Irish Arts Review

Masterpieces of Irish Painting Masterpieces of European Painting by Brighteye-Windmill LaneReview by: Colin WigginsIrish Arts Review Yearbook, (1991/1992), pp. 256-257Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20492699 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

BOOK REVIEWS

is a fuller text than in Penrose Glass, and any reader is bound to find information new to him or her, such is the scope of the publication. There is less for those in terested in archaeology than for students of the decorative arts, the focus of the booklet being on pottery and porcelain from the eighteenth century to the twen tieth. Within these main pages separate sections deal with delftware, Oriental porcelain, European porcelain, fine ear thenware, country pottery, Belleek, The

Queen's Institute, Frederick Vodrey and the renaissance of Irish pottery manufac ture in the nineteenth and twentieth cen turies. The text is well documented throughout, the notes giving an extreme ly useful reference guide to those wishing to pursue the subject further.

A key feature of the booklet is that it opens up discussion of the consumption as well as the manufacture of ceramics in Ireland. The thesis of a 'traditional at titude' to ceramics in Ireland is proposed in the opening pages, based on the initial observation that the Celts of the Iron Age lacked an interest in pottery relative to other materials. This is supported by reference to wills and inventories of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries which bear witness to the scarcity of ceramics in some households of the time. Inevitably the complexity of production and use of ceramics from the eighteenth century on wards renders the thesis unnecessary to develop, although the later parts of the booklet do draw attention both to retail activity and the usage of ceramics to quite an extent. These later pages however, are

most valuable for their short accounts of Irish manufacturers over the past two cen turies.

The booklet therefore falls to some ex tent between two stools. It offers a very good short history of the pottery and porcelain used in Ireland, with typo logically arranged subheadings, but it also attempts a material culture-based ap proach, setting ceramics within their economic, social and cultural contexts. The contextual'material adds greatly to the interest of 'the publication, but this thickening of the text seems to demand a purely chronological structure. For exam ple, sections on wheel-turned Anglo Norman pottery, and on pottery produc tion in early Ireland, are immediately followed by a passage on Oriental porce lain, dealing with the introduction of

Oriental porcelains to Ireland in the

seventeenth century. A more satisfactory progression would arguably have been to discuss the seventeenth century develop ment of the country potteries out of the late mediaeval period and to consider the role of Oriental imports alongside the country wares in the contemporary economic and cultural context. Further, whilst the discussions of social usage and marketing are always interesting they cry out for illustration - this would have been useful for those interested in mater ial culture and have added greatly to the appeal of the publication, for the general reader. As it is, the layout of the booklet is somewhat conservative, restrictng, one

would suspect, the market for it. Ceramics in Ireland will have lasting

value for all interested in Irish pottery and porcelain. It has perhaps not quite capitalized on the opportunities, which it undoubtedly opens up, for exploring the broader aspects of the subject, and it seems to lack the attractiveness of pre sentation necessary to encourage the general museum visitor to buy it. It is nevertheless, with Penrose Glass, a most worthwhile addition to the publications of the National Museum.

Ian Wolfenden.

lan Wolfenden is a Senior Lecturer in the Depart ment of History of Art, University of Manchester, where he runs a postgraduate course in Art Gallery and Museum Studies. He has published and lectured widely on nineteenth century British glass. A founder member of the Glass Association, he is editor of its Journal.

MASTERPIECES OF IRISH PAINTING

MASTERPIECES OF EUROPEAN PAINTING

Video productions by Brighteye-Windmill Lane for the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

Irf13.95 each.

Video is the medium of the moment. No pop record can be released without its accompanying video. The cinema in dustry whines that it is being destroyed by the advent of home video. Television, too, is big business with a vast audience that effortlessly sits back and absorbs advert ising and propaganda, information and entertainment. Newspaper reports shock us with statistics of how long children sit in front of TV screens, of how many deaths they witness before the age of eight, when, as we all know, they should be quietly reading Black Beauty or Treasure Island.

Now art galleries and museums are join ing in . Masterpieces of Irish Painting is one of two videos produced by the National Gallery of Ireland, accompanied by Masterpieces of European Painting. The principal problem faced by anyone wishing to produce a video about pain tings in an art gallery is, of course, the fact that its target audience, the public, is quite simply saturated with programmes that have been made with the slickest,

most competitive and highly profes sional, big budget production standards.

Art gallery video producers without these budgets have to compete with those stan dards, or their productions will be half watched and wiped from the memory as quickly as a hand-held amateur video of 'What I did on my holidays'. The first thing one notices is, obviously,

the box and the title. Treasures of, The Golden Age of, or Masterpieces of are catch-all labels that are perhaps neces sary in our instant information age.

Countless exhibitions, coffee-table books and now art gallery videos have been pro duced with these titles, and the definition of a masterpiece has become looser and looser. Can we really call Antony Lee's Portrait of Joseph Leeson of 1735, or Thomas Roberts's 1770 topographical country-house picture, Lucan House, masterpieces? For both of these paintings are included in Masterpieces of Irish Pain ting. And the inclusion of non-Irish works by Pompeo Batoni and Sir Joshua Reynolds shows how the titling of this video overrides its content. Perhaps the word 'masterpiece' is qualified by the epithet 'Irish'. Does this mean that the standards required of a painting before it becomes a masterpiece are lowered if the artist is Irish?

A theme running through this produc tion is that Irish art has always had to look to England and the Continent, that there is no such thing as an Irish style and that 'Irishness' in painting has had to limit itself to subject matter. But a more honest title such as The Story of Irish Painting, although more accurate, is dull and lacks the excitement of that magic word 'masterpiece'. Another problem is that faced by the

presenter, in this case Paula Murphy, bill ed on the video box as 'lecturer in Art History, UCD'. She has to compete with

the experience and glamour of a Michael Wood, the delightful charm of an Alec Clifton-Taylor, or the enthusiasm of a

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

BOOK REVIEWS

David Attenbourough. What a daunting prospect. Some of those old Open Uni versity productions must have crossed her mind: wooden presenters with funny hair cuts, enunciating each syllable slowly and precisely with eyes relentlessly following the autocue. Those programmes were, of course, aimed at a captive audience, at night owls eager for information that they need to get them through their exams. Viewed by any other kind of audience and they elicit either sleep or mirth.

Facing up to this difficulty, Ms Murphy does very well. Pleasantly relaxed and unhurried, she seems friendly and ap proachable with her script evenly paced and her voice easy to listen to. But the principal fault of this production is its length. The unvaried pace of the presen tation makes fifty-four minutes far too long. Towards the end, the sequence of paintings discussed becomes samey, the approach to each one becomes repetitive and attention begins to flag. Fifty-four minutes is a very long time for one single presenter to hold the attention of an au dience. Perhaps marketing was a con sideration, because a programme of, say, twenty-five minutes might not encourage potential buyers.

One function of this video, though, is surely to tease, to leave the viewer with a sense of wanting more. Ms Murphy does, after all, finish her commentary with the truism that 'nothing quite replaces that one-to-one contact with an original work' and a video like this should not simply be seen as an animated postcard collection, a souvenir to put on a shelf and forget, but as something to encourage the viewer to visit the Gallery and to en joy the actual paintings. Another important consideration is

the amount of knowledge that can be assumed in the viewer. The first painting discussed in detail is Sir John Lavery's Lady Lavery with her Daughter and Step daughter, which is compared to Velaz quez's Las Meninas. Yet we are not shown Velazquez's painting. Perhaps it was thought that to include it would demon strate the limitations of Lavery's work, and in a production entitled Masterpieces, we can't have that. Perhaps Lavery's dreary painting should have been exclud ed because the next painting, Orpen's The

Artist's Parents has much greater tele visual impact, being more reliant, as the presenter points out, on contrasts of light and dark. But again, an unillustrated

comparison is made, this time with Whistler. After the opening six minutes one is left with the unfortunate impres sion that Irish painting is by its very nature derivative and unoriginal.

From then on, a broadly chronological approach is adopted. Hugh Douglas Hamilton's The Earl Bishop of Derry and his Granddaughter, a charming and engaging painting, is quietly brought to life by Ms

Murphy's commentary, with a mood en hanced with an unobtrusive background of piano music. A Grand Tour sequence is followed by tales of Nathaniel Hone, Sir Joshua Reynolds and James Barry. The treatment of Barry's gripping Self-portrait and Hone's The Conjuror exploit one of the strengths of video, the use of close-up detail. The stories of Hone, Reynolds and Angelica Kauffman, and Barry's expul sion from the Royal Academy are ad

mirably suited to video, being narratives filled with the kind of human-interest gossip that enlivens and enriches art history. But again we come back to the problem of assumed knowledge - Raphael's School of Athens is mentioned and re vealed as the source of Reynolds' caric ature version, but it is never shown. The

Gothic architecture of Reynolds is com pared to the classical architecture of Raphael, which is never illustrated. It is assumed that the viewer will already know what a 'classical' building looks like.

Music backgrounds on art programmes can often be irrelevant, distracting and intrusive. Yet without it a programme can seem dull and lifeless, and it is one of the trickiest things to get right. Original

music by Declan Masterson and John Donnelly was commissioned for this video, and it is used sparingly and often with positive effect, particularly the lilting Celtic evocation of the piece played to Maclise's The Marriage of Aoife and Strongbow.. This is one of the most successful passages of the whole pro gramme with details of this epic painting nicely used, and the melancholy mood successfully retained as the programme continues into a discussion of George Petrie's beautiful Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise.

The passages illustrating James Arthur O'Connor's A Thunderstorm: The Fright ened Waggoner and Francis Danby's The Opening of the Sixth Seal take the risk of in

cluding sound effects. Lightning bolts sear across the pictures, followed by sound effects of crashing thunderstorms. Details of the death agonies of the damned in

Danby's picture are accompanied by a soundtrack of wailings and desperate groans. It is a risk, but it works. It is not overplayed and with the Danby, par ticularly, it works in an almost subliminal

manner and well emphasises the awesome subject of Danby's ambitious and melo dramatic painting.

Here the programme could have happi ly ended. It would have run for half an hour or so, which is probably about the maximum attention span to allow the viewer not just to enjoy but also to remember. But instead of ending, the pro gramme carries on straight into Nathaniel Hone the Younger's The Banks of the Seine, a painting about as different from The Opening of the Sixth Seal as you can get. The next section of the pro gramme is devoted to the Irish response to developments in nineteenth century France and focuses upon Walter Osborne,

W J Leech and Roderic O'Conor. The problem with these artists is that, aside from emphasising their debt to France, there is really not much to say about them. Their paintings, as seen on the TV screen, become broadly similar and despite some pretty details, Yeats's The Liffey Swim arrives as a welcome change of pace, with jaunty music and sound ef fects of shouting youths.

It is not that artists like O'Conor or Leech lack quality, but more that they need location shots, comparative mater ial and anecdotal detail of the kind seen earlier in the programme with Hone and Barry. A solution, perhaps, could have been two programmes, on the same tape, one ending with Danby, the other starting with Hone the Younger. By the time we reach the last painting, Jack Yeats's Grief, the end is well overdue and comes as a relief. In one solid lump, Masterpieces of Irish Painting becomes hard going. Which is a shame, because broken up into

manageable portions it would be easier to watch, therefore more enjoyable and therefore more successful. But to end on a positive note, I have never been to

Dublin but now I am eager to go and visit the obviously wonderful collection in the

National Gallery. But not to see Leech or Walter Osborne: Barry, Danby and Maclise look much more fun!

Colin Wiggins

Colin Wiggins is a lecturer in the National Gallery, London, and has contributed several tape-slide presentations to the National Gallery programme.

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