THIS IS a detective story, a kind of art whodunnit. It concerns a painting which disappeared, only to reappear a century later under another name. The search for the artist responsible for the picture uncovered a man who had himself disappeared from sight, and who, like the picture, had a curious link to a notorious 19th-century murder.
It was most likely in Rathmines Castle that my father bought the picture, in October 1963. The occasion was an auction of house contents, as I recall being told, and the oil painting in question was described as “landscape, Italian school”. The painting, some 3ft by 2ft, was a fairly murky view of a bay, with an island in the middle distance, and it did not attract much interest. But my father had the idea that it was in fact an Irish picture, the bay was Dublin Bay and the island Ireland’s Eye. He knew Howth well from having spent summers there as a child – he told me he used to hunt for birds’ eggs on the island – and he thought the slightly brighter blob in the darkness on one end of the island was a Martello tower.
He bought the painting and some years later had it professionally cleaned. It was, of course, Ireland’s Eye, with Lambay behind it, and to emphasise this topographical truth the roof of Howth Castle could be seen above the trees at the shore. The vantage point was high up on the Hill of Howth. The brightness on one end of the island which had caught my father’s attention at the auction was now a gleaming white – so the Martello tower was new at the time the picture was made. It was the early 19th century when these towers were built around the coast, anticipating an invasion by Napoleon.
The painting came to the attention of the Knight of Glin and Anne Crookshank, who were preparing their book The Painters of Ireland, 1660-1920. The Knight – who died last year – believed the Howth picture to be the work of Samuel Frederick Brocas (1790-1847), of the famous family of artists, and said as much in the book (1978), where a half-page colour illustration showed it to be indeed, as the authors wrote, “a sparkling view”. However, by the time Crookshank and Glin came to revise their work in 2002, they had changed their minds, and the attribution (and the illustration) fell away.
For some years now the Howth picture has been hanging in the State Apartments at Dublin Castle, on loan. Recently I asked another authority on 19th-century Irish art for a second opinion. William Laffan came up with a compelling case for attributing the painting to a now little-known painter who had been excluded from Crookshank and Glin’s landmark survey of Irish art – though not in fact, said Laffan with a smile, because without realising its true authorship they had chosen the Howth picture as one of only 65 paintings thought worthy of being given a colour reproduction in the first edition of their book.
The painter of the picture, it turns out, was William Howis. Born in Waterford in 1804, Howis studied at the Dublin Society Schools, and quickly established a reputation as a landscape artist; his works were much sought after. He first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1825, and went on to see 188 of his works accepted for the annual shows. At the 1851 exhibition the Lord Lieutenant purchased his painting The Entrance to Dublin Harbour. The RHA’s records perished in 1916 and information is scarce, but the present picture is most likely that described in the 1838 exhibition as “Coast Scene, taken at Howth, looking towards Ireland’s Eye”.
That Howis’s name has largely disappeared from view now is perhaps a result of the row he had with the RHA over the way his pictures were being hung; at the 1863 exhibition he cut a painting from the frame where it was hanging and never exhibited again. A dismissive entry in Strickland’s Dictionary of Irish Artists (1913), stating that Howis “did many good copies after James Arthur O’Connor”, did not help either. Or indeed the painter’s friendship with fellow artist William Kirwan, the man found guilty (wrongly, it seems) of murdering his wife on Ireland’s Eye in the sensational case of 1852.
William Laffan deals with the “copyist” allegation by establishing that Howis was a pupil of the great O’Connor, perhaps his only pupil.
He suggests that Howis studied a similar view of Howth by O’Connor and produced his own, better composed, image – which could not be mistaken for the O’Connor version. Laffan, who is writing the entry on Howis for the Royal Irish Academy’s forthcoming Art and Architecture of Ireland (the “new Strickland”), backs up his assertion with reference to the 60 oil sketches by Howis held in the National Gallery, including studies of rock formations at Howth, and to three Howis paintings that have appeared at auction in recent years.
Of the 188 pictures which Howis exhibited over the years at the RHA, Laffan can only trace those three, apart from the Howth picture. The mystery is only partly solved. But anyone curious to see this newly discovered painting, and examine the style of the newly rehabilitated William Howis should pay a visit to Dublin Castle. There must be more Howises out there.