Sometimes the most obvious ideas are the best ones. When the Ulster Museum completed a modest though extremely effective overhaul of its temporary exhibition galleries, the question arose as to which exhibition should inaugurate the revamped space. "We have been criticised in the past," curator Brian Kennedy explains, "for not concentrating enough on the Irish work in the collection." Why not, thought the Museum's new director, Michael Houlihan, go to town on the permanent collection of Irish painting? Not for negative reasons, but because: "I felt that we have a responsibility to tell that story. It's something we should be doing."
The result, A Land of Heart's Desire, isn't, as the subtitle suggests, 300 Years of Irish Art, but a compact, thoroughly engaging survey of more or less three centuries of Irish painting, from the late 17th century right up to the present day, assembled from the museum's own collection and beautifully displayed. A simple idea, but a good one, and appropriately timed. Inevitably, there is some bias towards Northern artists, but it also underlines just how high a proportion of Irish painters have Northern roots. And, as Kennedy readily acknowledges, it tends to get stronger as the chronology progresses. "The real strength in the collection is probably between 1880 and 1960."
It may seem rash to try to chronicle 300 years in about 100 works. "We did feel a bit nervous," Kennedy says. "I knew it was a good idea, but was it a sensible idea? We'd concentrated on specific aspects of the collection in different shows, but as to how to tackle the whole thing without it degenerating into a miscellaneous mass . . ." The solution was to construct a thematic narrative in four episodes, beginning with early portraiture and landscape, then dealing with the pervasive influence of French plein-air painting from the latter half of the 19th century, leading on to the evolution of a diverse, authentically Irish school linked to Modernism in the first half of the 20th century, and finally, since the 1960s, internationalism.
The story begins in the latter half of the 17th century, when a rare spell of peace and political stability enabled the fine arts to flourish. In any history of Irish art, there is no way around the fact that for a considerable time many Irish artists gravitated towards London, though some stayed here, and artists from abroad were drawn to Ireland for one reason or another. As William Carey rather dismissively put it in 1826: " . . . Ireland had some native artists, and was occasionally visited by straggling adventurers of the brush from London." Carey was quoted in the catalogue of a pioneering exhibition held in the National Gallery of Ireland in 1969, Irish Portraits 1660-1860, by Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, whose enthusiasm and scholarship were decisive in rescuing a significant strand of Irish art history from obscurity. One of the best Irish portrait painters, James Latham, is represented by a typically assured work, but it's not a field that is explored here in any great depth (though, to be fair, you can look elsewhere in the museum to flesh out the picture).
Portraiture and landscape were the dominant forms in Irish painting throughout the 18th century. But, and it's a conclusion that's difficult to avoid, in the long term, as Kennedy says, "The main theme is landscape. It comes across very strongly. Even if you look at more abstract, contemporary work where there is no ostensible connection, you actually get a sense of landscape coming through. It just seems to be very deeply ingrained in the psyche."
Of course landscape is not a fixed, unvarying category. Thomas Mitchell, in 1757, translates a view of the Boyne into a formulaic Claudian vista, and imports a presumably invented equestrian statue of William III. Early in the next century, William Sadler II is studiously exact in his topographical view of The Eagle's Nest, Killarney. Then it seems as if Irish artists decamped en masse to France and repetitively produced scenes of fairly restricted slices of terrain in Barbizon and Brittany. This activity did have effects back home, not least in the work of the first Irish artist to make the trip, Nathaniel Hone, who settled down in north Co Dublin and produced a prodigious number of atmospherically accurate, though often rather uneventful, local landscapes. Sir John Lavery made his career as a society portrait painter, but he was a naturally gifted painter who could turn his hand to anything, including landscape, in Ireland, Europe and North Africa. He was also generous in giving his work to the Museum, which owns about 40 Laverys as a result.
The ripples of continental influence did spread further. Even by the time of independence, Irish painting was undergoing a decisive transformation. A number of painters, some of whom had worked in France, developed an enduring iconographic view of the West of Ireland, for example, typified in the work of Paul and Grace Henry, but Frank McKelvey and James Humbert Craig were also important. This vision of the West was important to emergent national identity. Just look at the way Jack B. Yeats's On Through the Silent Lands, one of his definitive pictures, romantically mythologises the Irish landscape.
It must be said, though, that in the 20th century the story does become much more complicated than a simple thematic breakdown might suggest. William Leech, Mainie Jellett, Daniel O'Neill, George Campbell, Patrick Swift, Louis le Brocquy and the extraordinarily restless Colin Middleton develop a variety of the different stylistic options opened up by Modernism. There are singular talents like the visionary, ever-popular John Luke. William Scott emerges as a substantial figure, one of those painters whose Irish origins remain significant even though their careers happen elsewhere.
Landscape is, as Kennedy says, still central. In texture and feeling, Scott's still lifes are informed by landscape, but more overtly, there is Basil Blackshaw, for example, with his brilliant The Field, and T.P. Flanagan, whose stark, gestural Donegal study, Gortahork (2), is very powerful.
There are some key or archetypal Irish works here from the last few decades. Key works include Robert Ballagh's witty reworking of Nude Descending a Staircase, Inside No 3, and Edward Maguire's portrait of Seamus Heaney. Among the significantly typical works are one of William Scott's exemplary pale paintings, Micheal Farrell's hard-edge abstract, Study (monochrome), a calculated revival of Celtic and early Christian art, Felim Egan's abstract composition with neon, le Brocquy's James Joyce study, an early Sean Scully grid, one of Ciaran Lennon's big, ambitious Scotoma series, and an exuberant Michael Cullen.
Kennedy's favourite room in the show is this final one, featuring the most recent work. "For me the stars are these modern things, because of their optimism. I think they're indicative of a country that has confidence in itself." This work is also generally much larger, so there are fewer pieces, and many gaps - but it's pointless to start listing who is missing from a concise, necessarily selective survey, particularly when what is there works so well. Houlihan and his curators, Kennedy and Eileen Black, deserve credit for tackling such an obvious, and such a difficult task.
Houlihan worked previously at the Imperial War Museum and at the Horniman in London, which boasts one of the best collections of musical instruments in Europe. Though he has only been in Belfast a year, he obviously hit the ground running.
Under the new administrative structure he is director of Northern Ireland's National Museums and Galleries, responsible for the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum and the Ulster-American Folk Park as well as the Ulster Museum, and he has plenty of ideas for the development of all three. A 10-year development programme for all three is due to be unveiled next February. One possibility is obviously the establishment of a National Gallery with its own identity, though built around the museum's collection.
Under his auspices the black ceilings and tired linen-lined walls of the temporary exhibition galleries in the museum are no more. White walls, a white ceiling and pale hardwood flooring have completely transformed a hitherto heavy, gloomy atmosphere into an airy, spacious environment. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this is that it has been done on what is, in relative terms, a shoestring budget, and without any special capital funding. "It cost about £150,000, and when you look at it I think you'll agree that it's very good value," Houlihan says, and he's right. Like other museums and galleries within the British system, the Ulster Museum receives level funding from year to year. That is, no cuts but no raises either, which means, in real terms, an annual drop in income, so the pressure is on to source alternative sources of funding.
One area that must suffer is the purchase of new works. Looking at this exhibition, it's alarming to think that it may be impossible to carry out the same exercise in the future in relation to our own time, because the work just isn't being added to the collection.
A Land of Heart's Desire: 300 Years of Irish Art can be seen at the Ulster Museum until Nov 7th.
