Visual Art: A unique, painterly look inside the homes and cottages of ordinary Irish people in the 19th and early 20th century.
This is a magnificent book, scholarly, marvellously illustrated and intriguing. It illuminates Irish country life, particularly during the 19th century, by bringing together social history and art history. The painstaking, or inspired, recorders of homely scenes and artefacts are given due credit for their powers of observation along with degrees of painterly expertise; some, of course, were better artists than others, but all of them, whatever their idiosyncrasies of style or motivation, have left valuable documentation of bygone activities and customs.
As Claudia Kinmonth says in her introduction, images of the past form at least as important a source of information as oral or written evidence - and their impact, into the bargain, is instantaneous and striking. Many of the paintings reproduced in Irish Rural Interiors, she goes on, have not been analysed or, in some cases, seen, since they left the artist's studio. Now, tracked down and sumptuously presented, they make a vibrant testimony to the lives, liabilities and resources of their subjects, whether the mode of expression is rugged, romantic or even satirical.
A lot have not been seen since they first appeared, but some have: in Kinmonth's previous book for Yale, about Irish country furniture (1993). Works by Erskine Nicol, for example, Howard Helmick, John G Mulvany and others (Jack Yeats among them), were included in that book alongside photographs of indigenous household accoutrements, straw cradles and dowry chests and rush lights and salt boxes, to show these survivals from the past in their original settings.
With the current book, the emphasis falls differently - on the paintings themselves - but the purpose is the same: to assess the light thereby shed on realities of the day. There were, for instance, degrees of poverty even among the Irish poor, though in some cases it boiled down to whether or not the communal potato basket contained potatoes. Alfred Downing Fripp's The Fisherman's Hut of 1844 shows an empty skib in the foreground to symbolise hunger; while his later watercolour, A Cottage Interior (1859), with its sturdy table and meal in preparation, has a more buoyant feel about it. The table was a luxury, indeed. A Potato Dinner at Cahirciveen (1946; artist unknown) portrays a family about to eat their supper off the floor, pig and all. (Foreign visitors, we're told, were frequently shocked to find farmyard animals sharing a habitation with their owners - and with the pig in particular, some warned of the dangers of keeping it in close proximity to children in case it took a fancy to make a meal of them, which wasn't unknown.)
Chapter One, entitled The Hearth, introduces a slight paradox straight away: a glum couple exuberantly painted. This is Sir William Orpen's Old John's Cottage (1908), in which the stony hearth and bare surround suggest the exiguous amenities available to the countryfolk of Connemara. The families of "strong farmers", on the other hand, as depicted by George Grattan, Tom Semple, John George Mulvany and others, engage in picturesque domestic business within their well-appointed houses. Dressers, clocks, crocks, arm-chairs, table linen and what-have-you: all these are fixtures of homes in which penury wasn't the paramount reality. These are mostly decorous paintings; for domestic high spirits, you have to wait until the mid-20th century and artists such as Sean O'Sullivan, whose Young Couple of 1941 has an up-beat modernity, despite the hen pecking on the kitchen floor.
One nearly ubiquitous feature of the Irish household - according to the visual evidence assembled here - was the presence of a cat or dog (sometimes both): all right, these were essential deterrents to rats and other vermin, but their cherished and companionable aspect is none the less an inspiriting factor in relation to a peasantry not especially noted for kindness to animals. Some representations of cats and dogs, of course, are pictorial devices for reflecting or undermining the mood of the genre painting in which they occur. As well as the descriptive titles of paintings, various clues were provided as aids to deciphering the narrative drift.
Some of Claudia Kinmonth's artists armed themselves with a kind of merry dissociation from the darker implications of the scenes in front of them, somewhat in the spirit of William Moffat's lines, "At one o'the ends he kept his cows,/At t'other end he kept his spouse"; while for others, the miserable social, economic or political particulars were geared towards a reformist purpose. But whether the artistic impulse is tied up with charm and seductiveness (eg George Washington Brownlow's Carding Wool: A Scene in an Irish Cottage of 1861), or with an outraged approach to the abuses of the era (eg James Brenan's Notice to Quit of 1880, showing a family just served with an eviction order), the effect is compelling.
Among the omissions - and even so comprehensive an undertaking can't hope to avoid omissions - I regret the absence of Walter Osborne's atmospheric Old Man by a Cottage Fire (c.1900), and Rosamund Praeger's very decorative classroom scene from her picture book How They Went to School (c.1897). (Claudia Kinmonth has a chapter on Health and Education.) But the wealth of images provided, and the scope and density of the undertaking quickly cause complaints of any sort to fade away. Here is 19th-century rural Ireland in some of its more pungent incarnations: poverty-stricken, defiant, gaudy, rumbustious, stoic, bewitching, and always touched with a bit of dishevelled grace.
Patricia Craig is a critic, biographer and anthologist. Her Ulster Anthology will be published by Blackstaff in the autumn
Irish Rural Interiors in Art By Claudia Kinmonth Yale University Press, 286pp. £40