Irish and Scottish painting.(Book Review)

Brian O'Doherty, the artist and critic, has described Irish art as 'the gate lodge beside the big house of Irish Writing.' This still remains true, but we hope that we have been able to push the squeaking hinges of the gate a little further open." So concludes Ireland's Painters, 1600-1940, the successor to The Painters of Ireland, published in 1978. The same authors wrote both books, enlarging upon the first with new information, and ending with the 1940s rather than about 1920. They candidly confess that some paragraphs are little changed from one book to the next "as the old paragraphs still seemed to hold up." They do not suggest that there was an Irish school of painting, nor have they adopted the "New Art History" approach. Instead they "have attempted to write a simple, chronological account of the history and development of Irish painting."

As recounted by Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, the history of Irish painting is an episodic affair, its heyday being the time between the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England in 1660 and the Act of Union of 1801, joining Ireland and England. Thereafter Ireland's riches tended to be spent in England. The great famine of 1845 to 1850 eroded the patronage of artists even further. The National Gallery in Dublin, wrote George Moore in 1905, "is the most perfect image of the Sahara that I know. Now and then one sees a human being hurry by like a Bedouin on the horizon ... no one goes there except when it rains." Nonetheless, the authors are nationalists and take obvious pleasure in the present resurgence of prosperity in Ireland and the consequent repatriation of Irish art. "We are indeed indebted to the new group of collectors who have given us all great encouragement," they write with feeling. They even extend every courtesy to what one might call honorary Irish painters such as Robert Henri, who was born in Cincinnati but "had Irish ancestry." He spent a number of summers painting in Ireland and so became part of the canon.

A History of Scottish Art considers its subject through the perspective of the Fleming Collection, formed over thirty-five years by the London investment bank of that name. When the bank was sold to the Chase Manhattan Bank, the art collection was sold to the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, and a revolving selection is now exhibited in the foundation's London gallery.

While the union of Ireland and England contributed to the decline of painting commissions, the Act of Union of 1707 that united Scotland and England brought economic stability and prosperous times for artists, many of whom had studied in Rome. Then, well into the nineteenth century, there emerged a "truly Scottish school of painting in terms of an identifiable Scottish style." From about 1880 to 1895 the painters known collectively as the "Glasgow Boys" rejected romantic landscapes and sentimental genre paintings for the naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the Barbizon artists. The ...