WHIPPING THE HERRING — Survival and Celebration in Ninetenth-Century Irish Art

ed. Peter Murray

essays by Julian Campbell, Tom Dunne, Claudia Kinmonth, Peter Murray

ISBN 978 0948037 313      264 pages (hardback)    22.5x24.5cm    204 illus    index  

Whipping the Herring provides a fascinating visual record of everyday life in the towns, villages and countryside of Ireland two centuries ago. Featuring four superb, insightful essays, there are numerous images of fairs and festivals, pubs and pilgrimages, marriages and wakes. There is a particular emphasis on the lives of ordinary people, struggling to make do – and often enjoying life – on very limited means. There are scenes, too, of relative prosperity, for Ireland had periods of economic growth in the nineteenth century. Seventy key works are featured, each of which is accompanied by an individual text on the work and its artist.

EXTRACTS

"The Classical and Neo-Classical casts may have had a salutary effect on students at the School of Art, but there is also a strong tendency towards Realism evident in Cork art throughout the nineteenth century. A port city, its wealth based on mercantile attributes of measurement and quantification, like Belfast, Limerick and Waterford, Cork was well placed to become the regional centre for a Realist art movement. Although the houses of the merchants and bishops in the eighteenth century were embellished with Rococo plasterwork, by the early nineteenth century there was less taste for the fanciful; instead paintings describing people and the world in down-to-earth terms became valued. Nathaniel Grogan’s and Daniel MacDonald’s best paintings show street traders mixing cheerfully with wealthy merchants. Davis might have added to his list of émigré Irish artists William Turner de Lond, who depicted similar cheerful social confusion in Ennis and Limerick.
          By contrast, in Dublin, with its Castle ‘court’, a refined landscape and pastel portrait tradition at the Drawing Schools, and a nervous anxiety at the Academy to live up to its royal charter, patronage tended to follow a diluted English taste. There was an aspiration towards grandeur and the heroic, while the Academy laid down strict definitions on what artists might paint. Middle-class art collectors opted frequently for coy and sentimental scenes. On the other hand, the regional port cities, broadly speaking, lacked a substantial middle-class audience and this inhibited the growth of an art market based on qualities of sentimental appeal. The fact that the majority of artists in Whipping the Herring are from Munster perhaps reflects a more laissez-faire cultural approach in a city that cared less for titles and status than making money supplying the world with firkins of beef and salted butter. Like Belfast, Cork’s status as a port city created an atmosphere less conducive to sentimental art than Dublin, which preferred an escapist art that glossed over social problems. The Realism that flourished in Munster saw artists such as Robert Lowe Stopford, James Mahoney and James Brenan producing works of reportage and social commentary. Later in the nineteenth century, when the west of Ireland became popular as a destination for artists, artists tended to portray its heroic or picturesque qualities. Theirs remained essentially an outsider’s view. In Cork, a small self-contained city, the artists were insiders, casting a quizzical and occasionally satiric eye over those they knew well."

— from the essay by Peter Murray

"Irish interior scenes of the early nineteenth century derive from contrasting traditions – classic Dutch interiors of the seventeenth century, the genre subjects of William Mulready and David Wilkie, and the pretty cottage scenes popular in the Victorian period. In England, the novelist George Eliot criticised the ‘softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque’. However, paintings by Brownlow hauntingly echo the peasant interiors of the Le Nain brothers in seventeenth-century France. In the second half of the century, French Realist painters such as François Bonvin and Leon Lhermitte, and Josef Israels in Holland, introduced greater naturalism and pathos into the interior genre. Honoré Daumier’s wash painting La Soupe (1852, Louvre) shows a ragged working-class family ravenously eating their soup at the kitchen table while the mother breastfeeds her baby, while Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters (1885, van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) shows a Dutch peasant family crowding around the small table in their dingy cabin.
          Irish artists never reached this degree of social realism. Yet Aloysius O’Kelly’s Connemara interiors are striking in their tangible realism and the cleanliness of the cottages and their inhabitants. There are several unexpected features in representations of some west of Ireland interiors which contradict the stereotype of cramped two-roomed cabins often described by writers. The first is the spaciousness of rooms, with lofty ceilings, in paintings by Burton and O’Kelly. Moreover, in comparison with Wilkie’s untidy and ambiguous caverns, O’Kelly’s interiors have a well-swept, cared-for quality. The hearth, being a central feature in some pictures, brings a warmth and homeliness to a sparse scene. Also, in comparison with the cottage interiors of James Brenan in county Cork, and similar subjects by Continental artists, where the table is placed in the centre of the room, the kitchen table (if present at all) is placed against the wall in some west of Ireland pictures. This may have been to allow more space in a small room for storytelling, music or weaving, or for sitting around the hearth. Or the table may have been pushed back to allow the artist to include more details of the room."

— from the essay by Julian Campbell