Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 4 DECEMBER 2024

Important Irish Art | 4 December 2024 www.adams.ie 53 1. Information giving the title of the picture is derived from a letter to Grace, the artist’s wife, quoted in Bruce Arnold, Orpen Mirror to an Age, 1981 (Jonathan Cape), p.239. 2. Sir William Orpen RA, Stories of Old Ireland and Myself, 1924 (Williams and Northgate), p.32; see also Arnold, 1981, p.239. 3. A story confirmed in Arnold 1981. 4. Orpen 1924, p. 36. The picture’s reservation to Mrs St George may also explain its absence rom the artist’s Studio Book. It appears however in Cara Copeland’s handwritten List of Pictures and Drawings by Sir William Orpen RA produced around the time of the artist’s death. 5. Abbey Theatre productions gained tacit approval from Nationalists up until the so-called ‘Playboy riots’ in Dublin in the spring of 1907, just before Orpen made his visit to Galway. 6. For the utopian vision of rural Ireland, see Sir Horace Plunkett KCVO, FRS, Ireland in the New Century , 1904 (Irish Academic Press ed., 1983); also AE (George William Russell), The National Being, Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity, 1916 (Maunsel & Co, Dublin). 7. George Clausen’s A Field Hand , 1884 (Private Collection) and James Guthrie’s A Village Worthy, 1886 (Glasgow Museums), typify this trend. others, in an effort to reveal a prelapsarian world, west of Galway, in which ‘Progress – whatever we mean by it – has broken in vain against grey walls’. Recognising this, Old John’s Cottage, Connemara avoids the obvious later valorisation of the Gael in the works such as Keating’s Aran Fisherman and his Wife , 1916 (Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin) and Lamb’s Quaint Couple , 1930 (Crawford Art Gallery, Cork), while Paul Henry’s early Achill turf cutters and potato diggers were, in 1908, yet to come. How then do we approach Orpen’s seminal encoun- ter in a cottage in Connemara? How does the present painting play against his own heroic self-projection as a ‘man of the west’, clad in an Aran bonnet, leather jerkin and ‘crois’ or woollen sash tied at the waste (fig 3) In Orpen’s Connemara cabin, a stage is set for himself and others to play their parts. Its origins, so far as he – ‘Orpsieboy’ - suburban Dubliner - exiled in London - was concerned, lay in the precision with which the poses of the elderly couple,living on the earthen floor of a barren bog, were rendered. The man’s reverie and the woman’s grave reticence are theirs alone. They were as he found them, and would be still, if he was alive and went back today. Like Grant Wood’s American Gothic , 1930 (Art Institute of Chicago), they are de trop, but at the same time, essential. Kenneth McConkey, November, 2024 Fig. 2 W​ alter Osborne, A Galway Cottage, c. 1892, 30 x 38 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin Fig. 3​William Orpen, Self-Portrait, The Man form Aran , 1916, 119.5 x 86.5, Private Collection