Art: A journey through the history of Irish portraiture proves a bumpy but always exhilarating tour.
The Irish face conjures up a series of stereotypes: rosy-faced colleens, with smiling eyes; others consumptive, emaciated or ape-like. Defying such conventional expectations, this book opens with sparkling but startling images of English rulers of Ireland - a swaggering George IV by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and George V, with his queen and two of his children, flattered by Sir John Lavery, but the diminutive king uncannily like his cousin the Tsar Nicholas on the eve of the Russian revolution and death at Ekaterinberg. These unexpected Irish physiognomies are followed by awkward statues of Victoria, now shipped to an appreciative Australia, and of her consort, Albert, largely hidden in a Dublin hedge. Next, an official photograph of her successor, Edward VII, and his long-suffering wife, a sea king's daughter from Denmark, remind of what once graced the homes of the loyal Irish.
This discordant prelude keeps the reader alert. Soon, however, we are launched onto a bumpy, but always exhilarating tour. Standard features - the buccaneering Elizabethan, Thomas Lee, going native in his shirt, Sir Neil O'Neill, like Lee with Irish wolfhounds, but also incongruous Japanese armour, and the Duke of Ormonde - give way rapidly to numerous novelties. The pace quickens, and soon we are on an exciting and original journey. Throughout it, Fintan Cullen is alert to the politics behind the formation of national collections. He shows how notions of national stereotypes came into play, and how the opening of a National Portrait Gallery in London frustrated the creation of an Irish one. It is to the London institution that he returns repeatedly for unfamiliar images of the Irish. In part, his book trails a forthcoming exhibition of many of these little-known or unknown portrayals. London was happy to hang Oscar Wilde and Seamus Heaney, but not Roger Casement.
At first, Dublin had to be content with rejects. Cullen traces the heroic but unavailing efforts of Henry Doyle, the Victorian director of the National Gallery of Ireland, to persuade the imperial government to pay for an Irish collection. In time, the Municipal Gallery took up the cause, responding to the initiative of Sarah Purser who had encouraged Hone and Yeats to paint their notable contemporaries. Even then, portraiture was subsumed - as it still is - within the National Gallery in Merrion Square rather than having its own home.
In an inevitably selective account, Dr Cullen is especially effective in demonstrating the ease with which the facile Hugh Douglas Hamilton turned from commemorating the seedy and smart in Rome to the strident unionists and posturing nationalists in Dublin during the 1790s. Entirely fresh is the discussion of sketches by Sydney Price Hall of the participants in the hearings (in London) during 1888 and 1889 of the special commission to consider charges of incendiarism levelled against Parnell. Not only did Hall sketch an unusually androgynous and indolent Oscar Wilde, but a variety of witnesses called from rural Ireland, such as Jeremiah Buckley from West Cork. Dr Cullen is rightly concerned lest this tenant farmer was turned into a butt of imperial mockery. It would be good to know whether Buckley's deafness was feigned and how his ordeal was reported in the local press and indeed how it was remembered within his family and neighbourhood. In Hall's drawings, Buckley looks scarcely less respectably dressed than the chief actors in the drama, Parnell and Davitt. Remarkable, too, are the circumstances in which Lavery was encouraged by the presiding judge to record the scene in the London court when Roger Casement's appeal was heard (and rejected). Cullen is constantly alive to the ways in which imagery - whether of British sovereigns, United Irishmen or nationalist heroes - could influence a larger audience. It might be objected that if the Lawrence portrayal of George IV and Lavery's of George V are to be allowed as influences on the visual culture of the Irish, then so too should the engravings of successive popes and indeed of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart. Necessarily, the account is quirky, but it is constantly thought-provoking. Belated justice is done to Irish artists in Rome and London as well as in Dublin, and what lurks in the London National Portrait Gallery is dusted off and exhibited to our admiring gaze.
The Irish Face: Redefining the Irish Portrait By Fintan Cullen. National Portrait Gallery, London, 240 pp. £30
Toby Barnard is a history fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. His latest book, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641-1770 was published recently by Yale University Press