The National Gallery's new exhibition - A Time and Place: Two Centuries of Irish Social Life - does not quite take us up to the present day, writes Frank McNally
If it did, it could have charted the rise and fall of respectability as a restraining social influence in Ireland. Instead, by the show's cut-off point in the mid-1950s, the country's long struggle against decency and clean living appears to have ended in failure, and the forces of propriety have it firmly in their grip.
Visitors to the exhibition will know that the story turned out differently. In fact, anyone familiar with modern Dublin on a Saturday night may be struck by the similarities with pre-famine Ireland, when people drank like there was no tomorrow and casual violence was almost a sport.
The most popular picture in the show, I predict, will be Erskine Nicol's Donnybrook Fair, even if it dates from post-famine Ireland (1859) when the fair was on its last legs. The event had been restricted in 1837 and banned in 1855, before a few half-hearted attempts to revive it. But right to the end, there was nothing half-hearted about the clerical opposition it attracted.
The 1866 opening of the new Catholic church in Donnybrook was deliberately timed for the first day of the fair, which took place just across the road. And with the church's guns - or at least prayers - trained against it, the centuries-old event finally succumbed in 1868.
Nicol portrays its pomp, however, when it could draw crowds of 75,000 on a single day and attract stall-holders from Britain, the US and beyond. "Bell's American Circus" stands side-by-side in his painting with a wagon advertising "Paddy Maguire's learned pig Toby who can tell the hours of the day and talk like a Christian". Ominously, the fair's nemesis is also portrayed: a tent representing the temperance movement.
But the painting is mostly about people. Although the Scotsman Nicol had a tendency to play up any similarities between the native Irish and apes - his target market would have demanded this - the picture is on the whole affectionate. Vignettes include a woman who, under the concerned gaze of her (slightly monkey-like) husband, appears to have just remembered that she left the gas on.
In her introductory essay to the accompanying catalogue, Prof Mary Daly suggests that the modern fleadh cheoil or rock festival has a lot more in common with Donnybrook Fair than with any mass gatherings on the early 20th century, by which time Victorian values dominated both Britain and Ireland.
But even the worst-run rock festivals would struggle to match Donnybrook's reputation for drunkenness and violence. Thomas Crofton Croker was speaking of Irish fairs generally when he said (quoted by curator Brendan Rooney) that they seldom concluded "without a pitched battle and the loss of three or four lives". Since Donnybrook gave its name to the English language in this context, it must have contributed generously to the image.
The combined effects of improved policing and the temperance movement calmed it down in the 1830s and 1840s. Even so, Nicol includes a few raised cudgels in his picture, for old time's sake.
The exhibition is broken into seven sections: music and dance, ritual and religion, sport, and so on. Dancing is one of the stronger subjects, unsurprisingly. The Irish propensity for doing it is such that even Joseph Tudor's breathtaking View of Dublin from Chapelizod (c.1750) is a backdrop for dancers in the foregrounded Phoenix Park.
That sport is not so well treated is partly a cultural issue. Some of the paintings here date from a time when the elite defined sport solely as the organised pursuit of wildlife. The definition had broadened somewhat by the 20th century, but it obviously took longer to broaden among the painting community. Hurling only makes it into the frame, you suspect, because if its mythic connections. And although road bowling merits two pictures, Gaelic football is ignored.
A bigger gap in the exhibition is the Great Hunger itself. The nearest we get to it is William Willes's 1851 painting of an American wake. Apart from that, the viewer just senses a red-blue shift in the pictures, of the Famine approaching and then receding; and even this requires imagination.
Although the faces in Thomas Fowler's Children Dancing at a Crossroads are all happy, there is a sadness is knowing that the painting dates from 1840. On the other hand, and disconcertingly, the dancers look no less happy, or well fed, in Cover the Buckle (Nicol again), painted in 1854.
The rise of modern Ireland is just hinted at in the show's signature painting, Muriel Brandt's Procession Day (1949), which depicts children climbing a lamppost at Dublin's College Green. As Rooney points out, it is not clear which if any particular procession provided the model. The St Patrick's Day parade was still a grimly respectable occasion at that time, and for years afterwards.
If only for the sake of a story, however, we can read the picture as Ireland throwing off the Victorian straitjacket imposed on it for a century after the Famine. The Irish were about to revert to their wild ways, clearly. That said, Donnybrook Fair is now an upmarket grocery shop. So perhaps the defeat of respectability was not as complete as it seemed.