Irish Georgian Society,
South William Street, Dublin
www.igs.ie
By Donal Fallon
The 250th anniversary of the birth of Daniel O’Connell recalls the importance of City Assembly House, now home to the Irish Georgian Society (IGS), in the political career of the Liberator. It was there that O’Connell became the first Catholic lord mayor since the days of James II, appearing at the windows to thunderous applause from the populace below. ‘The moment he was recognised’, one account tells us, ‘a shout uprose which rang through the heavens. There was scarce a man in that vast crowd who did not feel the victory his own, or the glory his own.’ Fittingly, the Irish Georgian Society summer show is held in the Daniel O’Connell Room.
The City Assembly House, built between 1766 and 1771, was constructed for the Society of Artists in Ireland ‘with the expressed aim of promoting the work of Irish artists and providing an academy for the arts’. It was known then as the Exhibition Rooms. The first purpose-built public art gallery of its kind, certainly in these islands and possibly in Europe, it later became an important site of local politics. During the revolutionary period the building was even home to the supreme court of the revolutionary Dáil Courts for a period. Formerly home to the Dublin Civic Museum, which abruptly closed its doors in 2003 (leaving the Irish capital as something of a European outlier), the multi-purpose building has been given a new lease of life by the IGS.
The City Assembly Rooms building has undergone significant restoration in recent years. While the cleaning of neo-Classical plasterwork may not be visible to the passer-by, work to windows, ironwork and brickwork has the building’s exterior also appearing at its very best. Founded in 1958 against the backdrop of the wanton vandalism of the Georgian core of the city centre, the IGS stood in stark contrast to the mentality of some who supported the demolition of two Georgian buildings on Kildare Place, with one politician telling the press: ‘I was glad to see them go. They stand for everything I hate.’
It is difficult to imagine a better location for an exhibition devoted to historical depictions of the capital than the home of an organisation that has championed its preservation. The building appears in one of the most recognisable of James Malton’s Dublin street views, albeit as a secondary subject to the neighbouring Powerscourt House. Malton’s view is full of little details; though he described a ‘confined, but genteel, private street’, there’s plenty of life on it, with street hawkers and genteel Dubliners alike in view.
From the collections of Patrick Earley, who spent five decades accumulating artworks, the paintings presented form a diverse collection of views, ranging from city streetscapes to beautiful rural views. Expertly curated by William Laffan, the artworks are joined by historical contextualisation. Some views are still immediately recognisable, but others have been transformed with the passing of time.
In the work of William Sadler (c. 1782–1839), best known for his depiction of the Battle of Waterloo, we see the area in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral, as the inhabitants of the city—ranging from militiamen to workers with horse and cart—go about their business. This is at once familiar and different, pre-dating the Guinness philanthropy that would transform the environs of the cathedral. The exhibition text rightly evokes both the earlier James Malton and the later Walter Osborne in discussion of the work, noting that ‘the overall effect of quotidian life in the shadow of ecclesiastical splendour’ is akin to Osborne’s depiction of the cathedral in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Sadler’s views of the capital are iconic, but one of the most striking of his works here comes from Wicklow, entitled A Rebel Under Arrest in Wicklow. It is a reminder of how the revolts that closed one century and opened another in Dublin played out considerably longer in the hills and valleys of the neighbouring county. As the exhibition text tells us, ‘The procession is watched by local peasantry from the nearby mud cabin while, on the road itself, an elderly man, accompanied by his wife, doffs his hat; it is unclear to whom this mark of respect is offered, the soldiers or their captive’. The 1798 and 1803 rebellions largely recall portraiture of executed leaders, and the exhibition tells us that ‘artistic responses to the 1798 rebellion were few and far between’.
The artworks selected bring us from the Georgian into the Victorian age, an era that immediately recalls the seaside town of Bray. Bray Head with Colliers Unloading comes from Bartholomew Colles Watkins, described here as ‘perhaps the most appealing Irish landscape painter of the Victorian period’. While our eyes are drawn to the colliers themselves and the towering presence of Bray Head, the adjoining text contains a real nugget: we can just about see the rear of Martello Terrace, houses build a decade or so earlier and home to a certain James Joyce between 1887 and 1891. This was the setting for the Christmas dinner scene in Portrait of the artist as a young man.
For a city of its size, Dublin has been remarkably well served by artists who wished to document not only its grand buildings but its day-to-day life. From Flora Mitchell’s landmark Vanishing Dublin to Harry Kernoff’s woodcuts of public houses, the place of artistic representations in the twentieth-century memory of Dublin is secure. Here are earlier depictions, in some cases with just as much humanity on show.
Donal Fallon is a historian and the presenter of the ‘Three Castles Burning’ podcast.