Waterford's Municipal Art Collection is a local and national treasure, but it has yet to receive serious attention and funding, and the gallery hosting it is not ideal for the purpose, writes Aidan Dunne.
HENRY VII MARKED the steadfastness of Waterford with the motto Urbs intacta manet Waterfordia("The city of Waterford stays untaken"), after the city had weathered a siege by the forces of a pretender to the English throne, Perkin Warbeck, in 1495.
Indeed for much of its early history the city was something of a fortress, defending itself against all-comers while reaching out in trade and, on occasion, punitive excursions. But its identity was divided: somehow, political loyalty to the crown didn't preclude zealous Catholicism, so much so that Waterford subsequently earned another epithet, Parva Roma(Little Rome) and managed, uniquely, to retain its "untaken" status when Cromwell was at the gates.
Henry VII's motto forms the title of an exhibition at the Garter Lane Arts Centre which draws on the city's Municipal Art Collection.
The selected works take as their subject the city itself, and make up but one strand of a substantial range of work spanning several centuries. It lives up to art historian Peter Jordan's description of it as "one of the hidden gems of the Irish art world". He wrote these words towards the end of 2006 in his foreword to a beautifully produced and scrupulously researched catalogue and history of the collection, published by the City Council and the Institute of Technology.
Five years earlier, the collection had found a home in Greyfriars, a centrally located, modified 19th-century church, allowing for the continual display of a significant proportion of the work.
In his catalogue text, Jordan remarks that renewed public interest in the city's art undoubtedly stemmed partly from the boom in the Irish art market: what might have been of marginal interest was suddenly perceived to be of substantial monetary value and hence worthy of attention. People are perennially fascinated by the prices paintings fetch at auction.
AS HE ALSO noted, however, there has long been an awareness that the municipal collection was significant in other ways, not least in contributing to and forming part of the city's sense of itself in terms of its history and cultural identity. There is an underlying conservatism in the idea of a public gallery that houses an authoritative, canonical collection, particularly if the rationale is to fix and perpetuate certain cultural and perhaps social values. But it is also true that, from the onset of the modernist era, the gallery has potentially been a force for change and innovation.
Dublin's Hugh Lane gallery is a case in point. Throughout its history it has been a point of controversy. Even at its inception, it was perceived as a challenge to, rather than a guarantor of, established values. You could say that the evolving role of the public gallery throughout the 20th century led to its being viewed as a contingent, contested space rather than an inevitable, closed one. Similarly, a collection is not something fixed and complete but something ongoing and open to continual reassessment and development. Or at any rate it should be, if a municipal gallery is to maintain its cultural relevance and vitality.
As Jordan relates it, the genesis of Waterford's Municipal Art Collection was intimately bound up with the emergent cultural identity of an independent Ireland. He cites a letter published in the Waterford Newsin 1935. The correspondent, who signed himself An Fweelaun (The Seagull), argued that Waterford had "an important part to play in the reconstruction of the nation's cultural life", and the establishment of a civic art collection was one way of going about it.
"Reading between the lines of An Fweelaun's letter," Jordan pertinently observes, "it is also possible to detect another factor at work, that of frustrated civic pride."
That frustrated pride continues to be a relevant factor in relation to Waterford's national status. A stalwart sense of individual identity - Urbs intacta manet Waterfordia- is counterpointed, not unreasonably perhaps, by a feeling of relative cultural deprivation.
Competitiveness is also relevant. In the 1930s, some, perhaps many, Waterford citizens felt that their city was lagging behind Dublin and Cork due to its lack of an art gallery, particularly given that Limerick was setting an example by opening its own municipal gallery.
The head of Newtown School, Arnold Marsh, who was married to painter Hilda Roberts, initiated a series of annual art exhibitions in 1935. He intended that these would form a prelude to the establishment of a municipal gallery, and at first showed colour reproductions of Old Master paintings.
The shows attracted the attention and presence of many significant figures in Irish art, including Dermod O'Brien, Mainie Jellett, Paul Henry and Jack B Yeats. Another important participant in the instigation of a collection and then in the search for somewhere to house it was the locally born Edward J Maguire.
The fledgling collection's first lodgings were above the public library. When this moved premises to 5 O'Connell Street in 1953, the gallery tagged along. By then the collection numbered about 100 pieces, and both exhibition and storage space were hopelessly inadequate. As so often happens, there were several abortive initiatives to provide more adequate quarters. All came to nothing for one reason or another.
Thanks, as so often, to the informed interest of a small number of people, the collection was, and is, very strong, but it was widely dispersed and neglected until Finola O'Doherty, administrator at the Garter Lane Arts Centre in the 1980s, realised its calibre and set about cataloguing it in earnest.
From Willem van der Hagen's 1736 view of Waterford to Donald Teskey's tempestuous urban landscape from 1994, it is now a lively and eclectic collection with some great surprises. These include fine works by Arthur Armstrong and George Campbell, a terrific Patrick Collins figure painting, one of Louis le Brocquy's representational compositions from 1941, several works donated by Dermod O'Brien, a good Annunciation by Patrick Pye and a textural abstract from 1958 by Camille Souter. This is not to mention pieces by Jack B Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Charles Lamb and William Leech. Patric Stevenson's topographical watercolours of Waterford are also outstanding.
AS A MUNICIPAL GALLERY, Greyfriars is not ideal. It's more another episode in the story. But the point has been well made that the collection is something of a local and national treasure, one that merits some serious attention and funding. It's not that an art collection and a municipal gallery are status symbols, feathers in the city's cap: they form an essential element of Waterford's unfolding development, and are relevant to an understanding of its past and the direction it should be taking now.
Urbs intacta manet Waterfordia is at the Garter Lane Arts Centre until April 25.Waterford Municipal Art Collection: A History and Catalogue , by Peter Jordan, is published by Waterford Institute of Technology and Waterford City Council. Works from the collection are on view at Greyfriars Municipal Gallery, Greyfriars Street, Waterford
