A window on the Land League

History Windows on The Land War Eamonn Lynskey considers the political paintings of Irish artist Henry Jones Thaddeus. Any painting must be appreciated on its own merits: its artistry, its craft, its impact. But viewers are often curious to know more about a work that impressed them.

For instance, The Wounded Poacher, a work in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland, needs no knowledge of its background for it to make an immediate impression on the viewer. There is enough artistry in this painting to evoke sympathy for the poacher’s plight, and its sheer excellence may well compel a viewer to enquire further about the painting and its creator.

With the Eviction canvas we feel we are standing side-by-side with a family in their last-ditch attempt to prevent removal from their home by a combined force of police and landlord’s agents. The Sheep Pen, one of the painter’s many striking country scenes

Henry Jones Thaddeus (1859-1929) was born in Cork and was something of a prodigy, entering the Cork School of Art when aged just ten years. A painting entitled Renewal of the Lease Refused (private collection) gained him a Taylor Prize in 1878 of £60 a year and was based on an incident in the Land War – a troubled period of agitation in Ireland at that time, arising out of harsh property laws, rural poverty and the cruelty of the landed class towards its tenants. As local historian Liam Kelly writes in The First Fatality of the Land War (published by Abbyset, Cavan 2021) ‘The bad harvests 1877,1878, and 1879 and the depressed prices for agricultural produce exacerbated the situation and meant that the tenant farmers and their families were, in many instances, on the verge of starvation.’

The Taylor award enabled Thaddeus to go to London. Later, in Paris, he studied at the Academie Julian. He went on to become a prolific portraitist, numbering Popes among his clients (Leo XII and Pius X), which were unusual commissions for a Protestant. He was at the height of his powers when he painted The Wounded Poacher in 1881, displaying a wonderful exactitude of detail and overall professional finish.

This painting depicts a man who has returned from a nocturnal foray, his brace of rabbits and his gun lying on the floor beside him. A successful night’s work? – No. He has taken a bad wound to the shoulder, probably as a result of being caught in the act by a gamekeeper. The woman at his side, surely his wife, is herself a picture within a picture. Her attitude of concentration tells us that she has had to leave her anxieties to one side as she leans to tend him. Her focus on the wound suggests perhaps that this is not the first time she has had to undertake this task, and the simple furnishings of the house suggest a humble cottage where life is lived frugally. It has been a nocturnal expedition of course, as is shown by the wan light of dawn just beginning to light up the tiny window, and the overall darkness of the background throws the figures into sharp relief, as well as underlining the gravity of the situation.

This is an artwork of the highest standard which leaves us in no doubt that we are in the presence of a master who does full justice to a distressful scene. His sympathies clearly lie with the poacher. We feel that the artist wants us to consider that whatever law has been broken by this unfortunate man is an unjust law. As with the earlier Renewal of the Lease Refused this work continues the theme of oppression. The evocation of sympathy for the poacher is further strengthened by the way he is positioned: recumbent and with head thrown back to his left, recalling a work like Andrea Montegna’s Lamentation of Christ (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) in which the figure is similarly posed. This positioning imparts a vestigial religious dimension to the poacher’s suffering. Whether or not Thaddeus consciously meant to refer to a previous painting is not relevant. Works of art often reference other works, intentionally or not, and can invite us into contexts that lie beyond the immediate concerns of the work itself. This after all is the intent of all religious imagery, from the depictions of Christ’s ‘stations of the cross’ to Michelangelo’s great minatory representations of hell.

Here in Thaddeus’s painting, impact on the viewer is immediate and moving, even without much or any knowledge of previous artworks, or even of the turbulent period of Irish History that is the context of The Wounded Poacher.

That context inspired other paintings by Thaddeus. An Eviction, Ireland, Co Galway (private collection) painted in 1889 again takes us back to the Land War raging in 1880s Ireland. The political intent of this painting was widely recognised by critics at the time. Bridget Hourican, in an article in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, points to the profound social conscience at work in paintings like this and she includes the comment from the Liverpool Post newspaper (16 September 1890) that they ‘[helped] to bring the horrors of the social welfare in the sister isle vividly home to English hearts.’

As with The Wounded Poacher, the scene in the Eviction painting is set inside the house, rather than being presented from the outside as is the case in many eviction images. Photos and drawings made at the time usually show the unfortunate family sitting outside their broken home amidst their few possessions. Many of these scenes were posed because of the slow photographic processes of the time. In the main they are rather stiff portrayals of people standing disconsolately in front of their ruined cottages after the inhumane act of eviction.

Thaddeus’s Eviction canvas is different. The viewer is placed inside the house to participate the family’s desperate attempt to fight the eviction. This instant immersion in the actual event is calculated to give rise to a surge of feeling for the unfortunate family and the hopelessness of their

plight. We are in this with them and the evocation of a sense of injustice is overwhelming.

These paintings show that within his busy career as a portraitist of the great and the good, and despite the exalted company in which he moved, Thaddeus understood and sympathised with the condition of the people of his native country who had to endure such extraordinary oppression at the hands of the landed gentry. In his Recollections of a Court Painter (1912) he compares the absentee landlords of Ireland to the wealthy Russian families he met in Florence, whose extravagant lifestyle abroad was at the expense of ‘their peasants and serfs [who] were ground down to the last farthing’. His sympathy for his outrageously treated countrymen was never in doubt, either in paint or in word. ‘I have never learnt the art of sitting on a fence’, he wrote in his Recollections, ‘moreover, being an independent-minded person, that position would not be agreeable to me.’

The Wounded Poacher was painted shortly after Thaddeus arrived in Paris in 1879. It received immediate acclaim and was exhibited at the famous Salon – an extraordinary success for such a young newcomer. It points to a political dimension to his thinking which ran alongside his principal occupation (and main source of income) as a portrait painter. Happily, sometimes by choice of subject he could combine both. His sitters included many eminent nationalist figures involved in tackling injustices in Ireland, such as Michael Davitt, William Smith O’Brien and John Redmond. He met Charles Parnell, whom he admired greatly, but a projected portrait did not materialise because, as he explains in his Recollections ‘… the O’Shea divorce proceedings intervened’. What a loss to Ireland’s cause was Parnell. And what a loss to Irish art that portrait that never was!

The Wounded Poacher and An Eviction, Ireland, Co Galway clearly have a polemical edge, but they fall very short of being works of propaganda. Thaddeus does not preach. He presents the situation as it was, but with an unmistakeable empathy. He leads the viewer to an understanding of the oppressions endured by ordinary people in those difficult times. These are paintings that reach across the years and allow us entry into a world where ‘defying the law’ was often the equivalent of trying to prevent one’s family from being thrown out on the side of the road – that same set of laws which fifty years earlier had condemned as criminals those who attacked the wagons which carried grain to port for export during the height of the ‘Great Famine’.

As with the paintings of Bernard Canavan (b.1944) in our own time which document the heartbreak of 1950s Ireland and its haemorrhage of emigration, these works by Thaddeus combine both necessary artistic objectivity, deep personal involvement and political observation. The Wounded Poacher moves us to feel that we are actually present in the house where a man has arrived seriously wounded; with the Eviction canvas we feel we are standing side-by-side with a family in their last-ditch attempt to prevent removal from their home by a combined force of police and landlord’s agents. Both paintings are consummate artworks but they are also valuable social documents which can remind us of a time of violent upheaval in Irish history.

Bernard Canavan (b.1944) works document the heartbreak of 1950s Ireland and its haemorrhage of emigration.