Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

26 13 BASIL BRADLEY (1842-1904) Irish Cabin Interior Showing a Man and Girl Making Súgán Rope Oil on canvas laid down on panel 34.5 x 44.5cm (13½ x 17½”) Signed € 3,000 - 5,000 Straw was one of the most important organic materials in the economy of Irish rural life, and was used in fields as various – and vital – as clothing, building and agriculture. It also accrued religious, ritual and magical significance as well as developing rich linguistic associations. Straw was used for the fabrication of St Brigid’s crosses, for mum- mers’ costumes, fishing nets, toys and, as is shown here, rope – in Irish súgán or súgán cotháin. Basil Bradley portrays the weaving process as a collabo- rative effort between different generations of the family with the household’s two dogs noticeably indifferent to the task at hand. The artist’s ‘meticulous observation’ of detail has been noted and here the furniture, interior setting and costume are rendered accurately giving the painting great documentary value (Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (2006) p. 88). The work is closely comparable, especially in its earth- based colour scheme, to Bradley’s, Irish Cabin, Spinning and, as is in that work, the ‘women’s red petticoats’, which provide the one chromatic highlight, ‘suggest that the home is a western one’ (ibid.). In addition to its harmoniously controlled palette, there is a subtle deployment of light effects to evoke presence. Clearly, two sources of illumination are in play. The light from the window which silhouettes the standing girl’s profile is the most obvious. But there is also a secondary source from which light floods the left foreground of the image, bathing the seated man in its rays. This can only be from the cabin’s door and it is easy to imagine that this is the spot where Bradley has set up his easel. This makes him simultaneously a, literally, liminal presence – but also, rather suggestively, a witness as to the scene’s verisimili- tude – standing very close by, just on the other side of the picture plane. Also enhancing the veracity of the scene is the way in which Bradley crops into the body of the bare-footed girl at the right-hand edge, rather than composing the scene into a balanced, classically-conceived composition. This is a technique more associated with the advanced Parisian modernity of Degas, than the stylistically retardataire tra- dition within which most painters of Irish rural life worked. While Bradley is careful to depict very scrupulously what he saw before him when visiting this particular cabin, his analytical viewpoint is not merely ethnographic, or at the expense of human interest. Instead, the image is both an endearing depiction of familial life and shared endeavour and an unmediated testament to the hardness of exist- ence in the rural communities of the West of Ireland. Born in England, and excelling from an early date as an animal painter, Bradley was a careful recorder of the Irish landscape (for example in his View Of The Nine Pins, Connemara, 1873) and sympathetic chronicler of rural life (in for instance his Interior of an Irish Cabin in Conne- mara, 1879). Bradley exhibited with the Old Watercolour Society and, between 1873-99, with the Royal Academy. His Irish work is rare but examples of his art can be found in leading museum collections internationally including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Manchester Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.