An Irishman’s Diary on the campaign to commemorate Henry O’Neill

The cobbler’s children go barefoot, according to an old proverb. And it must have been in line with a related but unwritten rule that, for 136 years after he died, the antiquarian and painter Henry O’Neill lay in an unmarked grave in Glasnevin Cemetery.

He had devoted much of his life to Ireland’s ancient monuments, Celtic crosses in particular. It is to him that we owe their revival, from the late 19th century onwards, as gravestones. But amid a forest of such crosses in Glasnevin, his own grave was devoid of any marker until the wrong was at last righted this week.

So how do we explain the long neglect of a man who played such an important role in Irish cultural history? Part of it is that he died in poverty. This is not of course unusual for artists. Alas, he also seems to have been short of friends in the end, having exhausted the patience of most who knew him.

The Dictionary of Irish Artists (1913) resorts to euphemism when describing O'Neill's "conflicts with learned bodies and antiquarians working in the same field as himself, in which he upheld his views with great tenacity and not always with moderation".

He was by all accounts a difficult, combative man, which must have contributed to his failure ever to make a commercial success of anything, despite ample talent.

Perhaps the most telling of many missteps in his career, after he had left Dublin for London in 1847 and struggled to survive there, was to join the army. Luckily, he had enough admirers to buy him out again and restore him to his true vocation, unrewarding as it was.

Born in Clonmel in 1798, O’Neill was orphaned early and raised by an aunt in a haberdasher’s shop in Dublin. She educated him well and, in return, he designed lace patterns for the business. But when they fell out over money, he had to move in with the other side of the family, his mother’s.

Politics

By the 1840s, he was a member of O’Connell’s Repeal Association, painting the man himself during his incarceration in Richmond Jail. O’Neill’s politics also informed a series of portraits of the Young Irelanders.

Politics of a different kind, however, led to another of his rifts, when he resigned as associate member of the Royal Hibernian Academy because of the body’s reluctance to fill a vacancy for full membership.

He survived the military misadventure in London to publish, in 1857, his greatest work: Illustrations of the most interesting of the Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland, which fed the Gaelic revival and, as noted, changed the skyline of Irish cemeteries.

A decade later, in an 1868 broadside against landlordism, Ireland for the Irish, he at least picked the right side of a fight. But in yet another of his arguments – for the pagan origin of round towers – he took on the great scholar George Petrie and was plain wrong.

O’Neill’s later years were marked by disappointment and bad health as well as poverty. Happily, at least one bridge was unburned. His portrait subjects had included a certain “Oscar Wilde, as a lad”. And some years later, Wilde would do him two favours.

One was to rescue his reputation, via a 1878 essay crediting O’Neill’s role in the reclaiming of the Celtic cross. The other, more urgent, was to raise money for the ailing artist. British prime minister William Gladstone donated £2 to the fund.

Even so, O’Neill died penniless in 1880, leaving a widow and four children in bad circumstances, and thus it was that this reviver of Ireland’s monuments went without one himself for the remainder of the 19th century and all the 20th.

He was still bereft in 2015 when the archaeologist Peter Harbison reminded Ireland of his contribution with a book Henry O'Neill of the Celtic Cross. This in turn inspired Elizabeth Healy, long-time editor of Ireland of the Welcomes, to redress the neglect with a campaign since promoted by letters on this page.

The first task was to find the grave. Lost in the old, unmanicured section of Glasnevin, known (ironically) as “the garden”, it was unmarked by even a number. The location had to be extrapolated from the position of others.

Then stonemason Philip O’Neill carved a simple cross from Dublin granite, undecorated but with the classic circle motif. This marked the spot yesterday when a group of admirers, led by Healy and Harbison, gathered around it, doing belated honour to O’Neill’s memory in the fashion he himself began.