Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

www.adams.ie Important Irish Art | 1 June 2022 39 The beautifully painted still-life in the lower right corner consisting of earthenware jug, crutch and broom resting on a barrel offers a deliberate reference to the art of David Teniers who time and again places a similar grouping of objects with a prominent diagonal formed by a brush or similar object to lead the eye into the composition. Simi- larly the still-life of fish may reference Teniers’s ‘well-kept kitchen’ compositions (‘de welvoorziene keuken’). The quotation of Teniers would have been recognised widely, as the seventeenth-century Flemish artist was synonymous with ‘low-life’ genre scenes such as this and his work was avidly collected and frequently engraved. Even more fundamental as a source of inspiration, howev- er, was the phenomenally successful career of David Wilk- ie who applied the compositional dynamics of Teniers to modern-life subjects. Like Wilkie, Condy here deliberately echoes Teniers earthy ‘old master tonalities’ and shows a similar ‘delight in details and in rough irregular surfaces’ (David Solkin, Painting out of the Ordinary, Yale University Press, 2008, p. 12). Wilkie had also introduced a black sol- dier into his famous Chelsea Pensioners (Apsley House). Unlike Cushendall, the subject of another Ulster work by the artist, there is no townland in Antrim called Ballyboyle- boo. It seems to be an Anglicization – exaggerating the Irishness of the name – of Ballyboley. In the rich account of life in Ulster of a couple of decades earlier written by John Gamble (published as Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Brendán Mac Suibhne, Dublin, 2011, p. 280, n. 4), Gamble records how he stopped ‘at a lone public house between Larne and Ballymena’ and enjoyed a session in which tall stories were narrated. Mac Suibhne suggests that this may be ‘the premises now called the Ballyboley Inn’. An earlier build- ing on this site may also be the setting for Condy’s work, though an older inn only a few miles distant at The Battery, Glenwherry, is also a possible candidate.