Homan Potterton was the well-known and innovative director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1980 to 1988. After resigning, he moved to New York and now lives in south-west France. He has kept in touch with the art world, by writing for various publications and editing the Irish Arts Review. Now, he has produced an autobiography - of sorts. It finishes when he was 14, in 1960.
Rathcormick - A Childhood Recalled, illustrated by the architect Jeremy Williams and to be launched in Dublin on Wednesday, tells of growing up in the house with 300 acres his parents inherited near Trim, Co Meath. Potterton writes: "This is a respectable history. I am the tenth generation of my family, almost in a direct line, to have lived at Rathcormick. But what is so remarkable is that the family has remained so ordinary, so . . . undistinguished. Modesty has always governed our ambitions, plainness has been the salient feature of our demeanour, and while our motto is Regardez l'Avenir - Look to the Future - we have done this over the centuries by remaining low key, low profile, and above all, low-church."
His family, he says, "have never aspired to any social elevation at all." George Bernard Shaw described his own family as "downstarts" as opposed to the "upstarts" by whom he was often surrounded. "The Pottertons in a line stretching back over three centuries have always been downstarts too."
Thus it is ironic, writes this Potterton, that the family name is immortalised in Ulysses when, on June 16th 1904, Leopold Bloom spies an elderly female leaving "the building of the courts of chancery, King's Bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the Lord Chancellor's Court the case in lunacy of Potterton." The case was a real one, as The Freeman's Journal reported the listing, but with the destruction of legal records in the Four Courts in 1922 the details of the lunatic, and his relationship with the author - which he says is certainly a fact - are lost. "This is exactly how the Pottertons would have wanted it" he writes.