Chips off the old Irish block

ART: 3Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture: Native Genius ReaffirmedBy Paula Murphy. Yale University Press, 299pp. €59.99

IN THIS VERY welcome survey of Irish sculpture in the 19th century, Paula Murphy offers a valuable reminder that Irish art of the period is as much a story of emigrants as one of home-grown genius. So many of the key figures who dominate her narrative lived and worked in England, and, although their work can be seen in Ireland, the sculptural contribution of such artists as John Henry Foley is also an integral part of the history of 19th-century British sculpture.

This split perspective is key to the story of Irish sculpture before Independence. Artists needed to avail of the greater training opportunities in London (or indeed in Rome) as well as the wider range of patronage and general employment. Ireland in the 19th century was a hard place for sculptors who wanted to produce large monuments in marble or bronze. And yet a lot of statues were erected. Many are still there, although a fair number have disappeared, largely due to the vagaries of political opinion. The stories of those absent monuments are told here in detail, often accompanied by a wonderful selection of 19th-century photographs or more recent grainy images, some from this newspaper.

Murphy’s book is beautifully produced and sensibly organised. Copiously illustrated with more than 300 images, some of them in colour, this is going to be a standard text on the subject for many years.

The book traces three generations of Irish-born sculptors but also deals systematically with training matters, the display and exhibition of sculpture, the fascinating story of Foley’s O’Connell monument in Dublin and, as a final chapter, the “politics of street monuments”.

For those acquainted with Dublin’s historic monuments, Murphy carefully reminds us of such lost items as Foley’s equestrian statue of Lord Gough that used to be in the Phoenix Park, and of course Nelson’s “Pillar”; but this book offers so much more. It comes as a complete surprise to me to learn that Patrick MacDowell’s 1866 bronze monument to the lord lieutenant, earl of Eglington and Winton, stood for almost 100 years just inside the railings on the north side of St Stephen’s Green, opposite Dawson Street, until it was destroyed in 1958. The removal of such statues in Ireland is comparable to what has happened more recently in the former Soviet Union, and indeed in Iraq, and one could argue that Murphy might have made more of Ireland’s contribution to the afterlife of monuments.

Yvonne Whelan's discussion of such "contested identities" and public statuary in Reinventing Modern Dublin(2003) suggests one approach, but then Murphy is writing an account of a whole century of sculptural production, and tales of vanished lord lieutenants or toppled field marshalls are only part of that story.

Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculptureis really a book in two parts. On the one hand it is a survey of Irish sculptors – and while charting the careers of such illustrious names as John Hogan, Thomas Farrell and Foley, it also informs us about many forgotten names and careers. At the same time it is a fascinating study of the politics of sculpture. One of the most welcome seams running through the book is the question of Irishness and the rampant insecurity that inevitably surfaced when potential monuments were being discussed. On so many occasions the press and local opinion lamented the dearth of local talent or the fact that a London-based albeit Irish-born sculptor, such as Foley, was invariably commissioned. Murphy's meticulous research and her extensive use of primary sources, such as newspaper accounts and original letters, allow us to get a very clear picture of the arguments and counter-arguments that raged around O'Connell's Dublin monument from the 1860s to the 1880s.

Not enough has been published on the display and exhibition of art in 19th-century Ireland. This book is thus an important contribution to the slowly emerging investigation of what was available for viewing. Although Murphy subtitles her book Native Genius Reaffirmed, which plays on an 1874 comment from the Illustrated London News, there is much here that shows us how Dublin (and to a degree Cork) was very much on the international circuit for the display of art. Much more needs to be done on investigating the local reaction to the display of such famous works as the American sculptor Hiram Power's Greek Slave(even if only in plaster) in 1853 or that of his fellow American Harriet Hosmer's The Sleeping Faun, which was the "star" of the 1865 Dublin International Exhibition of Art and Manufactures, held in Earlsfort Terrace. It was subsequently purchased by Benjamin Guinness and is still in Ireland, in Iveagh House, on St Stephen's Green.

The 19th-century sculpture produced and displayed in Ireland was at once conservative and highly masculine. Despite the exhibition in 1865 of Hosmer's Faun, it is indicative of the male dominance of the world of 19th-century sculpture that Murphy can come up with only one other female sculptor to offer gender balance in her grand survey (Mary Redmond's Fr Mathew statue on O'Connell Street in Dublin, from 1893). Equally, in turning from producers to subject matter, women feature only as allegorical personifications. Hogan's various Hibernias of the late 1830s to the 1850s are intriguing examples of an emerging nationalist iconography, but they are only there to support a male figure, be it Bishop Doyle, Lord Cloncurry or Brian Boru. Not surprisingly, things had not changed much by the 1860s, when Foley designed his great O'Connell monument. The inevitably isolated figure of the great man is supported from below by four colossal female winged victories of patriotism, fidelity, courage and eloquence.

Fintan Cullen is professor of art history at the University of Nottingham. His next book has the working title Ireland on Show: Art, Union and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century. His account of Thomas Farrell's marble monument to Cardinal Paul Cullen will appear in a book on Cullen published by Four Courts in the autumn