Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 4 DECEMBER 2024

52 The cottage, Orpen tells us, was located on a bog, about nine miles from his patron’s lodge, and half a mile from the road, with no easy access. On the night of the wake, he arrived at 10 o’clock to find, ‘the grandmother and grandfather sat in their places on each side of the fire, and benches were ranged round the walls, on which the couples were seated.’ Plied with hot tea and poteen, silence reigned until ‘the music man would play some sad air and a few of the couples … would … dance very slowly in a weary, bored sort of way.’ Orpen stayed for four hours, during which time not a word was spoken between those present, before he decamped into the pouring rain. The young emigrant, who had been ‘ignored’ all evening then caught up with him to help him find a safe way to the road, and the following morning he presented her with a photo- graph of the painting.³ If the painter’s narrative is to be accepted, it seems likely that the work, begun in 1907, remained at the Maam Cross lodge until the following year, when events surrounding the wake and the gift of the photograph must have occurred. Orpen recorded the progress of the present work in a letter to his wife, Grace, giving her a swift pen drawing of the ensemble in which the roof was too high and the room too large. Nevertheless, he con- cluded ‘I think it is going well’ (fig 1). In the autumn of 1908, Old John’s Cottage, Conne- mara was purchased for £200 by Gardenia’s mother, Mrs St George.4 Clearly the work’s social historical significance is im- mense. Its authenticity breaks through the Yeatsian ‘motley’ of fairies, myth and legend, and stands with JM Synge in the presentation of a people whose be- liefs, customs and culture was regarded as a unique survival.5 Orpen’s sympathies were not with Horace Plunkett and the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, any more than he approved of ‘intellectuals’ of the George Russell (AE) stripe.6 At heart he was an ‘eye’ – an observer in whose neutral- ity before the ancient hearth, lay his power. In visual terms Old John’s Cottage, Connemara pro- vides a necessary corrective to the work of Erskine Nicol, James Brennan and Howard Helmick, who established an ‘Irish’ subgenre of peasant interiors in exhibitions throughout Britain and Ireland fifty years earlier. But where these artists looked for di- verting subjects, Orpen adopts a different tradition, and one that can ultimately be traced to French Naturalism of the 1880s. Its impact upon painters in the early days of the New English Art Club and the Slade School of Fine Art, where he would complete his training and become a new generation star ex- hibitor, was profound.7 The likes of George Clausen and James Guthrie, had looked for documentary accuracy in their depictions of fieldworkers, often posing them ‘as they live’, in portrait mode, and with no condescension or concession to narrative. This was the generation of Walter Osborne whose Galway expedition of 1892 led to an oil sketch that provides evidence of a similar cottage encounter (fig 2). The moment for such objectivity had never passed, but at the opening of the twentieth century, ad- dressing a people that even by the 1930s was considered to have been ‘locked away for centuries by geography and poverty’, it was becoming both necessary, and urgent. The case would be taken up by Orpen’s pupils, Seán Keating, Charles Lamb and Fig. 1 ​Illustrated letter from William Orpen to Grace Orpen dis- cussing his painting, [ Old John’s Cottage ] undated, c. 1907-8, Ink on Screebe Lodge notepaper, Photo, National Gallery of Ireland