Irish Arts Review

Henry Jones Thaddeus by Brendan RooneyReview by: Peter MurrayIrish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 126-127Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25502954 .

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_ I 1 Henry Jones

Thaddeus An Irish

Eviction 1889

oil on canvas

119 x152cm

(Private Collection)

2 Henry Jones

Thaddeus The Old

Prison, Annecy 1887 oil on canvas

71 x 99cm (Private

Collection)

Henry Jones Thaddens Brendan Rooney

Four Courts 2003

pp336 h/b 45.00 cased only

Ills col 40 & ills b/w 80

ISBN 1-85182-692-0

Peter Murray

Feted and honoured in his own day, an

artist who lived an extraordinary and

peripatetic existence, Henry Jones

Thaddeus had, by the latter half of the

20th century been virtually forgotten. His

achievements, which included having his

first major painting hung 'on the line' in

the Paris Salon, receiving two papal por

trait commissions and being elected a

Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in

recognition of his intrepid travels, were

recalled only in a long out-of-print autobi

ography Recollections of a Court Painter,

written during the artist's retirement in

California. The rediscovery of this Cork

born painter came about twenty years ago,

primarily through the work of art histo

rian Julian Campbell, whose investigations

into the careers of Irish artists working in

France in the late 19th century resulted

in the ground-breaking 1984 'Irish

Impressionists' exhibition at the National

Gallery of Ireland. The title of the exhibi

tion, while not strictly accurate, caught the

public imagination. Many of the artists

were not Impressionists in the true sense

of the word - apart from Roderic O'Conor,

they tended to adhere to the darker palette

of Courbet, and the Realists, the pale

tones of Bastien Lepage in Brittany or the

autumnal colours of the Northern French

and Belgian schools.

The Irish studying at the Acad?mie

Royale in Antwerp and at ateliers in Paris

in the 1880s were the outstanding stu

dents of their day. After the Metropolitan

School in Dublin or the Crawford in

Cork, a year in France was seen as essen

tial for any 'serious' artist. However, by the

time Campbell commenced his researches,

many of the names recorded in the atelier

roll-books, Thaddeus's among them, had

faded into obscurity. While Walter

Osborne, J M Kavanagh and Nathaniel

Hone enjoyed continuing popularity,

works by lesser-known artists appeared

rarely in sales rooms and galleries and

were often overlooked. A painting by

Thaddeus, La retour du bracconier or The

Wounded Poacher, lent by a private collec

tor in the Hague to the Irish Impressionists

exhibition, was acquired soon afterwards

by the National Gallery of Ireland. An

extraordinarily accomplished work, this

was the painting that had been shown at

the Paris Salon in 1881. It aroused con

siderable interest, as the artist was so lit

tle known. Two years later, the Gorry

Gallery showed the 1882 painting Market

Day, Finist?re, another ambitious early

painting by Thaddeus which was also

acquired by the National Gallery. Over

the following decade, the Gorry Gallery

showed a number of other works by

Thaddeus, including On the Sands,

Concarneau (1881) Breton Fisher Boy

(1881), and Spilt Milk.

This new book on Harry Jones

Thaddeus by Brendan Rooney therefore is

long overdue and is to be welcomed. The

book is the result of a doctoral thesis com

pleted by Rooney some years ago. It takes

research into ?migr? Irish artists to a new

level, not only in terms of the detail the

author brings to his account of the life and

work of his subject, but also in his willing ness to restrain from judgment when dis

cussing some later works by Thaddeus.

Like too many Irish artists, at the outset

of his career Thaddeus seemed destined for

a permanent place in the pantheon of great

European artists. Fired with the example

of James Barry and Daniel Maclise, he

126 j

IRISH ARTS REVIEW SUMMER 2 003

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dreamed of painting masterpieces in the

European Grand Manner (Figs 1&2).

However, the promise of his early works,

painted in Paris and in Concarneau in the

early 1880s, largely evaporated as the vain

and impressionable young artist was taken

up by a group of British expatriates living in Florence. Up to this point, Rooney s nar

rative is essentially a reiteration of material

already written about the Acad?mie Julian,

Heatherley's Academy, the plein air tradi

tion in France and the lure of Brittany, with its picturesque towns and traditions.

However, with the arrival of Thaddeus in

Florence in 1881, his meeting with the

Duke and Duchess of Teck, and his enter

ing a social scene that oscillated between

Lake Constance and Florence with a

colourful range of Russian and German

aristocrats in attendance, Rooney s account

begins to read more like the synopsis of a

novel by Thomas Mann or Henry James, than the life story of a minor portrait and

genre painter. Indeed, there is a faint pos

sibility that Thaddeus may have formed the

inspiration for the main protagonist in

George Moore's novel A Modern Lover: A

Realistic Novel, published in London in

1883. The novel however paints a picture

of a artist who was a cad, whereas all

accounts of Thaddeus point towards a per

son who was certainly vain and intemper

ate but whose character was essentially

generous, kind and sentimental.

Thaddeus's unbounded confidence in

his own abilities and importance, as

recounted in his own memoirs, becomes

tiresome. At the end of his life, to have

produced a memoir, Recollections of a

Court Painter that was partly a work of fic

tion, indicates that he was rarely willing

to confront the truth about himself or his

achievement. Rooney has at least set the

record straight, through diligent research

and clear and non-judgmental writing. It

seems strange that such a fine book, well

researched and well written, should be

devoted to Thaddeus, when other artists

such as Walter Osborne, incomparably more important in the general scheme of

things, should still be awaiting a proper assessment and substantial publication.

Peter Murray is curator of the Crawford Municipal

Gallery of Art Cork.

'Our Treasure of Antiquities9: Beranger and Bigari's Antiquarian Tour of Connaughtin 1779._ Peter

Harbison_

Wordwell in association with the National

Library of Ireland 2002

pp237 h/b 25 ?18.95

Ills 24 col & ills b/w 214 ISBN 1869587 53 4

Michael McCarthy Published in association with the

National Library of Ireland, this

handsomely produced and well-printed volume may be viewed as the textual and

visual culmination of Peter Harbison's

book on the drawings of Gabriel Beranger in 1991 and 1998, his Cooper's Ireland, 2000 and his general article in the Irish

arts Review of 2001, 'Irish Artists on

Irish Subjects'. Beranger seems to have

been a Huguenot from Holland and

Angelo Maria Bigari was an architect and

scene-painter from Italy, so this book

might well be titled European artists on

Irish Subjects. The book combines 214 illustrations in

black and white with text and commen

tary on 217 pages, and there are a further

24 half-page coloured illustrations. The

quality of reproduction is excellent for

drawings, engravings and watercolours

and the interest of the book is enormously enhanced by the sharp clarity of photo

graphs of the sites at present, the work for

the most part of Josephine Shields. Tim

O' Neill has provided a helpful map of

the sites, and reference material is com

pleted with a detailed bibliography of each

site and an index. There is no list of illus

trations, but each is provided with an

informative caption giving its call-number

when appropriate.

The author's method is admirably com

prehensive in combining the printed

image with the drawn and painted images and the photographic, where the informa

tion is full, as in the case of the tower

house at Claddagh near Dunmore in

County Galway (Figs 3&4). The elevation

and plan in 1779 by Bigari in the National

Library are complemented by engravings

from the first volume of Grose's

Antiquities of Ireland, (1791-96). By this

stage the scene had acquired Staffage of a

standing and recumbent male figure in

the foreground. These reappear in the

watercolour by an unknown hand in the

Royal Hibernian Academy manuscript

3.C.29, the location of ten comparable

watercolours. This leads the author to the

conclusion that the paintings were the

source of the engravings, whereas com

mon sense suggests the reverse was true

and the style of those watercolours is

closer to the mid- 19th century. In this

case Josephine Shield's photo is melan

choly in revealing that the structure, the

only tower-house to be depicted by the

artists, has been levelled to the ground. But this points up the historical impor tance of the visual evidence here so care

3 Bigari's only

surviving drawing of a tower-house is

that of Claddagh, Co Galway

4 The unknown

artist of this

watercolour of

Claddagh castle has

added two figures to

Bigari's original

fully presented to us.

Most of the material in the

book is ecclesiastical in nature.

Plans are not always available to

clarify the elevations chosen, but

they are supplied in most

instances from Grose. Details of

shrines, tombs and architectural

features are noted when excep

tional, and round towers are spe

cially noted. But pre-Christian

monuments are plotted and

sketched and measured when vis

ited and are reproduced here for

the most part from J S Cooper's

copies after the lost originals of

Beranger. They are testimony to

the objectivity of the originator of the tour, William Burton

Conygham of Slane and the

short-lived Hibernian Antiquarian

Society formed in 1779. The

introductory chapter provides a

narrative of the publishing his

tory of this treasury of antiqui

ties and its vicissitudes to the

present, while the second chap

ter most helpfully sorts out the

SUMMER 2003 IRISH ARTS REVIEW 127

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