‘What do you think – should we straighten it up? I like it at this angle, though. It matches my hat.”
Nora Niland had her own angle on art and on life. The eighth child of a family from Tuam, Co Galway, in 1945 she became the Sligo county librarian – and began what would turn out to be a lifelong quest to acquire a first-rate collection of public art for the county.
She started by borrowing five paintings by Jack B Yeats to exhibit at the first Yeats summer school in 1960. By the time our photo was taken five years later, the collection was growing in leaps and bounds – helped by a generous bequest of four paintings from an American donor, James A Healy.
Our image shows Niland and Thomas MacGreevy, a founder member of the Arts Council, admiring one of those paintings, a self-portrait by the father of all the Yeatses, John Butler Yeats. There is, in truth, plenty to admire. The portrait is pared back to essentials of form and colour, showing the influence of abstract art on the painter while he was working in New York in 1916. His figure floats in front of an austere geometric background; his clothing is also austere, the jacket strikingly black even in a black-and- white photograph.
Despite – or because of – this severity, his face is painted with great immediacy. He almost looks at though he might speak to Miss Niland who, dressed impeccably but somehow hurriedly – her necklace awry, her fur coat flung open, that hat shoved carelessly sideways – is holding forth on the painting with infectious enthusiasm.
The light in her eyes suggests that she would have made the perfect companion for a trip to any art gallery. Sadly she died in 1988 – but the Niland collection, which now consists of more than 300 works and is on display at the Model Arts Centre in Sligo, is always well worth a visit.