Exhibiting Art in Georgian Ireland
Below is my final essay for ‘Writing for the Art world: Substance and Style’ with Sotheby’s Institute of Art. It is a sort of a time travel exercise, as I took the course last year and chose to write about an exhibition I had visited the year before.
Exhibiting Art in Georgian Ireland – The Society of Artists’ Exhibitions Recreated was organised by the Irish Georgian Society to mark the restoration of the City Assembly House, on Dublin’s South William Street, and to celebrate the Society of Artists in Ireland who erected the building over 250 years ago. Shown from June 16th to July 29th, 2018 in the octagonal Exhibition Room – the first purpose-built and publicly accessible space in Ireland and Britain –– the exhibition displayed 79 works, arranged salon-style.
Inspired by the creation of similar societies in London and on the continent, in 1764 a leading group of artists created in Dublin the Society of Artists to develop a local market for contemporary works made by local artists. Nine of the twelve exhibitions organised by the Society were held in the octagonal Exhibition Room between 1766 and 1780.
Although these works were produced by artists influenced by Europe’s artistic centres – where they travelled to advance their studies and careers – and were commissioned by cosmopolitan patrons with catholic tastes, they reveal diverse influences and original aspects.
Keeping up with the salon-style hanging tradition, artworks were displayed without individual labels on seven of the eight walls (the one above the entrance having been left empty), and a reference guide was available to the visitors. Although eighteenth-century visitors had to count on catalogues which gave generic titles such as ‘Portrait of a Gentleman’ or ‘Portrait of a Lady’, it is likely they would have had no problems recognising portraits sitters. A case in point is the large Portrait of John Ponsonby, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons that hung close to the ceiling in the centre of the octagon’s first wall, clockwise from the entrance door. The author, Jacob Ennis, is said to have been the ‘favourite artist’ of Lord Charlemont, the most sophisticated collectors promoting international Neoclassicism in Ireland. If Lord Charlemont had been one of those fashionably dressed visitors to the Society of Artists’ exhibitions, he would have recognised the sitter at once. This three-quarter-length portrait shows a leading Irish politician, swaggeringly confident in his vibrant red suit and black satin damask Speaker’s robe with gold trimmings and frogs. The elegant pose, which emphasises the Speaker’s dignity and confidence, and the triangular articulation of the figure, animated by the curve made by the left side of the robes pulled aside by Lord Ponsonby’s right hand, is typical of State portraits. However, the lack of props that might make you yawn, such as the mace of the House of Commons and a full-bottomed wig, makes the portrait an unconventional one.
Next to the lower left-hand side of Lord Ponsonby’s portrait hung a small risqué portrait that eighteenth-century exhibition goers would have considered sensational but not unconventional, as it follows in the French tradition of erotic cabinet paintings: A Woman in Bed (Lydia), by Matthew William Peters. This oil painting of a young woman lying in state of dishabille is similar to the one that, when exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1777, caused such a stir that newspapers reported of men hurrying wives and daughters alike to a corner of the room to protect their virtues from such an indecent subject. After becoming a clergyman, the artist dedicated his talent to (moralizing) historical pictures and portraiture.
Hanging high on the right-hand side of the forth wall, the one that faces the entrance to the octagonal room and therefore immediately catches the visitors’ attention, is the Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Compton, considered Peters’ portrait masterpiece. The influence of French art is evident in the rendering of skin tones: the attractive face is confidently enlivened by small touches of vermilion. The sitter is the image of youth and happiness with her lightly powdered hair adorned with a string of pearls, and her white dress with a yellow bow again proof of Peter’s talent as a colourist.
At a first glance, Robert Healy’s monochrome Portrait of the Anne Trench, nee Gardiner, later Countess of Clancarty Standing in a Landscape seemed not to benefit from its proximity to the radiant Lady Compton (it hung immediately below). Executed with the extraordinary technique of grisaille chalk, which accentuates the dust like nature of the pastel, it is blended with colour. Is that a red spot in the right eye’s pupil? If only modern visitors could climb on benches to examine works more closely the way visitors to London’s Royal Academy Summer exhibitions used to do during the eighteenth century!
A close inspection of the miniature portrait paintings, displayed below one of the two large windows put in the exhibition room during the early nineteenth century, is necessary to appreciate the tiny brushstrokes. During the eighteenth century, Ireland was an important centre of miniature painting and Gustavus Hamilton one of its most successful representatives. All four miniatures by Hamilton showed in the exhibition are watercolours on ivory, a material particularly appropriate for the display of Neoclassical taste as its whiteness could replicate the effect of muslin and marble. In his Portrait of Emily, Duchess of Leinster, though, the artist has left the ivory unpainted to replicate some areas of Lady Emily’s face pale complexion. The sitter is depicted in what was known as a “feigned oval”, not quite in profile, wearing a modest muslin dress with no jewels and no ornaments in her brown un-powdered hair. This is a private and serene image of one of the key figures of eighteenth-century Ireland, who was painted by Joshua Reynolds as well. However, this miniature couldn’t differ more, not only in the size of the work itself but also in how the sitter is presented, from the English artist’s Grand Manner paintings.
Robert Hunter (c.1715/1720–c.1803). Lady Margaret Butler/Lowry-Corry (1748–1775), as Diana. National Trust, Castle Coole.
Many Grand Manner paintings by Reynolds were allegorical portraits, and Reynolds’ portrait of Lady Anne Dawson inspired Robert Hunter’s Portrait of Lady Margaret Lowry Corry, née Butler in the character of Diana. Hanging on the fifth wall, far right middle row, this standing three-quarter-length portrait is felicitously surrounded by landscape paintings. Here is the body of a lady who has spent countless hours riding or in other lady-like pursuits, but managed to keep her complexion pale and delicate. Lady Margaret has in the hair an ornament in the shape of a crescent moon, the Goddess symbol; she holds a spear in the right hand, with the arm extended upwards while caressing a hound with her left hand. She is the virgin goddess of the hunt but has forgotten somewhere her quiver of arrows.
To recreate that sense of floor to ceiling eighteenth-century display, curators have mixed works that were exhibited in this octagonal chamber during the 1770s with others by artists from the Society from the right period. All the works exhibited are representative of a time when Irish, English and Continental influences blended into each other, but in a very distinctive way.
