Who's who? Mystery at the gallery

Doubt is the great attraction at an exhibition of 17th-century Irish portraiture at the Crawford gallery, where things are not quite as they would seem

JUST HOW old was the "old" countess of Desmond, and which of the many portraits claiming to represent her actually show her aged features with some accuracy? Neither question can be answered by the forthcoming Portraits and Peopleexhibition at the Crawford gallery in Cork, but director Peter Murray believes they are at least worth asking.

“This is the sort of exhibition which should be worked on by a barrister,” he says, as yet another identification in this collection of 17th-century Irish portraiture comes under scrutiny. “It’s a kind of ‘are you now or have you ever been?’ issue, and that applies to the artists as well. What you have in this instance are various copies of Rembrandt’s portraits of old women, especially that of his mother, which appear in several Irish country houses as potential paintings of the countess of Desmond. Which they clearly are not.”

The exhibition will place several portraits of the countess side by side to allow for speculation about subject and painter. In some cases the artist is known, as in that of a miniature by Peter Oliver; this is undated, but Murray, convinced by its delicacy, has no doubt about its 17th-century origins. Another, attributed to Gerard Dow, shows a woman of about 90; the countess died in 1604 and Dow wasn’t born until 1617, so again, as Murray says about many of these items, the stated facts accompanying the portraits simply don’t add up.

The catalogue for the exhibition won’t be published until a week or so after the preview period, which began yesterday, giving the curators time to inspect signatures, check the often tenuous attributions and take final photographs of pictures that are being cleaned. The catalogue itself, to which Murray, William Laffan, Jane Fenlon and Hiram Morgan are contributing, will be cautious in tone, making no great claims to complete authenticity.

“One purpose of the exhibition will be to galvanise more research into the art of this period in Ireland,” says Murray. “It’s a question of accumulating knowledge, and the only way to do that is to keep on turning up these paintings.”

What Murray considers one of the outstanding works was bought by the McCarthy family at Christie’s two years ago and was donated to Fota House. The label, dated 1636, says this is David, first earl of Barrymore. At that time the first earl would have been about 32; the man in the picture is elderly and grey-bearded. And the only indication of the painter are the initials TL, which Murray decodes as an artist active in the mid-17th century and probably from the Low Countries.

“We’re including it because the provenance is impeccable. It had been at Fota House for generations as part of the Barrymore collection. But if the painting itself puts the age of its subject at ‘66+9 months’ – which is corroborated by the appearance of the sitter – it just can’t be the first earl. But this is a problem we’re finding with 99 per cent of the paintings in the exhibition. Putting it all together requires the skills of deduction possessed only by Sherlock Holmes!”

Doubt has a great attraction. The exhibition is something of a magical mystery tour of the Irish upper class from the 16th and 17th centuries. Who are these faces? Why are they reproduced? Who engaged the artists? Where are they to be found beyond this event? How have the portraits survived?

Who was it, for example, who commissioned the expensive copy of a great painting by Van Dyck of Warham St Leger – and which Warham St Leger was this, given that Van Dyck was born in 1599 and the first Warham in Ireland died in 1597 and the second in 1600?

“There’s no shadow of a doubt that the original artist was Anthony Van Dyck,” says Murray, supporting his assertion by quoting the Tate’s Van Dyck expert Karen Hearn. “We weren’t aware of the existence of either this replica or the original, and at least we now know that there’s a Van Dyck that hasn’t yet been found, and we know what it looks like.”

The search for provenance and authenticity seems to suggest balmy days in the Irish castle or mansion when landowners could hie themselves off to London to be painted by the Dutch masters considered more fashionable than their English or Irish colleagues. In fact, they could leave home only in the lulls between turbulent episodes; in the meantime journeyman painters travelled around the country and floated a client’s image into a picture in which the hands and hat and cloak and sword were already painted, rather like Photoshop. The lords who left Ireland after the Battle of Kinsale had their portraits painted by Spanish or Portuguese artists – the exhibition includes one of O’Sullivan Bere of Dunboy Castle.

Gathered from significant private collections in Ireland and elsewhere, the pictures reveal that the 17th century in Ireland was far from an artistic desert, offering remarkable tales of survival despite its political turbulence. Here’s Katherine FitzGerald, daughter of the earl of Desmond, the work of the Peter Lely studio. It was only in exceptional cases, or perhaps for exceptional fees, that Lely took hold of a brush, yet the owners of this portrait of Catherine as Diana the Huntress thought it so valuable that when the canvas began to shred they carefully stitched on a little patch.

Always at odds with their great rivals the Butlers of Ormond, the FitzGeralds of Desmond were one of the mightiest families in Munster. Now the Ormond paintings are in their palace at Kilkenny; was a comparable Desmond collection scattered along with the dissolution of their power?

Coming from estates such as Huntington Castle, Borris House, Kilkenny Castle and Dromana, the pictures include the adolescent Duke of Grafton, killed in the siege of Cork in 1690. He is wearing gilded armour, and Murray is reminded that it was with armourers, not artists’ studios, that engraving began. There is the portrait of Edward Villiers of Dromana, in which the Moorish page is wearing a metal collar. Perched on its rock over the Blackwater, this house was once a FitzGerald property and still seems to be the repository of many FitzGerald connections.

After all, it is said to be there that the old countess of Desmond fell while gathering cherries at the reputed age of 140. No wonder everyone wanted a picture of her.

Art in 17th Century Ireland: Portraits and Peopleruns at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork until January 22nd