JUST as I was getting on my bicycle to leave the funeral service of June Kuhn, Ireland’s first modern dancer, last September, my phone rang. On the other end of the line, delightful octogenarian Dora Forster, granddaughter of Dora Barden, teacher at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1879-1913 introduced herself.
She explained how she’d heard about my letter to The Irish Times seeking information about June Kuhn’s teacher, 1940s dance evangelist Erina Brady. Dora explained that her uncle, stain glass artist Hugh Barden, was great friends with Erina Brady, and had his studio in the same Harcourt Street building as her Irish School of Dance Art. Indeed, Dora remembered being brought to Brady’s dance demonstration at the Mansion House during the Emergency by her auntie May (who acted sometimes at the Abbey Theatre).
Soon Dora was kindly showing me her family album, heirloom sketches by her intriguing uncle Hugh and by her historic grandmother, who is mentioned several times in John Turpin’s authoritative History of the National College of Art and Design and its predecessors. She even appears in a cartoon by Grace Gifford Plunkett, playing piano to make “the reelists skip round like lambs in spring”.
Illuminated by a voluptuous life model, a sepia photograph of a 1910s life drawing class jumped out at me from the album. Inscribed on the back: “Grandma Dora Barden and her Art Class.... In our Schoolroom, Sallymount Tce, Ranelagh”. Later, I learned that life models were banned in NCAD until the 1960s, when the students rebelled and smashed the antique sculptures they were expected to draw from. Naturally, one could only imagine this was the result of organisations like the League of Decency. All the ingredients for a juicy yarn?
Luckily for me, erudite friends like Mick Wilson (Dean of Gradcam) and Ciarán Mac Gonigal quickly put paid to that idea, generously giving me an Irish art history lesson in the process. In the tradition of the South Kensington School of Art and the finest academies of France and Italy, students were required to draw from antique sculptures until they were skilled enough to draw from a real life model. Prudishness didn’t come into it. While NCAD students did indeed smash antique sculptures in the 1960s, the rebellion was against classical education rather than Irish prudery. Blushing at my ignorance, I have to admit I did also lament the loss of a great story.
I showed the photograph to Ciarán Mac Gonigal, third generation of his family to attend the school in its various incarnations, and son of famous Irish painter and former professor of painting Maurice Mac Gonigal. He nearly fell off his stool when the image arrived on his Westmeath computer screen. “That’s my cousin, [genius stain glass artist] Harry Clarke in the front row,” he exclaimed, excitedly, “and his wife Margaret Crilly”. He uttered the word “terrific!” several times, while also identifying Harry’s brother, Walter Clarke, and his wife Minnie.
An Orpen life-drawing class, pronounced Ciarán definitively, identifying A Nude Boy, Orpen’s award-winning 1897 drawing on the back wall – which he happened to inherit, and subsequently donated to the National Gallery of Ireland.
Wait – might this actually be a photograph of Ciarán’s family, instead of Dora’s? Though Dora believes it to be her grandmother’s Ranelagh residence, where Patrick Pearse, among others used to be regular visitors, Ciarán seems certain it is Room No 2, upstairs in the art school, “beside the antique room”. This may be hard to prove, as neither room exists any more. Both options are equally intriguing however.
Turning over as many stones as possible before putting pen to paper, I made my way to Dublin City Archive at Pearse Street Library, NCAD library, and of course the new Mecca of visual art history, the National Irish Visual Arts Library, where curator Donna Romano kindly sat down with me and the photograph, and leafed through early 20th-century Dublin Metropolitan School of Art payment records. Hugh Barden (either first left, or partially obscured, in the second row), a contemporary of Harry Clarke, was enrolled there on and off from the age of 13 in 1900, until 1915. The vibrant Harry Clarke, who looks directly at the camera, and appears as if he is about to leap over his easel, was already an RDS gold medal winner when he started at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1910, where he was registered for three years.
Grandma Dora Bradley, obviously a staff stalwart, is registered as a teaching assistant from 1879, reappearing in her married incarnation, Dora Barden, from at least 1889.
It’s curious how the men are positioned on the left hand side of the tableau. How staged is this? Who took the photograph? Who are these unidentified women towards the right, in various poses of confidence and diffidence, and what became of them? The contrast between their burka-like attire and the naked flesh of the model is stark. Is the woman who would soon become Joseph Mary Plunkett’s widow among them? In those days, the encyclopaedic Mac Gonigal informs me, there were “artists”, and then there were “women artists” – regarded as an inferior subcategory. Despite harbingers of Irish Modernism, Mainie Jellet and Evie Hone, the two categories didn’t really merge until the 1970s.
We would love if anyone can enlighten us further on the mysteries of this photograph. In the meantime, Dora, whose aunts and uncles partly raised her due to her own parents’ early death, misses her family photograph, and I must return it.
deir@indigo.ie