graphite on paper, 460 x 300cm. Trinity College Dublin Library MS 883/2/90 © The Board of Trinity College Dublin

4. Nathaniel Grogan, Portrait of Catherine FitzGerald, Countess of Desmond, 1806, mezzotint and etching, sheet: 44.5 x 31cm. NGI. Photograph © NGI

5. Photograph of Nano Reid, c. 1950. Courtesy of Karen Reihill

6. Gerard Dillon, Self-Contained Flat, c. 1955, oil on hardboard, 121.5 x 183.2cm, BELUM.U4974 © National Museums Northern Ireland, Collection Ulster Museum

7. Paul Fourdrinier, Ballymascanlan Portal Tomb, 1748, 24 x 30cm, engraving from Thomas Wright, Louthiana, Book 3, plate V. Courtesy of the NLI

8. Henry O’Neill, ‘East Side of the North Cross, Kilklispeen’, now known as the North Ahenny Cross, County Tipperary, tinted lithograph, 1853–7, 57cm in height, from Illustrations of the Most Interesting of the Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland (London: Henry O’Neill, 1857). Courtesy of the NLI

9. Jack Butler Yeats at his easel with A Fair Day, County Mayo, 1935, photograph. Y1/JY/7/2/30, Yeats Archive, Photograph © NGI

10. Patrick Collins, Liffey Quaysides, 1957, oil on board, 107 x 129.5cm, NGI 4692, The Estate of Patrick Collins. Photograph © NGI

11. Helen Hooker O’Malley, Louis le Brocquy on Achill, Co. Mayo, 1945, photograph. Photograph courtesy of Cormac O’Malley and Gallery of Photography, Dublin

12. Micheal Farrell, Madonna Irlanda or the Very First Real Irish Political Picture, 1977, acrylic on canvas, 174 x 185.5cm. Collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin © Estate of Micheal Farrell, Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation (IVARO), Dublin, 2020

13. Christian Daniel Rauch, Seated Victory, Throwing a Wreath, marble, 1838–44, 223 x 106 x 90cm, Nationalgalerie Berlin © bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Andres Kilger

14. Mainie Jellett, Composition, 1930, gouache on paper, 40 x 30cm. Collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (Reg. No. 1692)

15. François Vivarès after Susanna Drury, The East Prospect of the Giant’s Causeway in the County of Antrim in the Kingdom of Ireland, 1743–4, etching on paper, 413 x 672mm. © The Trustees of the British Museum

16. The ‘Tara’ Brooch, late seventh or early eight century CE, cast silver-gilt, gold filigree and other inlays, amber and polychrome glass, length of pin 32cm, ring diameter 8.7cm, Dublin, National Museum of Ireland. UK/Bridgeman Images

17. Frederic William Burton, Hellalyle and Hildebrand or The Meeting on the Turret Stairs, 1864, watercolour and gouache on paper, 95.5 x 60.8cm, NGI. Photograph © NGI

18. William Orpen, The Vere Foster Family, 1907, oil on canvas, 198 x 198cm. NGI. Photograph © NGI

19. William Orpen, It’s a Big Job (Self portrait with Philippa), 1907, graphite on paper, 22.2 x 17.5cm, NGI. Photograph © NGI

20. Edward Delaney, Wolfe Tone, 1967, bronze, 274cm, Dublin, St Stephen’s Green. Photograph courtesy of the Office of Public Works

21. Alice Maher, Folt, 1993, oil on paper, pins, hair braids, 103 x 124.5cm. Artist’s collection. Photograph courtesy Alice Maher

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Our thanks to the copyright-holders of texts and images and for their permission for us to edit where necessary.

Extract from Samuel Beckett’s letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 30 January 1938, reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London and The Letters of Samuel Beckett, © The Estate of Samuel Beckett 2009, published by Cambridge University Press. British Library Board. Extracts from Lucy Cotter’s ‘Art Stars and Plasters on the Wounds: Why have there been no great Irish artists?’, reproduced by kind permission of Richard Dyer, editor in chief, Third Text. Extracts from translation of Gustave Courbet’s letter to Champfleury, reproduced by permission of Arts Council England. Extracts from Riann Coulter’s ‘Gerard Dillon: Nationalism, homosexuality, and the modern Irish artist’ reproduced by kind permission of Irish-American Cultural Institute (IACI), publishers of Éire-Ireland. Micheal Farrell’s ‘Artist’s Statement’ reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Micheal Farrell. Extract from Françoise Henry’s Irish Art in the Early Christian Period (to 800 A.D.) reproduced by kind permission of Mme Corinne Thonier. Louis le Brocquy’s ‘A Painter’s Note on his Irishness’ reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Louis le Brocquy. Edward Delaney’s ‘The Casting of the Statue of Wolfe Tone’ reproduced by kind permission of Eamon Delaney. Evie Hone’s ‘Mainie Jellett – Cubist Paintings’ reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Evie Hone and the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland. John Kindness, Letter to Circa, and extracts from Daniel Jewesbury ‘Art and Society: Race isn’t an Irish issue’ reproduced by kind permission of Circa. Extract from Thomas MacGreevy, ‘Writers on Art’ reproduced by kind permission of Trinity College Dublin and the Estate of Thomas MacGreevy. Extracts from Gavin Murphy, ‘Same Difference: Surrealism and Irish art’ reproduced by kind permission of Visual Artists Ireland. Extract from Herbert Read’s essay ‘On Subjective Art’ reproduced by kind permission of David Higham Associates. Extract from Nano Reid, ‘The Artist Speaks’ reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Nano Reid. Extracts from Ernie O’Malley, ‘The Background of the Arts in Mexico’, reproduced by kind permission of Cormac O’Malley. Extracts from Clement Greenberg’s essay ‘Poetry of Vision’ © Clement Greenberg, Poetry of Vision, Artforum, April 1968. Extracts from Thomas McEvilley’s essay in From Beyond the Pale, reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Thomas McEvilley, William Orpen’s letters reproduced by kind permission of the National Gallery of Ireland and the Estate of William Orpen. Extracts from Dorothy Walker, ‘Art as Political Protest’ reproduced by kind permission of the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL). Extracts from the Wentworth letters are reproduced by permission of Sheffield City Archives; the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments have been accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government and allocated to Sheffield City Council.

We acknowledge the kind permission given by the following writers to reproduce extracts from their work: Fionna Barber, Lucy Cotter, Riann Coulter, Brian Fallon, Cheryl Herr, Daniel Jewesbury, John Kindness, Lucy Lippard, Alice Maher, Gavin Murphy and Brian O’Doherty.

Our thanks also to the following individuals who assisted us in gaining copyright for either texts or images: Leah Benson; Andrew Moore; Mary Clare O’Brien; Donna Rose, Library and Centre for the Study of Irish Art, NGI; Elizabeth Bray, BM Images, London; Darragh Shanahan, Gallery of Photography, Dublin; Jenny Fitzgibbon, National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL); Jeff Gibson, Artforum; Jacquie Moore, and Louise Kelly, Office of Public Works (OPW) Art Management Group; Johanna Mullen, Irish Museum of Modern Art; Philip Rowe, the Hugh Lane Gallery; Felicity O’Mahony, Manuscripts Department, Library of Trinity College Dublin; Sabine Schumann, bpk-Bildagenthur, Berlin; Sharon Sutton and Digital Collections in the Library of Trinity College Dublin; Nora Thornton and James Harte, NLI; Chris Walsh, Irish Visual Artists Rights Organisation (IVARO); Stephen Weir, Picture Library Executive, National Museums of Northern Ireland.

Every effort has been made to gain the copyright permissions for material quoted herein. Any omissions will be corrected in reprints of future editions of this book.

INTRODUCTION

In compiling a second edition of Sources in Irish Art (Sources 2), we offer a new collection of literary and critical sources for the study of Irish art. The historical range has been broadened to reach further back than the early eighteenth century, which was the starting point in the 2000 edition, and given that the earlier edition of this book is now twenty years old, we include some twenty-first-century material. While Fintan Cullen compiled that first edition on his own, this new edition has two editors, Fintan Cullen, who chose the pre-1900 material, and Róisín Kennedy, who chose the post-1900 material. This book is not about artists’ visual sources per se, rather it is about how art has been discussed since the seventeenth century and into the twenty-first century.

The presentation of the material is much the same as before, except that for many of the inclusions, a digital reference is now being supplied where possible, along with the manuscript, published book or journal source. Over the past few years, the digital availability of texts has expanded enormously. While producing the first edition of this book in 2000, such digital referencing was unimaginable; now readers around the world can easily access a huge range of the texts used in this anthology online. Through this democratisation of knowledge we hope that the excerpts and references offered will lead readers to a host of new reading experiences, be it a mid-eighteenth-century play (entry 5.i), a letter to The Nation in 1878 (entry 24.ii), the art criticism of Thomas MacGreevy in the 1940s (entry 16), or an analysis of 1970s Irish art (entry 18).

This second edition of Sources in Irish Art offers a larger historical breadth of sources than was the case in the earlier publication and such a range widens the art historical discourse regarding Irish art and visual culture over a period that stretches from the seventeenth century to the present day. In compiling the range of historical sources on things visual in Ireland, the editors do not just concentrate on visual analysis, but prioritise texts that also offer historical context, an indication of attitudes towards works of art, as well as the prejudices and preoccupations of the times. The sources have been chosen from letters, travel diaries and/or accounts, antiquarian writings, anecdote, satire, art dictionaries, accounts of collections, memoirs, essays, exhibition catalogues and reviews, and government inquiries.

Since the first edition of Sources in Irish Art (Sources 1), there has been a dramatic upsurge in research and publishing on Irish art that has not only produced new writings and new approaches but also furthered the rediscovery of forgotten or overlooked texts. The publication in 2014 of Art and Architecture of Ireland in five volumes under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy has greatly extended our awareness of Irish art and visual culture/heritage from the early-Christian period to the twenty-first century.¹ While a few of the authors included in Sources 1 (for example, George Moore, Mainie Jellett, Fionna Barber and Ernie O’Malley) reappear in this second edition (entries 13, 31, 38, 48 respectively), none of the extracts in this edition were included in the original Sources. The focus of this collection of comments is largely on the pictorial arts, painting in particular, but in putting together this anthology of sources in Irish art, a more fluid definition of relevant textual material on the visual has been in operation. Examples are the inclusion of one of the earliest recorded encounters with the Neolithic site at Newgrange (entry 3) and the rediscovery of Irish antiquities in the mid-nineteenth century (entry 56). Other writings on Ireland have been trawled for some of the entries in this anthology. While obvious art historical commentary can be found here, such as extracts from the notebooks of the early eighteenth-century London chronicler George Vertue (entry 4) or the journalism of the Dublin-based art critic Dorothy Walker in 1970 (entry 18), so too are writings that might normally be seen as pertaining to archaeology, literary drama, travel literature and science. Irish-born writers who discuss other cultures are also included, be it Thomas Hickey writing from Calcutta to the East India Company in London in 1804 (entry 40), or Ernie O’Malley writing about Mexican art (entry 48). Other disciplines such as architecture or media studies are not given central space in this collection of sources. That said, architecture does feature as an important backdrop to the discussion of church monuments or the display of paintings in excerpts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, see entry 1 for the discussion of the funerary monuments in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, or entry 2 for John Dunton’s account of the portraits in Kilkenny Castle in the final years of the 1690s.

While the themes and topics covered in Sources 1 still hold their relevance, in this second edition the organisation of the book is more consistent with current developments in the history of art and more immediately relevant to ongoing debates within the discipline, including texts that deal with gender, sexuality, race, identity and institutional critique. The focus of this anthology is on texts from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. The earliest text included is a series of comments in letters to the archbishop of Canterbury on a monument to the Boyle family in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, dating from the 1630s by Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy of Ireland (entry 1.i; Figure 2), while the most recent piece is an excerpt from Riann Coulter’s 2010 article on art and sexuality in the work of Gerard Dillon (entry 20; Figure 6). The focus of Sources 2 is on the discussion of art post-colonialisation. While a number of pre-conquest visual objects are discussed, for example the basalt stones from the Giant’s Causeway that once graced the entry hall of the original British Museum (entry 6) or Henry O’Neill’s diatribe on first-millennium CE high crosses (entry 24), it is important to note that these two entries and the other five that focus on early Irish antiquities (e.g. entries 3, 21, 26, 33 and 56) were all written in the eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The textual sources relating to the visual arts of pre-seventeenth-century Ireland are invariably too brief to warrant inclusion in an anthology that spans some 400 years.²

The book is divided into four chapters, three with thematic concerns: chapter 1, Art Historiography; chapter 2, Nationalism and Identity; and chapter 3, The Wider World. The final chapter focuses on individual works of art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. For ease of reference, in the chapters the entries are arranged in chronological order. We feel that such an arrangement offers greater insights into a wide range of subject matter and will allow the user to make specific comparisons over time.³ The actual sources that make up the contents of this book are spread across all four chapters and are itemised as individual entries from one to sixty. In a small number of cases some entries contain more than one source, for example entry 5 has three mid-eighteenth-century published extracts (indicated as 5.i, 5.ii, 5.iii) that all relate to the then prevailing fashion for foreign over native artists.

Chapter 1: Art Historiography has parallels with Aesthetic Viewpoints in Sources 1, but it is less about philosophical arguments and more about historical moments relating to the visual arts in Irish life. Throughout this section, the reader can find variations on how art history was written. It documents how art penetrated privileged Irish life from the Restoration period of the late seventeenth century to the more egalitarian access to art some two centuries later in the exhibition rooms on Lower Abbey Street, Dublin of the RHA (entry 12). In the earlier edition, a lot of space was awarded to writings on individual artists such as James Barry, Daniel Maclise, Paul Henry and Mainie Jellett. In the same spirit, this new edition offers a selection of comments from the writings of a range of twentieth-century artists such as Nano Reid (entry 17; Figure 5) in the 1950s and Micheal Farrell in the 1960s (entry 34), which allows us to compare their thoughts with the published views of art critics such as Thomas MacGreevy (entry 16) and Dorothy Walker (entry 18). The essays of two contemporary writers, Lucy Cotter and Riann Coulter (entries 19 and 20), offer more nuanced interpretations of how the reputations of Irish artists have been affected by issues of post-colonialism, social class and sexuality. As the reader moves through the anthology, it will become apparent that more recent sources, such as extracts from Cotter’s essay of 2005 and Coulter’s essay of 2010, are decidedly longer than earlier sources from the eighteenth century, for example, the entries by Edward Lhwyd (entry 3) or Edmund Powlett (entry 6). There is a simple reason for this. In the last 150 years, and certainly since the time of George Moore (entry 13, 1893), writings on art and its history have become much more common. In choosing relevant sources from much of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, one needs to explore studies of natural history, museum history or genealogy (Richard Sainthill, 1860s, entry 10) and the relevant sections are often quite short. The art history essay is a modern invention.

Chapter 2: Nationalism and Identity is concerned with the creation and perseverance of a distinctive Irish art. Sources include a range of antiquarian voices from the eighteenth-century English astronomer Thomas Wright (entry 21) describing a portal tomb in County Louth and attempting to dispel popular legends, to the Irishman Joseph Cooper Walker’s slightly later list (entry 22.i) of Irish subjects for painters, which by implication legitimises ‘Romantic’ topics relating to Cuchulainn and Fionn Mac Cumhaill. We have identified sources that exhibit a tendency towards a distinctive Irish identity and the creation of a discernible ‘Celtic’ preoccupation in Irish art and criticism. While anthologies on sources in Irish art have been few, in the context of the development of a Celtic awareness, it is appropriate to mention an important early compendium of early Irish literary and visual sources, Charles Vallancey’s Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis published in numerous volumes between 1780 and 1807, that highlighted the richness of Irish antiquities.⁴ As the nineteenth century progressed, defining such a Celtic preoccupation became a recurring theme in debates on visual art in Ireland, where it was concerned not just with analysing the great treasures of the past but also with the contemporary drive to promote a distinctively abstract Irish art that connected with international modernism. As examples, this anthology highlights the activities of the Dublin jewellery business of Waterhouse & Company and of the antiquarian and artist, Henry O’Neill (entries 23 and 24.i; Figure 8) in the 1850s and their mutual concern with identifying a verifiable ancient Irish art. Such mid-nineteenth-century concerns were still being discussed a century later in the writings of the artist Mainie Jellett and the art historian Françoise Henry (entries 31 and 33), thus indicating the longevity of the Celtic connection in the discourse of Irish art. ‘Nationalism and identity’ concludes with a selection of critics and artists offering views on what Irishness could be in the visual arts. These range from the standpoints of the artists Micheal Farrell (entry 34) and Louis le Brocquy (entry 36) to the analysis of work by diverse art historians and critics, Brian O’Doherty, Brian Fallon, Cheryl Herr and Fionna Barber (entries 32, 35, 37, 38 respectively). Their writings highlight the persistent critical practice of attributing and tracing national features in the production of twentieth-century Irish art.

In keeping with the expanding field of the history of art, this new edition of Sources in Irish Art wishes to enlarge public perceptions of the place of Irish visual culture within the international arena. While a consciousness of a wider world beyond England had obviously been there for Irish artists, patrons and commentators prior to the late eighteenth century, useful sources are few and far between. Chapter 3: The Wider World starts in the 1780s and proceeds through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the present day. Its inclusions range from information on a late-eighteenth-century elite collection of European art in County Derry (entry 39.ii) to the bringing together in the mid-nineteenth century of a huge collection of world art, actually largely western art, in the centre of Dublin (entry 41: Figure 13). Equally, this section highlights the contribution of Irish artists to a growing internationalism in the production of art as exemplified by the Irish-born Thomas Hickey’s work in India in the late eighteenth century (entry 40). This section also considers how a French artist such as Gustave Courbet used the image of an Irish woman to highlight poverty and misery in the centre of his great ‘Allegory of his Studio’ displayed in Paris in 1855 (entry 42) or how an English artist Ford Madox Brown (see entry 44), perceived the Irish as stoical and resigned to having to live on ‘cold pap’. It can justifiably be said that in including these extracts we learn little about Irish art but more about how Ireland and the Irish were visualised as the post-Famine diaspora developed. Consequently, this penultimate section of Sources 2 is about the Irish abroad, but it is also about the wider world taking an interest in Ireland. As will be gleaned from the following pages, ‘abroad’ meant England, France, Italy, India, Mexico and the United States of America. In the twentieth century, the role of international commentators offering insights on Ireland and Irish art is found in the views of some of America’s most influential critics, including Clement Greenberg (entry 49), Lucy Lippard (entry 51) and Thomas McEvilley (entry 52). The dominant thrust of many of these authors’ writings on Ireland is the nation’s relationship with modernism. The tension between internationalism and the local is a recurring issue. Since the 1970s this has been fundamentally altered by the impact of postcolonial theory and by the realities of the Northern Ireland experience during the Troubles. The latter forced artists to consider the purpose of art making within specific local and highly charged political contexts and to challenge international ideas of what Irish art should address, as expressed in John Kindness’ letter to Circa, the Irish art journal founded in 1981 (entry 50). This critical engagement with the dominant curatorial agendas of museums and international curators found an outlet in the pages of magazines like Circa and Printed Project, published by the Visual Artists of Ireland. Interventions such as Daniel Jewesbury’s critique of the IMMA’s presentation of Irish culture (entry 53) and Gavin Murphy’s interrogation of Irish perceptions of its modernist art (entry 54) have, like other more recent writings, greatly enriched the level of debate regarding institutional custodianship of visual art in Ireland.

In Sources 2 we offer a final chapter which focuses on individual art works within the history of Irish art. The rationale for this chapter, entitled Art and Text, is to show how historical and documentary sources offer useful insights into the analysis and interrogation of individual art objects. By presenting a small selection of sources focused on individual objects, we hope to stimulate the reader to search for comparable original sources. These six entries, one from the eighteenth century (entry 55), two from the nineteenth century (entries 56 and 57) and three from the twentieth century (entries 58– 60), are all illustrated and thus enable a direct balance between the art object and a textual commentary. In the first instance (entry 55), a lengthy engraved inscription on a published etching dating from the early 1740s (Figure 15) informs us of the extraordinary basalt formations to be found at the Giant’s Causeway, County Antrim. The print is based on a gouache on vellum drawing by the Irish artist Susanna Drury and the accompanying description alerts us to an eighteenth-century fascination with the origins of our natural world. This is followed by entry 56, a discussion of the so-called ‘Tara’ Brooch from the seventh or early eighth century CE and now in the National Museum of Ireland (Figure 16), which is examined in an 1850 lecture by the well-known antiquarian George Petrie. Entry 57 is a translation of a medieval Danish ballad by the philologist Whitley Stokes, which inspired a now nationally acclaimed painting from the collection of the NGI, Frederic William Burton’s watercolour Hellalyle and Hildebrand or The Meeting on the Turret Stairs of 1864 (Figure 17). All four of the individuals behind these entries – Drury, Petrie, Stokes and Burton – in their different ways exhibit a reverence for the past. Drury does this by her determination through painstaking petrological observation to depict one of Ireland’s most unusual natural phenomena.⁵ A century later, Petrie displays palpable antiquarian excitement on the discovery of an ancient brooch, while Stokes’ translation from an old language reveals to his artist friend Burton, the rich potential of a lost medieval world. Finally, we move to some examples of a twentieth-century focus on the making and realisation of the art object. The authors of these final entries were or are practising artists and they inform us about the actual production and appearance of their art works. William Orpen’s three letters to his wife give us a glimpse into the rather delicate procedure of fulfilling a portrait commission in a country house in County Louth in 1907 (entry 58; Figures 18 and 19). To Orpen the whole process of arranging sittings and painting a very large canvas was, he assures his wife, ‘not all beer and skittles’. Orpen’s correspondence is followed by the sculptor Edward Delaney’s account of the bronze casting in the 1960s of his 3m monument to the eighteenth-century Irish patriot Theobald Wolfe Tone that now stands on the north-east corner of St Stephen’s Green, Dublin (entry 59, Figure 20). This twentieth-century foray into the interconnections between art and text ends with the contemporary artist Alice Maher (entry 60, Figure 21) explaining how her work Folt (1993) uses parallels between the language of Irish and the language of hair to signify the construction of gender.

While not intended as an illustrated book, Sources 2 offers a judicious selection of images so as to help the reader grasp the visual significance of what are often relatively little-known works, such as the seventeenth-century Boyle monument in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin (Figure 2) or an eighteenth-century engraved image of a Neolithic portal stone in County Louth (Figure 7). We have also included photographic images of the authors of some of our extracts, such as the twentieth-century artists Nano Reid (Figure 5), Jack B. Yeats (Figure 9) and Louis le Brocquy (Figure 11). We have chosen Janet Mullarney’s Domestic Gods I as the cover image of Sources 2 (cover and Figure 1), as it was made by an Irish artist (1952–2000) who lived and worked extensively in Italy and Ireland and encapsulates the diversity and self-reflexiveness of Irish art. In its reworking of Italian Renaissance art into an ominous matriarchal figure and an amorphous child, Mullarney’s piece suggests the weight of tradition, of history and of the text and the need to constantly challenge their authority.⁶

In tracing a documentary-based history of Irish involvement in the visual arts, this book, and its predecessor in 2000, is initially indebted to the ‘Sources and Documents’ series published by Prentice-Hall a generation or two ago which made available a wide range of material from 1400 BCE to the mid-twentieth century. Although certain volumes were dedicated to such illustrious cultures as ancient Greece and Rome or Renaissance Italy, only one volume concentrated on a specific nation in the modern sense, American Art 1700–1960 (1965). The general premise set by John McCoubrey (1924–2010) in his preface to that volume still holds true and can be easily applied to the example of Ireland, the subject of this book:

The literature of our painting and sculpture has no counterparts to the influential doctrines of Winckelmann, the journals of Delacroix, or the manifestos that marked the major developments of European painting from Courbet’s realism to Breton’s Surrealism. It reflects rather a discontinuous, unsystematic development that makes the orderly presentation of its history difficult and the usual terminology awkward.⁷

Arguably, with the exception of George Berkeley, Edmund Burke and, in the present day, Brian O’Doherty and Luke Gibbons,⁸ Ireland has produced a small number of theoreticians of art and thus many of the names that appear in this reader will be relatively unknown or, as in the case of the more well-known figures, for example, Jonathan Swift (entry 1) or Patrick Pearse (entry 29), their views on the visual arts are less remembered. The purpose of this new edition of Sources in Irish Art is to bring to the fore these overlooked comments or indeed some forgotten writers on the role of the visual in Irish life, as well as highlighting the diversity of more recent art historical writing and analysis. As with McCoubrey’s volume, this book is more concerned with identifying a series of national and at times more specifically local discourses, as opposed to attempting to rewrite European art history. As in the earlier edition, no exclusivist agenda is in operation in the selection of writers, rather the emphasis is on suggesting as wide a range of useful material as possible.

In the years since McCoubrey’s American Art 1700–1960 was published in the mid-1960s, the definition of what the history of art can mean has greatly expanded. This anthology wishes to draw attention to as diverse a range of topics as possible from regionalism, sexuality and the body, colonialism and the transcultural to spectacle and display. The essence of an anthology of sources is that it offers the reader the opportunity to be immersed in an historical moment, but also to be confronted with a range of viewpoints, as opposed to thinking that one view dominates. Thus, while the editors can only focus on a selection