THIS exhibition comes from the Boston College Museum of Art, and is subtitled: "Irish Paintings from the collection of Brian P. Burns". It is large - filling the upstairs rooms - and comes here backed by a good, scholarly catalogue.
Speaking very broadly, it ranges over the period(s) from the early 19th century up to the 1950s, but remains a personal collection rather than a historical survey. (Brian P. Burns is, himself, an eminent Irish American who obviously has retained his Irish links cultural interests.
The collection's main strength lies in its late 19th century and early 20th century pictures - which include works by Hone, Osborne, Lavery, Orpen, Roderic O'Conor and Frank O'Meara. Jack Yeats, of course, is well - splendidly, even represented, but since his greatest phase came late in life, he can hardly be classed with any of these, good as they are. In retrospect, this was a real silver age in Irish art, both in painting and sculpture, and it is a pity that the age of Keating and Co which followed it was so manifestly inferior.
There is, of course, Paul Henry to take account of, but the 1930 landscape by him shows the formal slackness and repetition which set in shortly after the first World War. Henry, in fact, shot his bolt rather early, though the fact was not widely recognised at the time. Of all the inter war traditionalists, Maurice MacGonigal seems to wear best, and while Keating may have painted the sea better, MacGonigal was more convincing with the human figure.
The Yeats pictures, late and early, are all remarkable and highly individual, but they should not overshadow the fine Malahide coastal scene by Hone, Frank O'Meara's haunting twilight piece (painted, almost inevitably, at Grez sur Loing), the three very sensitive Osbornes, and Roderic O'Conor's tempestuous Romeo And Juliet (which, the catalogue suggests, may have been influenced by seeing a reproduction of Munch's The Kiss). There is a single picture by W. J. Leech, a tea trolley seen out of doors in broken light - presumably, in a garden. Yeats is the key figure in more than one sense, since Laurence Campbell's late bust of him is also included, as well as a George Campbell canvas of the old painter standing symbolically amidst the landscape of his beloved Sligo.
The earlier paintings in the collection are variable in quality and style, but then 19th century Irish art, outside a handful of chosen figures, can easily look lumpish and provincial - as indeed most of it was. The picture by F. J. Davis of a ball at Dublin Castle, circa 1845, is undistinguished as art but fascinating as social history. Erskine Nicol's amiable, anecdotal genre style has to be taken on its own homely and prosy terms. Rather a curio is Maria Spilsbury Taylor's portrait of Henry Grattan, hatchet faced and erect in the library of his home, and another is the panoramic view of Glengariff by William McEvoy, painted about 1862.
Apart from a surprisingly traditional picture of a cornfield by Colin Middleton, and the Campbell work already mentioned, there is virtually - nothing by the Living Art generation, Dillon, Collins, Reid, McGuinness, etc, nor is there any work by Mary Swanzy. By contrast, certain of the inclusions do seem rather lightweight, or at least over conventional by Letitia Hamilton, Robertson Craig, Frank McKelvey.
In fact, the overall taste of the collection is/was decidedly conservative, in spite of the formal and imaginative daring of the late Yeats paintings. Not the whole of Irish art then, but an individual cross section of it which contains much of interest, and a quota of genuine and quite undeniable masterpieces.
