Irish and Scottish painting

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2003 by Alfred Mayor

Brian O'Doherty, the artist and critic, has described Irish art as 'the gate lodge beside the big house of Irish Writing.' This still remains true, but we hope that we have been able to push the squeaking hinges of the gate a little further open." So concludes Ireland's Painters, 1600-1940, the successor to The Painters of Ireland, published in 1978. The same authors wrote both books, enlarging upon the first with new information, and ending with the 1940s rather than about 1920. They candidly confess that some paragraphs are little changed from one book to the next "as the old paragraphs still seemed to hold up." They do not suggest that there was an Irish school of painting, nor have they adopted the "New Art History" approach. Instead they "have attempted to write a simple, chronological account of the history and development of Irish painting."

As recounted by Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, the history of Irish painting is an episodic affair, its heyday being the time between the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England in 1660 and the Act of Union of 1801, joining Ireland and England. Thereafter Ireland's riches tended to be spent in England. The great famine of 1845 to 1850 eroded the patronage of artists even further. The National Gallery in Dublin, wrote George Moore in 1905, "is the most perfect image of the Sahara that I know. Now and then one sees a human being hurry by like a Bedouin on the horizon ... no one goes there except when it rains." Nonetheless, the authors are nationalists and take obvious pleasure in the present resurgence of prosperity in Ireland and the consequent repatriation of Irish art. "We are indeed indebted to the new group of collectors who have given us all great encouragement," they write with feeling. They even extend every courtesy to what one might call honorary Irish painters such as Robert Henri, who was born in Cincinnati but "had Irish ancestry." He spent a number of summers painting in Ireland and so became part of the canon.

A History of Scottish Art considers its subject through the perspective of the Fleming Collection, formed over thirty-five years by the London investment bank of that name. When the bank was sold to the Chase Manhattan Bank, the art collection was sold to the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, and a revolving selection is now exhibited in the foundation's London gallery.

While the union of Ireland and England contributed to the decline of painting commissions, the Act of Union of 1707 that united Scotland and England brought economic stability and prosperous times for artists, many of whom had studied in Rome. Then, well into the nineteenth century, there emerged a "truly Scottish school of painting in terms of an identifiable Scottish style." From about 1880 to 1895 the painters known collectively as the "Glasgow Boys" rejected romantic landscapes and sentimental genre paintings for the naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the Barbizon artists. The "Spook School" of painters was Scotland's contribution to the art nouveau style, although its contributions were more valued on the Continent than in Scotland or England. Its principals were Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Herbert MacNair and their wives, the sisters Margaret and Frances Macdonald, and their work was deemed spooky for the extreme stylization of the figures. Then, by 1900, the four "Scottish Colourists" took up where the Glasgow boys left off, adopting the high coloring of Henri Matisse and the Fauves, and significantly influencing succeeding generations of Scottish painters.

The book about Irish painters is a chronological narrative; the one about Scottish painters consists of a historical summary followed by chapters on the various epochs and schools, illustrated by two hundred paintings, each accompanied by a brief biography of the artist.

A problem unique to Irish canvases was the dark encrustation caused by peat smoke. Apparently this has trapped many an English restorer "and many an Irish picture has been skinned because of their treatment of this unfamiliar tarlike surface." Then there is the peculiarly Irish time clock used by John Butts, a painter, and one Chapman, a restorer, who shared a Dublin garret in the eighteenth century. A partition pierced by a hole separated them. As they labored they revived themselves by quaffing from a jug of booze, which they passed back and forth equably through the hole. When the jug was empty, they packed up for the day.

The Irish potato blight and consequent famine inspired remarkably few works of art, although Daniel MacDonald's moving The Discovery of the Potato Blight summarizes the sadness. A sprawl of potatoes at the center of the picture is the despair of a family of seven and a worried dog as a pluming rain cloud approaches from distant hills. The potato blight spread to Scotland almost immediately, redoubling the misery caused the Highland Clearances. That economic spiral caused clan chiefs in the Highlands to sell their land in view of shrinking rents paid by their tenant farmers. The new landowners then evicted the tenants in favor of sheep, which were far more profitable. The aftermath of these evictions is the subject of Lochaber No More, painted by the Scottish artist John Watson Nicol in 1883, a year after riots on the island of Skye protesting the displacements. In this view a Highlander looks back to shore as a ship takes him forever from home. His wife sags on their few possessions, as an anxious dog tries to comfort his masters.