O'Byrne The Last Knight

A Tribute to Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glin
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84351-611-8
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

When Desmond FitzGerald died in September 2011, obituaries paid tribute to his involvement with organizations such as the Irish Georgian Society and the Irish Architectural Archive. But over the previous decades, Desmond had achieved much more than has yet been realized. Not only did he battle to save his own ancestral home, Glin Castle, from destitution but he also helped to ensure the survival of many other historic houses in Ireland, raising large sums of money at home and overseas for this cause. Without his passion and commitment Ireland's architectural and artistic heritage today would be much the poorer. Desmond was a pioneer in the field of Irish cultural studies, awarded a post-graduate scholarship to Harvard where he wrote a thesis on 18th century Irish architecture. At the time little was known about the subject even in Ireland and Desmond's research has since proven invaluable in making the public aware of the quality of Irish design. The range of his interests and the consistently high quality of his published material across the entire spectrum of Irish architecture, art, furniture and decoration meant he paved the way for all subsequent writers on these subjects. The Last Knight of Glin is a celebration of the enormous amount that Desmond managed to do before his death, but it is also an assessment of the man. Robert O'Byrne has spoken to a wide range of family, friends and colleagues from Desmond's schooldays onwards, and had access o his extenisive private archive, letters and papers,creating a portrait of a very distinctive Irish patriot, that will be of immense interest to his admirers and acquaintances.

ROBERT O'BYRNE is one of Ireland's best-known writers on architecture, fine art and design. A former journalist with The Irish Times, he has written extensively on the country's historic houses and their decoration. His previous books with Lilliput are Desmond Leslie, The Biography of an Irish Gentleman (2010), Mind Your Manners: A Guide to Good Behaviour (2004) and Hugh Lane, 1875-1915 (2000).

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Byrne, Robert

Leseproben

The Art Historian

IN JUNE 1951, Desmond wrote to his mother from Stowe, his letter mostly concerned with plans for imminent summer holidays. In the midst of this discussion he added, ‘I am enclosing a picture of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland by Sir Peter Lely. I think the portrait of her at Adare is a copy.’ Written a month before his fourteenth birthday, even allowing for the fact that through his grandmother he had family ties with Adare Manor (and that his mother was a Villiers), this observation shows remarkable precocity on Desmond’s part. It is an instance of character and interests manifesting themselves at an exceptionally early age.

In addition, the June 1951 letter demonstrates how Desmond was already concerned with correct attribution, a trait again manifested in an undated letter sent at some point in autumn 1955 during his first term at Trinity College School, Ontario. Once more writing to his mother he comments, ‘By the way, I think the picture of Lord Clarina is certainly a Gilbert Stuart, its style corresponds to many I have been looking at in an art book here. He practised in Dublin to get out of debt in about 1780, just the right time for Clarina, and did many Irish nobility and gentry.’ This picture had recently been acquired by Desmond’s mother from the first Lord Clarina’s descendants of soon-after demolished Elm Park, County Limerick. Now attributed to the Irish artist Robert Hunter, it hung in the dining room at Glin until sold by Christie’s in May 2009.

Inevitably, Ireland would come to lie at the centre of Desmond’s engagement with art, but there were a few early diversions. While touring County Clare in June 1959 he went to visit ‘a painter friend of mine Barrie Cooke who paints in the Burren surprisingly good modern nudes and landscapes. I bought a portrait he did which I think you will like very much.’ And later the same year when travelling around Indonesia, Desmond met the distinguished artist Affandi (1907–90) who painted his portrait in a distinctly bold, expressionist manner. ‘He is a wonderful man and his painting is glorious,’ Desmond wrote at the time, commenting of the portrait, ‘For want of something better to liken it to I would say a mixture of Kokoschka and Van Gogh,’ a fair assessment. (This picture was sold in the 2009 Glin sale.)

Even when buying old pictures during this period Desmond did not confine himself to those with an Irish connection. A letter he wrote to his mother in July 1959 mentions a sixteenth-century Italian painting he had picked up in London the previous month for £300 (‘The dealer – highest references, I checked up with Agnews. Agnew also thought I made a good buy – was very pleasant, got £175 off!’). And two years later, he writes of paying a Mrs Grunsby in Cork £500 for a seventeenth-century Bolognese painting of David and Goliath. ‘Colnaghi’s offered me immediately £1,500 and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford want to buy it too. I am not going to sell it till I find out more about who painted it, etc.’

Here were two sides of Desmond’s personality, the wily dealer and the academic researcher, which happily co-existed throughout his life, much to the surprise of some observers who seemed to believe one was incompatible with the other. However, at this stage the researcher had the upper hand, not least when it came to Irish art. Around the time he quit Harvard and returned to Ireland, Desmond met for the first time a woman who would become one of his closest friends and collaborators, Anne Crookshank. There was already a connection between the two: Desmond’s great-great-grandfather the 3rd Earl of Dunraven and Anne Crookshank’s great-grand-aunt Margaret Stokes were both nineteenth-century antiquarians who had worked together investigating early Christian art in Ireland (after Lord Dunraven’s death in 1871, Miss Stokes edited his three-volume Notes on Irish Architecture). This gave Desmond and Anne Crookshank a bond on which to build what was undoubtedly one of the most productive collaborations in Irish art history.

After spending time at the Tate Gallery and the Courtauld Institute, in 1957 Anne Crookshank had been offered the position of keeper of art in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery (later the Ulster Museum). At the time, this institution owned startlingly few Irish pictures. In an amusing essay she and Desmond wrote for a Pyms Gallery catalogue in 2001, Crookshank recollected how on first moving to Belfast she had been conscious of her ‘sad lack of knowledge of Irish painters of all periods’ and found it a misfortune that she ‘never knew the names of any of the artists whose pictures hung on the walls of the houses she visited’. Among those houses was Leixlip Castle where, as was so often the case, Desmond and Mariga Guinness introduced her to like-minded individuals, not least Desmond. In 1963, the two men together with Anne Crookshank and James White, then curator of the Dublin Municipal Gallery (he became director of the National Gallery of Ireland the following year), came up with the idea of organizing an exhibition of Irish pictures showing landscapes that included houses. The show was held in the Ulster Museum in June 1963 and in Dublin’s Municipal Gallery in August of the same year. The previous May, having just settled into Leixlip, Desmond wrote to his mother:

on arrival immediately started on the catalogue. We have got about 25 catalogue headings done. There still remain another 60. The introduction also has to be rewritten. We should have it all done by next Monday. Desmond [Guinness] and I go to Belfast tomorrow. Still it is interesting to do and Anne Cruikshank [sic] the Ulster Museum person is most efficient (Thank God!).

In 2001, Desmond and Anne Crookshank remembered that when they started working together,

the extent of our ignorance was such that a panoramic view of Glin which we brightly described as J.H. Brocas, was discovered, after cleaning for the exhibition by Alexander Dunluce, to be signed and dated J.H. Mulcahy, 1839 – a Limerick painter of whom we had never heard. It was too late to reposition it in the catalogue under M. where it should have been. We were also very uncertain about two brothers called Thomas Roberts, we could not believe that two brothers would have the same name, but we went along with Strickland, the bible of Irish art history, and five years later or even more, Edward McParland, the great Irish architectural historian, found the letter from Roberts’ great-niece which told the story that Sautell Roberts took his brother’s Christian name after his tragic early death.

At the time, the ignorance about Irish art to which the pair here confess was no greater than that of anybody else. Today monographs on individual painters and genres are regularly produced and Irish art history is widely taught in the country’s schools and universities. This was far from being the case half a century ago. A great deal of academic research had been undertaken into artwork of all kinds produced during the Celtic era, and into whatever remained from the Anglo-Norman period. But the visual arts from the late seventeenth century onwards had been almost entirely ignored so that it was hard to believe painters and sculptors flourished in Ireland for 200-odd years before 1900. One suspects that at least in part this was due to an association in the public mind between much of these artists’ work and the former British regime. The majority of paintings, drawings and sculptures of the pre-Independence era had been created for an affluent minority, as was the case everywhere else in Europe. But that minority’s dominance had been overthrown and all manifestations of its former power cast into disrepute.

So even though the majority of artists working in Ireland were native to the country, their output was held in low esteem owing to associations with a displaced authority. The scant published material on this subject was inclined to judge Irish art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a provincial manifestation of what had appeared elsewhere during the same period. As Desmond told Renagh Holohan of The Irish Times in August 1981, ‘I have rather zoned in on this Irish period because nobody else much bothered. They are the artefacts of the Anglo-Irish, if one can use that dreadful word, caste, so we have sympathy with them. In the beginning this was considered colonial, but they are as much part of our heritage as the Book of Kells.’

On the other hand, when Desmond began studying eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish art it had received far less attention than the Book of Kells and other work of the earlier periods. The only significant source of information was the Strickland mentioned above. This was a two-volume Dictionary of Irish Artists published in 1913 and written by Walter Strickland, then registrar of the National Gallery of Ireland. An alphabetical survey of all deceased artists known to have worked in Ireland, Strickland’s work has been an incalculable boon ever since it first appeared. However, despite his diligence the book is by no means infallible and particulars are often given without a credited source. The quantity and quality of illustration is also decidedly meagre. On the other hand, in the absence of anything else, Strickland’s Dictionary sustained interest in the subject over the next half-century. This was especially important because soon after the book appeared much source material was lost or dispersed, beginning...