It wasn't just navvies who emigrated to Britain - the Irish made their mark in the arts, politics and literature of Victorian London. An exhibition marks their contribution and its curator, Fintan Cullen explains their importance
'England had conquered Ireland, so there was nothing for it but to come over and conquer England." In this typically confrontational statement, the words of George Bernard Shaw sum up the rationale behind an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Conquering England: Ireland in Victorian London, which highlights the achievement of Irish migrants to London in the Victorian period.
The aim of the exhibition - and the accompanying book - is to explore the diversity of the Irish in London and their influence in metropolitan arts, theatre, journalism and politics, where the "Irish question" dominated late-Victorian parliaments. In focusing on the 19th century, Conquering England stresses that, under the Union of 1800 between Great Britain and Ireland, the two countries were engaged in a relationship that was quarrelsome, contentious and in many ways inter-dependent. Exploitative as the connection between them often was, it also provided a wider arena for certain ambitions in literature, politics and the arts. Irish talent was exported to London in the 19th century; by the turn of the 20th, it was being imported back, with interest, to an Ireland undergoing political radicalisation and cultural renaissance.
The reign of Victoria demarcates a convenient period in which to explore the contradictory relationship that existed between the two islands of Britain and Ireland. As well as being an era that consolidated the union of parliaments, it also witnessed the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland, and saw the Parnellite Irish Parliamentary Party come to hold the balance of power at Westminster in the mid-1880s. More tangibly, during this period London became the metropolis of the empire and the mecca to which all subjects were drawn. Irish politicians, such as the colourful TP O'Connor, were obliged to attend Westminster, but the city also attracted Irish artists such as Daniel Maclise and later John Lavery, writers such as Lady Morgan, William Allingham and Bram Stoker, playwrights (Anna Maria Hall, Dion Boucicault), actors (Tyrone Power), journalists (William Maginn) and those seeking advancement in a wide range of human endeavour.
The exhibition - curated by myself and Roy Foster, explores the cultural and political diversity of the Irish in London.
The focus is on the visual representation of the Irish and, as such, it discusses, for example, the hitherto unacknowledged presence of a number of Irishwomen models in the London art world between the 1850s and the end of the century. By including an etching such as Weary of 1863 (top right) by James McNeill Whistler of his mistress and muse, Joanna Hiffernan, who was born around 1843 in Ireland and met Whistler in 1860, and Julia Margaret Cameron's photograph of her Irish servant, Mary Ryan, also from the 1860s, the exhibition enlarges our understanding of the integration and involvement of the Irish in all aspects of London life.
Hiffernan is well known in art historical literature as the model for such well-known works as Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl of 1862 in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Tate's Symphony in White, No. 2: Little White Girl of 1864 (exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1865). In Weary, Whistler represents Hiffernan resting, her famous "copper-coloured hair" spread out across the back of the armchair. Hiffernan has been much discussed in the Whistler literature as the most exciting of his mistresses/muses. To the Pennells, early biographers of Whistler in 1908, "Joe", as she is frequently called, is described as "Irish, Roman Catholic . . . a woman of next to no education, but of keen intelligence".
Her hair inspired, we are told, not only the American artist, who claimed it was "like everything Venetian one had dreamed of", but also his friend Gustave Courbet, who in 1865 was to paint her at least four times as La Belle Irlandaise. In a letter of 1863, George Du Maurier, then a caricaturist and in time the author of Trilby (1894), the story of a half-Irish Parisian model, described Hiffernan as "fiery" and wrote that she was the cause of fierce jealousy on the part of Whistler. Later accounts of Whistler maintained this caricature of the Irish model as a racy, "effervescent personality".
JULIA MARGARET CAMERON'S compelling photographs of the former Irish beggar girl Mary Ryan show the transformation of an exiled vagrant into an angelic beauty. It was while viewing photographs of Ryan that Henry Cotton, a rising official in the Bengal Civil Service and an advanced Liberal, spied his future wife and duly asked Mrs Cameron for the hand of her employee. Within a few years Mary Ryan was to become Lady Cotton, wife of the Chief Commissioner of Assam and a leading member of the Anglo-Indian elite. The exhibition of photographs by Cameron that Cotton viewed in 1865 at the French Gallery, London,included many images of a young Irish girl whom Cameron had first encountered in 1859 begging with her mother on Putney Heath. The photographer took her in and gave her a job in her household. By 1865-7, Ryan was posing continually for Cameron - as demonstrated in The Irish Immigrant of 1865-6. Here, Ryan wears a long-sleeved white gown that also appears in other photographs of the time; in some she is A Flower of Paradise, while in others she is After the Manner of Perugino or Francia, two 15th-century Italian artists particularly associated, in mid-Victorian taste, with the representation of angels.
Conquering England focuses on three groups, writers, politicians and visual artists, while the objects assembled come from a wide range of collections in Britain, Ireland and America; and, although portraits predominate, the exhibition contains sculpture, paintings, drawings, engravings, photographs, theatre posters (see Dracula poster, below) and programmes and book covers, as well as manuscripts by such writers as W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde.
The visual attractions of the exhibition include portraits of Yeats, Wilde and Shaw, as well as such political figures as Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. Ireland's so-called "uncrowned-king" features in one of the many splendid drawings by Sydney Prior Hall (above), produced during the special commission set up in 1888 to investigate alleged connections between the Irish parliamentary leader and crime. Seen from behind and wearing an old coat, Parnell is accompanied by his solicitor, Sir George Lewis. They are approaching the entrance to the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, yet are absorbed in discussion, and thus ignore the government spy, "Major Le Caron", standing off to the right.
IN COVERING THE period from the 1830s to the turn of the century, Conquering England moves from art through politics to literature and drama, while establishing cross-connections between these various worlds. The Irish were prominent in other spheres also, notably medicine and the law: in 1894 an Irish-born Catholic, Charles Russell, became Lord Chief Justice of England after an immensely distinguished career at the bar, combined with a political life spent supporting Home Rule at Westminster. But the worlds of the visual arts, politics, literature (both popular and highbrow) and the stage retain the most vivid impression of Irish influence in Victoria's reign. At the same time, in exploring the presence of the Irish in London, this exhibition is not limited to artists of Irish origin. Some came to London from Ireland: Daniel Maclise and John Henry Foley, John Lavery and John Butler Yeats, and lesser-known figures such as the cartoonist John Doyle and the illustrator Althea Gyles. Other artists such as Ford Madox Brown (see oil of The Irish Girl, 1860,above), Sydney Prior Hall, Julia Margaret Cameron and Aubrey Beardsley were English, yet were interested in representing Irish people and events at the heart of the empire. And others were neither Irish nor English: James McNeill Whistler was American, while David d'Angers, who produced a spirited bust portrait of the novelist Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, was French.
In enlarging our choice of images when discussing the representation of Ireland, we have amassed a wide range of visual material which moves from objects ex hibited at the highly respectable Royal Academy of Arts in London or the more progressive Grosvenor Gallery, founded in 1877, to pages from popular magazines, book illustrations, and theatre posters - ephemera which convey in retrospect a vital moment of cultural history. For a period of time in the 19th century, Irish writers, artists and politicians went to London and succeeded. Yet, as Fiona Shaw says in her Foreword to the accompanying book, the generation of Wilde, Shaw and Yeats "declared their genius with an ironic twist. There are signs of this trait still in today's resident Irish artists in London. Their presence in Britain gives inspiration to those who follow them from Ireland - rolling out a carpet on which newcomers can tread."
Conquering England: The Irish in Victorian London, published by the National Portrait Gallery, accompanies an exhibition at the gallery in London from March 9th to June 19th. The book, by Fintan Cullen and R.F. Foster, features 50 illustrations, £12.99 (paperback); special price: £10.99
Fintan Cullen is professor of art history at the University of Nottingham and author of The Irish Face: Redefining the Irish Portrait published by the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2004