ÉIMEAR O’CONNOR
Contents Acknowledgements
IX
Prologue – Declan Kiberd
XI
Author’s introduction Section 1: 1893–1907 IMAGES OF IRELAND AT HOME AND ABROAD: World’s fairs and emerging networks
XVII
1
Mrs Alice Hart: Founder of the Donegal Industries Fund 1883: Context before Controversy 4 Lady Ishbel Aberdeen: Context before Controversy The Irish Industries Association 1886 Lady Aberdeen: Representing Ireland at the Edinburgh Exhibition 1886 Mrs Hart: An Irish village at Olympia, London 1888 Lady Aberdeen and Mrs Hart: Emerging Difficulties – The Chicago World’s Fair 1893
7 11 13 15 17
Chicago 1893: Two Irish Villages Chicago: A Bit of Blarney
19 25
Here and There: Emerging Networks – Horace Plunkett The Irish Lace Depot, Dublin, 1893 The Recess Committee and the Emergence of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI)
31 34
Here and There: Emerging Networks – George Russell (AE)
40
Here and There: Emerging Networks – New York – John Quinn
43
Irish International Exhibitions: Context DATI and Ireland’s Presence at International Fairs The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St Louis, 1904: Irish Culture and Controversy St Louis, 1904: Irish Visual Art Those Theatre Folk: Trouble in St Louis St Louis and Hugh Lane: An Exhibition that Did Not Happen John Quinn: Irish Exhibition, Madison Square Gardens, New York, 1905 The Importance of Networks
49 49 50 52 54 57 58 65
The Irish International, Dublin, 1907: Art, Arguments, and Altruism The Dublin International Exhibition, 1907: Gardens, Paintings, and Politics Irish International, 1907: Irish Home Industries
68 72 76
36
Irish International, 1907: Fine Arts Section Irish International 1907: Irish Fine Arts Section The Somali Village: ‘The Other’ on Display, Irish International, 1907
79 81 86
Lady Aberdeen: The Women’s National Health Organisation and Eradicating TB, 1907–1915
87
In Summary
88
Section 2: 1907–1924
90
Introduction:
92
Irish Exhibition, Madison Square Garden, 1908
92
Artists and Émigrés – John Butler Yeats Dublin: No Stranger to Modern Art – Whistler, 1884 Modern Paintings: Dublin, 1899 Dublin: Nathaniel Hone and John Butler Yeats, 1901
95 98 100 103
Hugh Lane: Gifting Culture – A Municipal Collection and Gallery in Dublin Hugh Lane: An Exhibition in the RHA, 1902 Hugh Lane: An Exhibition of Irish Art, St Louis, 1904 Hugh Lane: Exhibition of the James Staats Forbes Collection, Dublin, 1904 Hugh Lane: Art for Dublin – Culture and Controversy Hugh Lane: A Temporary Gallery, Dublin, 1908 Hugh Lane: Opposition to Plans for a Permanent Gallery
105 107 107 110 111 113 116
Post-Impressionism Exhibition in Dublin, 1911: The Rediscovery of a Forgotten Art 118 ‘A Whirlwind on 26th Street’: The Armory Exhibition, 1913
120
John Quinn: Irish Art at the Armory Exhibition, 1913
124
Artists and Émigrés: Marjorie Organ
126
Artists and Émigrés: Michael Power O’Malley John Quinn: The Ways and Means Committee – The Route to New York for Irish art, 1913 John Quinn: After the Armory – Irish Culture and Politics John Quinn: Lady Gregory and the Death of Hugh Lane John Quinn: The Irish Home Rule Convention – An American Point of View John Quinn: Lady Gregory and the Death of Robert Gregory, 1918
128 132 135 141 146 148
‘America will Seem Very Distant Now’: Art, Ireland, and the Death of John Quinn
151
Interlude: Post-Treaty Context – Ireland ‘Old Count Plunkett’: A Ministry for Art in Ireland – 1921 Post-Treaty: ‘Queer Things … Under the Name of Art’
156 158
In Summary
165
Section 3: 1923–1935
166
Introduction:
168
Context: Ireland to New York – Émigrés: Francis, Dominick, and E. Byrne Hackett
169
Context: Setting the Scene – Edmund Byrne Hackett and the Brick Row Bookshop, 1915
170
Artists and Émigrés: Michael Power O’Malley and Patrick Tuohy
174
New York: The Helen Hackett Gallery The ‘Revival of Irish Art’: The Helen Hackett Gallery, 1929 Helen Hackett: ‘Ireland Revisited’ July 1929 New York: The ‘Revival Continues’ – The Helen Hackett Gallery George Russell: The Irish Homestead (1905–23) and The Irish Statesman 1923–30) New York: The ‘Revival’ Continues – The Helen Hackett Gallery New York: The Death of Patrick Tuohy New York: Patric Farrell and the Irish Art Rooms New York: Patric Farrell – From Irish Art Rooms to the Museum of Irish Art
179 182 193 235 236 238 243 244 247
Interlude The Death of Lady Gregory and a Permanent Municipal Gallery of Modern Art The Death of Sir Horace Plunkett The Death of George Russell (AE) Lady Aberdeen: The Final Years
252 253 254 255
In Summary
258
Section 4: 1931–1939
260
Introduction:
262
Context: World War Beckons – The Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, 1933
263
Ireland: Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition, 1933
264
Returning to Ireland: Robert Flaherty and the Man of Aran Robert Flaherty, Russia, and Socialism The Journey to Ireland: Germany and the British Empire Marketing Board Ireland: 1931 and 1932 The Influence of Liam O’Flaherty Capturing ‘Tiger’ King The Arrival of the ‘Sun Fish’, April 1932: A Tradition Reborn Robert Flaherty and Seán Keating
268 271 272 275 279 280 282 284
A Silent Film, and the Storyteller, Seán O Dioráin Man of Aran: Advertising the Aran Islands Frances Hubbard Flaherty: Photographer Emerging Criticism Returning to New York, 1934: Critical Reception The Mussolini Award, 1934 New York, 1934: The Man of Aran and the Wild Earth Exhibitionat the Museum of Irish Art
286 289 291 293 299 301
The New York World’s Fair, 1939: Building the World of Tomorrow
304
Floating Ireland: The California, 1936
308
Victor Waddington: Irish Art at the Hotel Astor, New York
310
The World of Tomorrow, 1939: Michael Scott’s Shamrock Pavilion
312
The World of Tomorrow: Ireland in the Hall of Nations The World of Tomorrow: Ireland and the New World The World of Tomorrow and the Second World War The World of Tomorrow: Seán Keating and Race of the Gael Aftermath: Helen Hackett Aftermath: Patric Farrell
318 321 324 326 328 329
In Summary
330
Endnotes
334
List of plates
368
Select Bibliography
370
Index
376
302
Author’s Introduction If God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from ruling the world, then who invented Ireland?1
The quote above, is of course, tongue in cheek, written by one of the most distinguished academic authors of our time, Professor Declan Kiberd. I cannot answer the first part of the query, but to the second part, I have, I hope, at least a partial answer. This is a book about the people that helped to invent Ireland, the Irish visual arts, and those who worked so hard to encourage the arts and artists in Ireland and in Irish America between 1893 and 1939, a period that covers just under fifty years. It is about networks – connections between people and connectedness – and sometimes, it is about the controversies that emerge as a result of those connections. But most importantly, it is the various personalities, introduced throughout the book that will take the reader through the narrative. The idea for Art, Ireland, and the Irish Diaspora emerged while I was working on my biography of Irish artist, Seán Keating (1889–1977), published by Irish Academic Press in 2013. It was through my research on Keating that I began to recognise the importance of several people in Ireland, and in America, to the development of Irish visual arts in the early years of the twentieth century. But I found that my research needed further context, which brought me further back, to 1893, and to the first time that Ireland was exhibited to the Irish diaspora in Chicago under the guise of what become known as the ‘Irish village’. Designed to deliberately emulate historically recognisable buildings in Ireland, and therefore to appeal to the Irish diaspora in America, the Irish village was populated by ‘real’ Irish peasants, all of whom were trained in the art of lacemaking, embroidery, or other home crafts, as well as others who were trained in various aspects of farm-based crafts such as butter making. There were various controversies and jealousies connected with the Irish village, so much so, that in fact, there were two Irish villages in Chicago in 1893, but the story was a way to begin to pick up on who knew who, and how each was so important to Irish art and artists in Ireland and in America. Of necessity, and largely owing to the broad scale of the theme, I have chosen to work within reasonably precise date ranges, and by reference to specific people, in the knowledge that, owing to space, there are people and galleries
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
XVII
Section One 1893–1907
IMAGES OF IRELAND AT HOME AND ABROAD: World’s Fairs and Emerging Networks
Facing page: Plate 1.4. John Butler Yeats, Portrait of John Quinn, 1908
IMAGES OF IRELAND AT HOME AND ABROAD World’s Fairs and Emerging Networks
In the cultivation of beauty, not only in its loftier sense, but on the practical side, by proper designs, by proper adapting of means to ends, by combining simplicity with elegance, every man and woman, nay, even every intelligent youth, can help to make our life better and purer, and therefore happier; for here the many and the few, the poor and the rich, the native and the settler, the producer and the employer, can combine and contribute to their country’s good.1
It seems extraordinary that John Pentland Mahaffy, then Chair of Ancient History at Trinity College Dublin, could happily refer to the ‘native and the settler’ in such glowing terms during his speech made in 1899 at the opening of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition at Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin, and quoted above. Yet, the speaker was living in a particular context; one that accepted the plight of the poor, and that allowed the development of philanthropic endeavours by the upper classes that were designed to educate the underprivileged so that they might be encouraged to help themselves. Mrs Alice Hart’s Donegal Industrial Fund (1883), Lady Ishbel Aberdeen’s Irish Industries Association (1886), the Irish Arts and Crafts Society (1887), and the many countrywide projects encouraged by the Congested Districts Board (1891) led to a reinvention or revival of Irish cottage industries, the output of which appealed to expatriate communities in England and America.2 Allied to the re-emerging lace industry, the Royal Irish School of Art Needlework, inspired as it was by its London-based namesake (1872), opened in Dublin in 1876. At the same time, the ‘international fair’ was becoming popular as a method by which to advertise industrial and artistic developments from countries across the globe. Although there were many such fairs of varying scale, and while the Olympia in London is briefly mentioned so as to introduce two important women, the central focus in this section of the book is Chicago (1893), St Louis (1904), New York (1905) and Dublin (1907). Casting a lens on
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Ireland’s involvement with such fairs allows the opportunity to uncover, and sometimes to recover, a complicated series of networks between people, and more specifically as the years advance, between Dublin and New York. The importance of Ireland’s involvement with World’s Fairs, which were essentially shop windows designed to appeal to expatriate communities abroad, cannot be overestimated. In the years following the famine, well-meaning wealthy women, such as Mrs Alice Hart and Lady Aberdeen, who had determined to help the Irish peasant classes to earn a decent living by utilising their farming and crafting skills, funded the construction of ‘authentic’ Irish villages with attendant thatched cottages, round towers and other such architectural signifiers at various fairs. Irish men and women were, quite literally, shipped in to live and work on site for the duration of whatever fair it was; the implication being that the clean, good-living ‘natives’, who could be seen making butter, lace, woodwork and other various crafts, were content and happy with their situation, and were thus, demonstrative of the positive life to be gained from education provided by those with philanthropic inclinations. One might assume, in view of the socio-political and economic circumstances in Ireland, that such constructions held little appeal to the Irish expatriate community. Yet, the villages, the native inhabitants, and their handiwork, proved extremely popular to visitors, who were, perhaps, eager to engage with memories of home. Moreover, there was no shortage of Irish men and women willing to populate the villages. Fascinatingly, too, by the time that
Fig. 1.1. Advertisement for Mrs Hart’s Donegal Industries Fund. Gordon Family Archive, Haddo Estate.
SECTION ONE: 1893–1907 IMAGES OF IRELAND AT HOME AND ABROAD
3
the Chicago World’s Fair opened in May 1893, there were two Irish villages on the site – one run by Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, and the other operated by Mrs Alice Hart. They were two feisty women that were well known to each other before 1893, their villages in Chicago being a manifestation of their competitive territorialism.
MRS ALICE HART Founder of the Donegal Industries Fund 1883 Context before Controversy After touring the poorest districts of Ireland with her husband, Ernest, a doctor, Mrs Alice Hart (née Rowland) founded the Donegal Industrial Fund in 1883. They drove over ‘400 miles through the country’ where they saw dire destitution, yet, ‘though the people were actually starving’, the couple ‘were never begged from but once. Work, work, was all they clamoured for’.1 Her response was to try to reinvigorate local cottage industries through founding the Donegal Industrial Fund, and an associated shop that opened initially in 31 New Cavendish Street, before moving to 43 Wigmore Street, London in 1885. Such was the success of her venture that work made in Irish cottage industries, and distributed through the Donegal Industrial Fund, won a ‘special commendation’ at the International Inventions Exhibition in London in 1885.2 In an article written by Dinah Mulock on behalf of the Donegal Industrial Fund in 1886, the author notes that Mrs Hart: Revived the industries once pursued in the district – spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, and embroidery. She organised centres where the women were supplied with materials and taught how best to use them, and where their work was brought to be punctually examined, criticised, and paid for. The men, too, were encouraged to recommence hand-loom weaving, and shown how to obtain permanent and beautiful dyes from the bog plants so as to produce friezes, tweeds, and serges entirely of home manufacture. ‘The great recommendation of them’ says Mrs Hart, ‘is their genuineness. Nothing but wool can be used, for the peasants have nothing else to use. No cheapening admixture of jute and cotton is possible: they are hand-carded, hand-spun, hand-woven, hand-washed and shrunken; in fact, hand-made from beginning to end.3
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ART, IRELAND & THE IRISH DIASPORA
Born and bred in an upper class merchant family, Mrs Hart knew how to access markets for the ‘cottage crafts’ made in ‘rural Donegal’.4 Her heightened empathy for Ireland’s destitute cottage workers may have derived from her personal experience of ‘reduced financial circumstances’ after her father’s death in 1869.5 In her choice of husband, Ernest Hart (1835–1898), a Jewish physician some thirteen years older, Alice found a kindred spirit who had already developed a name as an activist against anti-Semitism.6 Their tour of the poorer districts of Ireland in 1883 appears to have been encouraged by Hart’s apparent interest in Charles Stewart Parnell, whose political rhetoric focused on the plight of Irish peasants. Whatever the reason, their philanthropic focus was not unusual at that time; poverty stricken rural and city dwellers in Wales and Scotland were also of concern to benevolent members of the English upper classes. Interestingly, when Mrs Hart first began her enterprise, she put a committee in place; their names are now long lost to history. But realising that working with committees created difficulties; she ‘took it into her own hands’ within the first couple of years.7 The point is of significance; as will become apparent, Mrs Hart proved that she was definitely not a committee woman when it came to advertising and selling Irish cottage industries abroad. But that fact would not emerge into the public domain until 1893. In the interim, Hart, now working singlehandedly, apparently ran into difficulties with the cottage workers who ‘could not be taught that a pair of socks must be of exactly the same length, and that colours must match, and orders be obeyed literally’.8 Accordingly, she realised that she would have to be ‘remorseless’ about standards if the venture were to succeed: Mrs Hart was remorseless. Every true teacher must be. Her aim was not that of giving charity, but of helping people to help themselves, so as to have no need of charity. By unlimited patience she contrived to make the work so good, and at the same time so reasonable, that the buyer was as much benefitted as the worker. Among large London houses and elsewhere she succeeded in getting regular sale for her productions, and in distributing in Donegal, as payment, a sum of money which, during the past severe winter, has saved a district from starving. Of course, she gained nothing herself. Her working capital brought in no interest, but she kept a list of all her employees, ready to give them a bonus, over and above their payment, should circumstances allow.9
SECTION ONE: 1893–1907 IMAGES OF IRELAND AT HOME AND ABROAD
5
Thus, to ensure the success of the business, which was ‘flourishing’ by 1886, Mrs Hart insisted on ‘quality and finish’ in all work. Writing to her workers in July 1885, she insisted that: Everything must be done by you as well as it can possibly be done. It is no use casting on sixty stitches when sixty-five are ordered, or making a sock ten inches long when ten and a half are ordered. By such mistakes the work is made unsaleable and returned on my hands, thereby causing me heavy loss, and you also, for the business is carried on for your interest and your profit, not mine. In everything you must show the greatest care and neatness. Nothing will do, my friends, but the very best.10
Although she apparently made no money from the venture, Mrs Hart invested capital into her enterprise. In that same letter to her workers, dated July 1885, Hart wrote: During the past year I have spent £650 in yarns sent to Donegal, and have paid my knitters £365 for knitting 12,300 pairs of socks and stockings. I have also bought of you 4,954 yards of tweed and flannel, paying each spinner and weaver separately for their work. In the past twelve months I have paid over £1,000 to my knitters, spinners, weavers, and embroiderers. In parts where wool has been scarce, I have sent fleeces, and in every possible way I have striven to keep your looms and spinning wheels at work. Altogether, I have laid out nearly £2,000 in effort to help you; which sums of money now lies locked up in the various articles you have made and been paid for, but which, as yet, have not all been sold.11
At the root of Mrs Hart’s project was the notion that ‘instead of fighting for one’s rights, it is best to do one’s duties – the first being to work’. Moreover, it was the women of Ireland who could introduce ‘Home Rule’ by inculcating such thoughts in their husbands and sons.12 Thus, although her Donegal Industrial Fund ran on reasonably good business principles, Mrs Hart, at this stage anyway, did not adopt an overtly political stance on Home Rule, rather, she was concerned that all Irish people should work. In this regard, and acknowledging that upper class women could also fall on hard times, she introduced the ‘Kells Art Embroideries’, featuring embellishments from the
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famous book decoratively transposed onto Irish linen by ‘ladies of culture and condition [who were] starving like the peasants’.13 As in the case of Mrs Hart’s cottage workers, the ‘Kells’ embroiderers worked from their homes. Indeed, in just a few lines the author of the article on the Donegal Industrial Fund, Dinah Mulock, revealed everything that was ‘pathetic’ for every class of Irish women, for so many different reasons, at that time. So as to be properly enabled to write the article she had access to information, some of which took the form of: A heap of letters – from the ill-spelt, almost undecipherable scrawl of the poor knitter or crochet maker, to the letter of the ‘lady of title’, thankful to do ‘Kells’ embroidery, and the ‘mistress’, living in almost starvation on her own estate, imploring any kind of work ‘to get a crust for her old age’, and explaining that she can ‘stand a great deal without requiring rest’ – but all these are too pathetic and too sacred to be made public … Mrs Hart’s customers and workers are of every possible shade and opinion. She wants no charity and asks none. All she wants is to save Ireland, as many a human being has been saved, by giving her the great blessings of life – work!14
LADY ISHBEL ABERDEEN Context before Controversy In the meantime, the aforementioned Lady Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon (née Marjoribanks), Countess of Aberdeen, later Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair (1857–1939), arrived in Dublin in February, 1886. She was, from the outset, blatantly, and absolutely a believer in, and supporter of Home Rule for Ireland. It was not uncommon for the reigning vicereine to display her support for Ireland by wearing Irish-made and embellished clothes, evident as early as 1826, when an observer for the Freeman’s Journal wrote that the then vicereine had worn ‘a splendid train of white Irish silver tabbinet, shamrock pattern, richly trimmed with silver, and manufactured by O’Reilly of College Green’ while attending the levée in the Presence Chamber.1 In 1830, the viceroy and vicereine, the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland both attended a ‘Drawing Room’ at Dublin Castle dressed in ‘Irish manufacture, as were the generality of those attending.’2 But it was not until 1886 that such support was deliberately fused with a paternalistic project to create economic recovery and stability for Ireland’s cottage workers. This was
SECTION ONE: 1893–1907 IMAGES OF IRELAND AT HOME AND ABROAD
7
Facing page: Plate 1.1. Alphonse Jongers, Ishbel, Marchioness of Aberdeen, 1897. Courtesy of Joanna, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, and the National Trust for Scotland, Haddo Estate.
concomitant with support for the political zeitgeist of the era: Home Rule for Ireland. Akin to many philanthropic women of the time, and of her class, Ishbel was always aware of the importance of service to the community, and in her youth she ran Sunday school classes for the children of workers on her family estate, Guisachan, in Inverness, Scotland.3 Her father, Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, was a Liberal MP for Berwick-on-Tweed, in Scotland, and was on friendly terms with William Gladstone until the issue of Home Rule broke the bond between the two men. But Ishbel remained friendly with Gladstone and his wife; she was an ally and an overt political supporter. Ishbel and her husband, John Campbell Hamilton-Gordon, 7th Earl of Aberdeen, later 1st Marquis of Aberdeen and Temair (1847–1934), whom she married in 1877, were drawn together through their ‘common desire to dedicate’ their ‘lives to the service of God’.4 Fundamental to their attitude was a paternal disposition that accepted as a given that ‘God had created a hierarchal society and that it was the duty of the wealthy to protect, guide and help the lower ranks, maintaining a firm moral superintendence’.5 Inherent to their paternalism was the concept of social benevolence. This attitude was ‘exemplified’ in Scottish ‘kailyard’ literature, as espoused by ‘Free Church minister turned journalist William Robertson Nicoll’, who, as it happened, ‘encouraged the Aberdeens to write their memoirs’ which were published in 1925.6 Kailyard literature acknowledged ‘tacit social norms’, including the notion that ‘inequality and social hierarchy were acceptable if the upper classes remained in contact with their subordinates and thus open to human feelings prompting them to acknowledge obligations towards the less fortunate’.7 Thus, the couple involved themselves with several social causes including an organisation, based in London, which worked towards the provision of seats for shop assistants, along with the National Home Reading Union, the Parents’ National Education Union, the Canning Town Women’s Settlement, and homes for working girls.8 Significantly, the Aberdeens, or more specifically, Ishbel, co-operated with Gladstone ‘in his rescue work with London prostitutes’.9 Such was the extent of the Aberdeens’s paternalism, particularly towards women, that Gladstone is reputed to have said that they were ‘a very edifying couple’.10 The arrival of Lord and Lady Aberdeen to Dublin Castle in 1886, appointed by Gladstone, heralded extraordinary changes to the role of the vicereine in Ireland. Lady Aberdeen was astute, clearly politicised in spite of her protestations to be otherwise, and highly experienced in working with those far less privileged. She was well used to addressing the press, and she was in
8
ART, IRELAND & THE IRISH DIASPORA
SECTION ONE: 1893–1907 IMAGES OF IRELAND AT HOME AND ABROAD
9
Fig. 1.2. Lord and Lady Aberdeen, Ireland, 1886. Gordon Family Archive, Haddo Estate.
no mind to remain behind the scenes while her husband, to whom she was an equal partner, fulfilled his public remit.11 A naturally confident communicator, she conjoined her inherent ‘social benevolence’ to her belief in Home Rule, through her engagement with Irish home industries. Her project was to bring about an economic revival, especially among the poorer classes, so that the Irish people could help themselves, but under the caring eye of the ‘welfare monarch’ presiding over Home Rule. Although she began her tenure as vicereine by wearing Irish-made and embellished garments during the Castle season, it was the inauguration of the Irish Industries Association, of which she was president, in May 1886, which heralded her first, highly intentioned, public relations exercise.
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that I have not referred to. There are four sections, corralled by date range, within the book. I begin in section one by following Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, an avid Home Rule supporter, who founded and fully funded the first Irish village in Chicago in 1893. The section appraises her close association with Sir Horace Plunkett, founder of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) and the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI) in Dublin, and the concomitant emergence of cultural connections between Lady Aberdeen, Plunkett, George Russell, and a person of major significance to Irish literature and visual arts, the New York based lawyer, John Quinn. Section two continues with Quinn and his friendship with and support of the Yeats family, Lady Gregory, and many others, while at the same time, introducing some of the major exhibitions of art held in Dublin in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and the early years of the twentieth. The section also deals extensively with Sir Hugh Lane’s contribution to Irish culture, and with John Quinn’s promotion of Irish artists through the famous Armory exhibition in 1913. Quinn’s association with George Russell and Home Rule in Ireland is another element of the section. The major focus of section three is the developing market for Irish visual art in New York that began in 1915 with Kilkenny-born émigré, E. Byrne Hackett and the Brick Row Book Shop, carried on during the 1920s through the activities of his exwife, Helen Hackett, and later, by the son of Irish émigrés, Patric Farrell. The section reveals previously unknown information about Helen Hackett, and about the Waterford-born artist émigré to New York, Michael Power O’Malley. Section four returns to the Chicago World’s Fair, 1933, and offers a narrative of Robert Flaherty’s major undertaking, his film Man of Aran, completed in 1934. Although deeply problematic for many reasons, the story of the making of the film, and of the work of photographer, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, is an important one, which subsequently returns the narrative to Patric Farrell’s Irish Art Rooms in New York in 1934. The section then deals with Ireland’s involvement with the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, and Patric Farrell’s role with a small section of the Irish art therein. It has largely been forgotten that Ireland’s history, culture, and industry was represented in two buildings in New York in 1939; the so-called Shamrock Pavilion, designed by Michael Scott, with a huge scale mural by Keating featuring the Shannon Scheme, and also in a large building in an area known as the Hall of Nations, all of which is outlined in the section. The focus on Ireland as a tourist destination to the Irish diaspora is also a feature, as is the emphasis on the nation’s role as a victim of history by Irish politicians at the time, in spite of the theme of
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the World’s Fair, which was ‘The World of Tomorrow’. Just as the book begins with Irish representation in Chicago in 1893, it ends with an assessment of Ireland’s two buildings, the content of same, and the political rhetoric of the time during the New York World’s Fair, 1939. With the onset of the Second World War, the market for Irish art in America in general, and in New York in particular, closed. By the time it had reopened again, Ireland had its Cultural Relations Committee, founded in 1949, and later, the Arts Council, founded in 1952 – both of which are briefly discussed. While several excellent books, such as Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, edited by J.J. Lee and Marion R. Casey, examine the role of religion and politics to the development of Irish America, this book does not overtly take that route, except where mention of Home Rule is pertinent. Rather, what emerges from Art, Ireland, and the Irish Diaspora is that those working in the arts tended to promote a cooperative approach, akin to Plunkett’s vision for Irish farming as outlined and practised through his IAOS, and, perhaps more importantly, espoused as a method of living and working in general by George Russell, editor of The Irish Statesman, organ of the IAOS.
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
XIX
Section Three 1923–1935
Facing page: Plate 3.7 Patrick Tuohy, Girl in a Striped Dress, c.1924-5. Courtesy of private collection.
Art has slumped rather badly in Ireland during the past few years, but artists are always optimists, and now that things are more settled here [in New York], they are looking for a revival …1
INTRODUCTION In the post-Civil War years Cumann na nGaedheal were in power, but with serious economic issues to contend with, and with the closure of the shortlived ministry for arts, there was very little being done to offer state support to Irish artists. In the meantime, the RHA struggled on, and without its premises on Abbey Street since its destruction during the Easter Rising in 1916, the organisation began to hold exhibitions in the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (DMSA). In turn, the DMSA, was without any formal university status, and was under-resourced in every way. It was to take until 1937 before anything was done to try to resource the art school properly. The Dublin Painters’ Society, otherwise known as the ‘Dublin Painters’, was founded by Paul Henry and others in 1920 with a view to providing exhibitions for artists of a more experimental or modernist persuasion who might not otherwise have found space on the walls of an RHA annual exhibition. However, the situation was not that black and white, and many artists who were members of the RHA also showed work with the Dublin Painters. There were several small galleries including Combridges, the Gorry Gallery, the Daniel Egan Gallery, and later, the Victor Waddington Gallery, along with the United Arts Club, while artists also made use of several other venues in Dublin. Outside Dublin, the Munster Art Exhibition, and various other venues provided opportunities for artists around the country. Additionally, there were occasions for Irish artists to show their work in various galleries in England and Scotland. But no matter how many venues were made available to display visual art, the fact was that Irish visual artists needed access to a larger market for their work. Thus, just as Lady Aberdeen and Mrs Hart
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set out to appeal to the Irish diaspora in America, so too, certain galleries followed that lead. Owing to the removal of the tariff on contemporary art in 1913, the way was then opened to expand the market for Irish art among the expatriates Irish in New York, and indeed, further afield across the United States. During the 1920s and 1930s there was sense of excitement about Irish art in New York, the story of which is focused on two galleries in this section; the first directed by the wife of E. Byrne Hackett, and the other directed by the ever enthusiastic Patric Farrell, whose family originated in Ireland.
CONTEXT: Ireland to New York – Émigrés: Francis, Dominick, and E. Byrne Hackett At various intervals between 1890 and c. 1901, three brothers; Francis (1883– 1962), James Dominick (b. 1877), and Edmund Byrne (1879–1953) Hackett, left their home in Kilkenny to seek a better life in America. Their father was John Byrne Hackett, a medical officer who held the post of coroner in Kilkenny, and their mother was Bridget (Doheny), daughter of a farmer. The boys were educated in Kilkenny, and later, in Clongowes Wood College. Another brother, William, became a Jesuit priest based in Limerick city, where he apparently became friendly with the Daly family, one of whom, Ned, was executed by the British for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. An active nationalist, William later became a teacher in Clongowes Wood College. During the War of Independence, he ‘visited many Irish Volunteers in prison prior to their execution’, and later he became ‘an unofficial chaplain to the Dail’ during the debates on the Treaty of Independence. As the Jesuit order was not happy with his political entanglements, Father William was sent to Australia where, in 1951, he was ‘killed by a car when crossing the road at age eighty-two’.1 Francis Hackett settled initially in New York, before moving to Chicago in 1906, followed by a brief spell in Wisconsin in c. 1912, before finally returning to New York in 1914. He became a well-known author, publishing several books including The Story of the Irish Nation (1924) and A Personal History of Henry VIII (1929), and was a founding editor of the New York-based political and arts magazine The New Republic. He married Danish author, Signe Toksvig (1891–1983) in 1918. The couple lived between America and Denmark, finally settling in Denmark in the 1950s. Significantly, they lived for ten years or so, in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, in County Wicklow, and so they were very well known among the artistic community in Ireland. Dominick Hackett,
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or Dom as he was known, had already qualified as a pharmaceutical chemist before he emigrated to New York.2 He was, apparently, a ‘close friend of Thomas MacDonagh’ who later lost his life for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising.3 Two brothers from the family, Jack and Bartholomew or Bart as he was known, joined the British Army and fought in the First World War, while at least one sister remained at home in Kilkenny. The third brother in New York, Edmund (E.) Byrne Hackett, was to become vital to the revival of a market for Irish literature and, later art.
CONTEXT: Setting the Scene – Edmund Byrne Hackett and the Brick Row Bookshop, 1915 Edmund, who liked to be called E. Byrne Hackett, married his first wife, Margaret Carson, in 1903.1 The couple had two daughters, Florence (b.1905) and Frances (b.1910), and one son, John Byrne (b.1908) who appears to have died at birth. E. Byrne Hackett had been, for some time, ‘connected with a New York firm of publishers’, a post he ‘relinquished’ to become ‘the first director of Yale University Press’ in New Haven.2 In 1914 or so Hackett employed a young woman to help with the administration in New Haven. Helen Plechner (c.1895–6) was of Austrian descent; her parents immigrated to the New Haven area in c.1884. Graduating from teacher training college at the unusually young age of 17, Helen Plechner was quick witted and intelligent; she did well at the Brick Row Bookshop, and was soon elected secretary and treasurer.3 Records suggest that Margaret Hackett died in May 1921. On 27 January, 1923, Helen Plechner married E. Byrne Hackett; they had one child, a daughter, Helen Byrne Hackett, born in 1924.4 In the interim, in 1915, E. Byrne Hackett was asked by the university authorities to found and manage the Brick Row Book Shop. Initially housed in an old building which was ‘torn down to give way to the Sterling Memorial Library’,5 the ‘chief purpose’ of the Brick Row Book Shop ‘was to inculcate the love of good books’ among the undergraduates at the college.6 The shop moved twice on campus before finally closing in the early 1920s, after which the business was ‘carried on’ initially at 19 East 47th Street in New York, relocating a few times before finally moving to 140 Cedar Street in 1952, by which stage E. Byrne Hackett had long retired.7 E. Byrne Hackett maintained an extensive network of connections within the Irish community in New York, and in Ireland. As director of the Brick
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Row Book Shop, he made sure to stock contemporary literature and poetry by Irish authors, alongside large collections of first editions and antiquary books. He was a frequent visitor to Ireland, and, according to his correspondence, he certainly knew Lady Gregory, George Russell, and the Yeats family reasonably well, and was, for many years, purchasing bundles of their first editions, along with those of Thomas McDonagh and Padraig Colum among others. An early letter from Jack B. Yeats, dated August 1906, reveals that the artist was sorry to have missed Hackett during a recent visit to Dublin. Yeats goes on to describe his journeys along the western seaboard, with John Millington Synge, at the behest of the Manchester Guardian. The purpose of the trip was to outline the success or otherwise of the Congested District Board, which was trying to alleviate poverty in the area. Yeats illustrated Synge’s articles, and later, the artist did a series of drawings based on the trip, for the author’s seminal book, The Aran Islands, published in 1907:
Fig.3.1. Photograph of Helen Plechner Hackett and E. Byrne Hackett, c. 1922.
Synge and I had a great trip all
Hackett Kelly Papers, private collection.
up and down the west for the Manchester Guardian, Synge doing the writing, I the drawing. We saw some wonderful country. … I have lately done a dozen drawings for a book of Synge’s of the Aran Islands. It is out soon. It is a fine work. I don’t think anyone has written about those western islands quite in the way Synge has.8
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Yeats included in his letter an illustration of an Aran man in typical clothing, with labels indicating the colour and title of each piece of apparel. E. Byrne Hackett was on friendly terms with John Quinn who purchased several first editions of Irish literature from him, and for whom, in turn, he collected Irish paintings while in Dublin. Writing to George Russell in 1919, perhaps at the suggestion of John Quinn, E. Byrne Hackett requested the author’s manuscripts for publication, and a selection of ‘two or three paintings’ for the gallery, with a view to ‘arrange for a more elaborate exhibition’ at a later date:
Facing page: Fig. 3.2. Letter from Jack B. Yeats to E. Byrne Hackett, August 1906, with illustration of Aran costume. Hackett Kelly papers, private collection. © Estate of Jack B.
Some twelve years ago I had the pleasure of calling on you at the
Yeats, DACS London/
request of Mr John Quinn to bring for him some seventeen paintings
IVARO Dublin, 2020.
of yours to this country. … We are now in our fourth year of business [at New Haven] … I have worked up an interest for Irish literature and succeeded in having two wealthy New York clients purchase representative libraries of modern Anglo-Irish literature. Naturally, you were the first to be included in these collections. … My proposal is that you go through your files and send me such autograph material as you may have and as much copies of your first editions, preferably inscribed with your name. … I am also desirous of finding a market for your paintings. … We have, in this University building, a gallery, 30 x 40 ft. and in which I have made dignified exhibitions. … I firmly believe that I can secure you, in the course of a couple of years, an adequate marked for your beautiful work.9
Russell wrote in response that there had been ‘a run’ on his paintings that year, but that he would do his best to send something over. Although he found it difficult owing to the political situation in Ireland, Russell sent six paintings to E. Byrne Hackett in early May 1920.10 While records are scant, E. Byrne Hackett organised a few exhibitions of Irish art at the gallery in New Haven, showing work by Russell and Paul Henry, before he closed the bookshop there. When the Brick Row Bookshop opened in New York in the early 1920s he continued to exhibit Irish art. In August 1925, for example, the Irish stained glass artist and illustrator, Harry Clarke (1889–1931) ‘dispatched a consignment of his unsold illustrations to the Brick Row Bookshop on New York’s East 47th Street since its owner, Mr Byrne Hackett, had earlier sold a considerable quantity of his drawings.’11 It may have been a somewhat intermittent enterprise, but Helen Plechner
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Hackett was honing her skills. Their relationship had not been going well; the couple were divorced in November 1926.12 E. Byrne Hackett married his third wife, Isabel La Monte, in February 1927.13 By now well-versed in the skills required to run a gallery, and with a divorce agreement leaving her to fend for herself financially, Helen Hackett kept her married name and opened her own exhibition space at 9 East 57th Street, New York, in October 1928. Variously known as the Helen Hackett Galleries, the Helen Hackett Gallery, and the Hackett Galleries, she remained in business until she married her second husband, Swedish diplomat, Alvar Möller, in 1935.
Facing page: Plate 3.1. Michael Power O’Malley, S elf Portrait, undated. Courtesy of the de Koster Power O’Malley Collection.
ARTISTS AND ÉMIGRÉS: Michael Power O’Malley and Patrick Tuohy In the meantime, the Waterford-born émigré artist, Michael Augustine Power O’Malley had settled well in New York and was exhibiting with various galleries in the city. Acknowledged for his ‘direct interpretation of his country’, O’Malley was thought at the time to be a painter of Ireland as it was, rather than creating ‘the mystic Ireland of Yeats, or the emotional Ireland of Synge.’1 An exhibition, at the Knoedler Galleries in 1921 was well-received by the critic for the New York Times who wrote of the ‘melancholy’ in the eyes of Little Aran Colleen, and of the realism in La Pensure, an image of a man trudging across the bog that presented the viewer with ‘the everyday aspect of a country that has been dragged before the footlights more often than it has been shown in the clear light of day.’2 Another exhibition, the result of a summer spent in the west of Ireland, was shown in the Milch Galleries in New York in November 1924, and was not as well received. Although one critic noted that the artist was ‘best known for his rich dark brown Irish interiors’, his portraits, namely of Eileen and Sheila, were, the writer thought, of ‘the conventional Irish type with no strikingly new note in the conception or painting, [and] commonplace in comparison with the landscapes’ for which O’Malley was so well admired.3 Importantly, however, O’Malley was well connected into the multifaceted network of Irish and Irish American artists, gallery owners, and patrons, and as a result, his career began to improve when he became closely associated with the Helen Hackett Gallery. In 1927 O’Malley was joined in New York by another Irish émigré painter. Dublin-born Patrick Tuohy (1894–1930), an artist possessed of enormous talent, entered the world in 1894 and left it, all too soon, at the age of 36, in 1930. Born with just one hand, he wore a wooden glove over his missing left
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Plate 3.2. Michael Power O’Malley, Irish Landscape, undated. Courtesy of the de Koster Power O’Malley Collection.
limb and made great efforts not to show it in photographs, or in the several self-portraits he made throughout his life. His father, John Joseph Tuohy, was a surgeon, and a nationalist. A friend of Padraig Pearse, it is hardly surprising that John Joseph Tuohy sent his only son to Pearse’s Scoil Éanna when it opened first in Cullenswood House, near Ranelagh, Dublin, in 1908. In the belief that the arts were as important as any other subject, the walls of the school were covered in visual art. One of the first pieces that Tuohy would have seen was a painting of a young child, entitled Íosogán, by Beatrice Elvery (1883–1970), later the Lady Glenavy, which now hangs in the Pearse Museum, former second home of Scoil Éanna in Rathfarnham, south Dublin. While attending the school Tuohy was surrounded by the cultural nationalists of the day; Willie Pearse, Con Colbert, Thomas McDonagh, and Padraic Colum were on the teaching staff, and visiting lecturers included W.B. Yeats and Douglas Hyde. Tuohy’s innate artistic ability was greatly encouraged by
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the atmosphere, and by the teachers, and while still a student he did several illustrations for the school publication, An Macaomh. But when Scoil Éanna moved from Cullenswood House to The Hermitage in Rathfarnham in 1910, Tuohy did not follow. He had already decided to train to become an artist and had begun night classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (DMSA) in 1909, moving to full-time day classes in 1910. The painting classes were run under the guidance of artist William Orpen, who taught on a part-time basis at the school from 1902 to 1914. Tuohy proved to be an exceptional student; in 1913 he won the Taylor Scholarship in painting, and a prize of £50.00.4 That same year, and still only 19 years of age, he received a commission for a mural scheme of religious paintings for a ceiling in Rathfarnham Castle, which had been recently purchased by the Jesuit Order. There had been a series of murals in place, reputedly by Angelica Kauffman (1740–1807), but they had been removed prior to the close of the sale of the castle to the Jesuits, thereby leaving large blank spaces that required attention.5 Tuohy successfully completed the commission within a year. Still in place, and cleaned and conserved in recent years, the paintings are to be seen in their original glory; full of colour, legible from the ground and extraordinarily well-achieved for such a young artist. Two years later Tuohy won a silver medal for a study of a seated female figure, painted from life, which was judged to be ‘excellently rendered in strong light and shade … altogether a careful and highly creditable study of the nude’.6 He won yet another silver medal for painting in 1916.7 He displayed an astonishing level of ability as a portrait painter and was much sought after for private and public commissions. In 1916 Tuohy moved to Spain where he spent the best part of six months or so studying the masters of Spanish art. He returned to Dublin in 1917 and was appointed to a part-time teaching position at the DMSA in 1918. But while his career was going extremely well, Tuohy wanted to get away from Ireland. In 1927 he decided to go to live in New York, a place that seemed to offer creative opportunities. That same year, artist, Hilda Roberts (1901–1882), a contemporary of Tuohy’s, painted a very unusual portrait of her friend. Set against a nondescript background, she portrayed Tuohy complete with his wooden glove, a symbol that was to prove all too poignant within a short space of time. Tuohy knew very many Irish artists, and when in New York his extensive network of associates was to prove vital to the ‘revival of Irish art’ that was about to take place.
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