Irish art from the sublime to the beautiful

While an abundance of research has been published in recent years on Irish art during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this country's painting from an earlier period is still relatively little explored.

The authoritative volume written by Professor Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, The Painters of Ireland, circa 1660-1920, first published in 1978 is due to reappear next year in a completely updated edition. In the meantime, however, London's Pyms Gallery - a specialist in Irish art for the past 20 years - has just produced a new work The Sublime and the Beautiful, looking at painting and sculpture here between 1700-1830.

Edited by William Laffan, the book contains detailed and fully-illustrated entries on 18 works produced during this period, beginning with a pair of portraits by Edward Luttrell and ending with a white marble bust of Henry Grattan carved by Peter Turnerelli.

The volume opens with a number of essays, including an examination by Patrick Healy of Edmund Burke's The Sub- lime and the Beautiful on the Irish landscape tradition and Nicola Figgis's admirable exploration of Irish artists in Rome during the 18th century.

While some of the names featured - such as William Ashford, Thomas Roberts, James Arthur O'Connor and William Sadler - will be well-known to anyone possessing even a passing acquaintance with the period, others are likely to be less familiar.

Turnerelli is a case in point. The son of an Italian refugee who had worked first in Belfast before settling in Dublin in 1787, the sculptor subsequently trained at London's Royal Academy Schools where he won a silver medal. During the first decades of the 19th century, he was enormously successful not just in these islands but throughout Europe.

In Ireland, he worked on the High Altar for Dublin's Pro-Cathedral and executed a monument to Bishop Moynan in Cork. In 1813, at the request of Lord Kinnaird, he visited Henry Grattan at the latter's estate of Tinnahinch where he modelled a bust of the famous orator; that shown in the present volume, however, dates from seven years later and was created to mark Grattan's death. It was described by Canova as being "the best modern bust I have seen in England."

Equally deserving of greater fame in contemporary Ireland is the portraitist Matthew William Peters. The book shows his half-length image of Lady Elizabeth Compton, afterwards Lady Burlington, a work described by Peters's biographer Lady Victoria Manners as one of his best known pictures and "radiant and beautiful".

Although born on the Isle of Man, the artist's parents were Irish and he grew up in Dublin, studying in the city under Robert West before being sent to Italy by the Dublin Society with an annual allowance of £30. However, despite enjoying considerable popularity, particularly thanks to a series of female portraits showing the subjects in various stages of deshabille, in the early 1780s Peters was ordained an Anglican clergyman and began to paint religious and sentimental works.

It was to the detriment of his natural ability. As Strickland later noted of the artist, "Had he devoted his talents to portraiture instead of wasting them on his historical pictures and his ill-drawn, badly coloured angels and pious children by which he is best known, he would have been regarded and taken his place as one of the best painters of the English school."

Finally, it is worth noting the attention given to an early Irish landscapist, John Lewis who, like a number of other artists working in this country during the first half of the 18th century, began his career as a scene painter for the theatres of Dublin.

The brother-in-law of Stephen Slaughter, in 1750 he began his association with the Smock Alley Theatre company under the directorship of Thomas Sheridan, whose portrait he painted; he was also responsible for the famous portrait of Peg Woffington now in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. Among his landscapes, a series of views of the Enniskillen area at Florence Court, Co Fermanagh are attributed to Lewis.

The Sublime and the Beautiful is a welcome addition to ongoing scholarship in the field of 18th century Irish art. The book itself is beautifully produced and is available, priced £10 sterling (including postage) from the Pyms Gallery, 0044 207 6292020.