Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

38 21 LT. NICHOLAS CONDY (1793-1857) Interior of an Irish Inn at Ballyboyleboo Oil on canvas, 47.5 x 64cm (18¾ x 25”) Signed € 5,000 - 7,000 Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1843 No. 415 Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843, Condy’s recently rediscovered depiction of an Antrim interior populated by twenty very different individuals and with a rich variety of objects on display is an invaluable portrayal of Ulster country life in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although he described the picture as Interior of an Irish Cottage at Ballyboyleboo , what is shown is an inn, tavern or shebeen, making it a rare early depiction of an Irish public house. In contrast, however, to the small body of work showing Irish pubs by artists such as Charles Henry Cook, Erskine Nicol and Nathaniel Grogan, which invariably feature the Catholic Irish peasantry in stereo- typed attitudes often verging on the caricature – here the clientele seems distinctly more mixed in terms of class and confession with a noticeably military flavour. The primary interaction in the painting is between the doubly amputated figure standing on the right in smart but sober attire and the seated black man at left who has suffered the loss of just one foot and who leans back in his chair as he raises a toast. This is an extraordinarily rare image of racial equality in an Irish genre scene of this date. Where black figures appear at all in Irish painting of the period it is invariably as marginal, often servile, subsidiary figures as, for example, in Erskine Nicol’s The 16th, 17th (St Pat- rick’s Day), and 18th March (National Gallery of Ireland). It seems likely that equality – or at least the superficial appearance of equality – has been gained through shared endeavour on the battlefield, and that the seated black man is a veteran toasting his former commanding officer. Certainly the deportment and dress of the man standing, very comfortably it must be said, on his double prosthetic limbs, suggests his elevated social position. The gather- ing includes both army and naval elements. An advertis- ing bill on the right seeks able seamen, while the format of Condy’s signature, ‘Lt. Condy bf 43rd regt’ reminds us that he had begun his career as an army officer, serving in the Peninsular War, and retiring on half-pay at Christmas 1818. Continuing the military theme, a bust of the Duke of Wellington looks down from a shelf at upper left in the somewhat indecorous company of candlestick and brass kettle (and with a canoodling couple directly beneath his gaze). Prints of naval victories adorn the walls while to the side of the chimney hangs a toleware candle box and pair of bellows. A drunken sailor has passed out under the table his clay pipe and glass lying smashed in front of him while a serving woman brings more refreshments to those at table – a punch bowl, small glasses for toasting and pipes. Music is provided by a fiddler in the background. Claudia Kinmonth notes that Condy’s Ulster subjects ‘con- vey a real sense of how poor people’s homes in Antrim may well have been in the 1840s’ (Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (2006) p. 94). However, he also mixes Irish and English elements within his work, sometimes reusing still-life motifs or even whole figurative groups with which he was pleased. On the shelf to the left, the silver-plated vessel with a pouring spout and a handle on the side was used for serving hot chocolate, a delicacy un- likely to be widely available in Irish pubs of the 1840s, and indeed it, and other elements of the composition, appear again in Estate Workers in a Kitchen Interior (Mount Edg- cumbe House). Similarly, a small work in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, repeats almost verbatim the seated man shown here smoking a pipe. This is clearly a reduction from the present work, rather than the other way round, as the man’s motivation for turning round and looking upwards is lost when the figure is shown in isolation and removed from its context. Condy’s composition is artfully created and rather than the mere ‘slice-of-life’ recording of an interior and the ob- jects within it, he offers knowing and witty allusions to the art of the past and also perhaps to that of his contempo- raries. He relishes the chance to paint textures as different as scaly fish, metal, glass and ceramics and to record the differing way that light falls on each. The beautifully paint- ed still-life in the lower right corner consisting