Irish Arts Review

Rose Barton's Talent DisplayedAuthor(s): Peter MurraySource: Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 39-40Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20491986 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

ROSE BARTON'S TALENT DISPLAYED

A bout, seventy water-colours were brought together for the Rose

Barton Exhibition which was shown in Cork, London, Belfast and Kilkenny this year. This was the first substantial exhibition of Barton's water-colours and allowed public and critics an opportunity of reassessing her work.

Most of the water-colours in the Exhibition were borrowed from private collections; only three were from public collections. The water-colours fell into three general categories: views of Lon don, views of Dublin, and views of children in rustic settings. There were also some water-colours of country houses and gardens where Rose Barton stayed. The water-colours varied in size from the diminutive 'The Blackbird' to 'The Market in St. Patrick's Close',

which measures twenty-eight by sixteen inches. There were one or two drawings,

which demonstrate quite competent draughtsmanship, and some mono chrome ink wash illustrations for F.A. Gerard's Picturesque Dublin, which Barton illustrated in 1898. A book which she both wrote and illustrated is Familiar London, published in 1904. This contained many colour plates of London scenes, and some of the origin als of those colour plates were includ ed in the Exhibition, for example 'The Bell Inn, Holborn'.

Rose Barton (1856-1929) has been well-known for many years by those re searching Irish art, and in particular Professor Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin who, in preparation for their forthcoming book on Irish water colours, have done much to uncover the whereabouts of water-colours by her. However, her work has been rela tively unknown to the general public and it was not until a collection of her water-colours appeared at Christie's Elveden Hall sale in 1983 that interest in her work was rekindled. Charles

Nugent of Christie's water-colour de partment, who has researched Barton's life and work, contributed an essay on her life to the catalogue of the Exhibi tion. Rebecca Rowe, who completed a

B.A. thesis on Rose Barton under tbe supervision of Professor Crookshank has written on Barton's paintings. Through the active support of the Knight of Glin, the Exhibition was generously sponsored by Christie's. It was shown at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, then at the Fine Art Society's Gallery in London, at the Ulster Museum, Belfast and finally, at

Peter Murray, Curator of the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery,

Cork, writes in praise of the Tipperary-born artist, Rose Barton,

an exhibition of whose water colours and drawings was shown

in Ireland and in London this year, sponsored by Christie's.

the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny in May. When Brian Fallon, art critic of The

Irish Times, met Raymond Brooke, Rose Barton's nephew and author of The Brimming River, Raymond told him that one of the ways one could tell a gentle man was by the manner in which he took sugar, that there were no less than six ways of effecting the relatively simple operation of transferring sugar to tea-cup, and each one denoted a parti cular level of status and education. It is through details such as these that one gains an insight into the mannered world in which Rose Barton grew up. She was born in Co. Tipperary in 1856, the daughter of a wealthy solicitor, Augustine Barton. Following the usual private education, she set off for Paris to study painting under Henri Gervex.

Raymond Brooke speculates about a possible unhappy love affair prior to this, but we have little other informa tion concerning her life in the mid 1870s, when she was embarking upon her career. Mildred Anne Butler, from Kilmurry House in nearby Kilkenny, accompanied Rose on this trip, and it is no coincidence that these two women artists later specialized in a distinctive type of plein-air water-colour painting that employed vivid colours, flickering brushwork and the ability to work on quite a large scale. Their studies under Gervex, a fashionable salon Impression ist, gave them the accomplished tech nique and the confidence that so many other women water-colour painters of their day lacked. Their subsequent careers were as professionally oriented as many of their more famous male counterparts, but doubtless, being

women, they were denied the status and recognition that the quality of their

work would indicate. Charles Nugent remarks that it seems perverse to de vote an exhibition to an artist who was not elected to full membership of the Royal Water-colour Society until she was nearly sixty; but that same system

that had conferred on Mildred Anne Butler and Rose Barton the privileges of comfort, education and travel, just as carefully delimited the development of their professional careers.

It was possibly this factor that led the Irish women artists to form their own clubs. Shirley Armstrong Duffy, in the catalogue of a previous Crawford Gal lery exhibition devoted to the water colourist, Beatrice Gubbins, chronicles the development of these clubs. The

Water-colour Society of Ireland was originally founded by six women, for the "mutual improvement in painting and drawing and the cultivation of a taste for Art". The Ladies Sketching

Club was founded in 1872 by Miss Deane, probably the daughter of Thomas Deane RHA. Clubs were also founded by men, and a spirit of friendly rivalry seems to have prevailed. In 1885 the

Dublin Sketching Club introduced the idea of Corresponding Member, i.e., not necessarily resident in Dublin, and what is more, a Corresponding Member

might be a Lady Artist! But by and large, it would seem that the clubs were run for, and by, women. Beatrice Gubbins belonged to the Queenstown Sketch Club in the early part of this century.

Although no list of members survives, the pseudonyms used by the members in judging each other's work indicate that most were women. Beatrice called herself 'Greyhound' and 'Jessamine'. Her friend was the formidable Edith Somerville, farmer, master of hounds, author and herself a painter of no small talent. Edith Somerville was the subject of the first exhibition in the series cele brating Irish women artists at the Crawford Gallery. That exhibition, compiled by Frances Gillespie, showed Edith Somerville (a cousin of Rose Barton) to have been an artist of con siderable talent, and yet one who practised her art in relative isolation, at her West Cork home in Castletowns hend. There she pursued a number of careers with equal success, as well as introducing the first Friesian cattle into Ireland. And yet her success as an author had to be tempered by the acceptance of the conventions of her class, which frowned upon the earning of money by ladies in such a disreput able area as publishing. It was for that reason that her co-author, Violet

Martin, used the pseudonym 'Ross'. And what did the recent Exhibition

tell us about the art of Rose Barton? It

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

ROSE BARTON'S TALENT DISPLAYED

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Rose Barton RWS, Here We Dance, Lubin, Lubin, 1897, water-colour on paper, 26 x 47 cm. Collection the late Geoffrey Brooke.

is evident that she remained a commit ted open-air painter all her life, and

many anecdotes are recounted of little adventures she had in the streets and parks of London and Dublin. Her love of fog and mist effects is evident in many of her paintings, especially the London ones, and as she writes herself, in Familiar London: "Men talk raptur ously about 'mountain distances' and 'air perspectives'; but what can be more striking than the blue-grey fog that turns the end of a London street, as you look down it, into mystery and beauty that give to the present a tinge of the uncertainty of the future, and throw a halo of poetry over the most common place homes?" Many paintings in the ex hibition reflected these sentiments. Barton used the medium of water colour to sublime effect in depicting the looming shapes of buildings, the wet streets and the glow of lamps through the fog.

Children form another central key to Barton's work: they appear everywhere, of all ages. Her obvious love for the world of children is one paralleled by Walter Osborne who, like her, remain ed unmarried. The views of streets are enlivened by babes in arms, urchins, toddlers. In a 'View of Nassau Street' in

Dublin, a well-dressed child leads a coiffeured poodle along the pavement. Father in a top hat, mother in a bustle skirt, lead their child to church in 'St. Patrick's Cathedral' on a quiet Sunday morning. An elegiac painting of the innocence of childhood is 'Here we

Dance, Lubin, Lubin'. A boy leans over the quayside in 'Evening on the River Liffey'. Indeed, few of Barton's pictures are without children, frequently placed unobtrusively. The ducks in 'Ducks on a Pond' seem, at first glance, to be swimming at random, but when one espies the distant figures of a mother and her children on the bank, it is seen

that the ducks are turning towards that source of breadcrumbs. There is this faint thread of the anecdotal in many of Barton's paintings, giving them a more Victorian flavour than is at first apparent.

A minor figure she may be, slightly misplaced, as are so many Irish painters, in the history of European painting; but the passing years have treated Barton

well, and the sudden resurgence of interest in her work has helped us fill another gap in our knowledge of Irish art over the past century.

Peter Murray

Eight water-colours by Rose Barton are included in the auction of the effects of her nephew, the late Geoffrey Brooke of Knocktoran House, Co.

Limerick. This sale which also includes works by Hone and Lavery and the other contents of the house will be conducted by George Mealy & Sons at Knocktoran House on June 30th, viewing preceding days.

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