Playing the role of documentary

Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne:Reviewed: A Time and a Place, National Gallery of Ireland Millennium Wing until Jan 28 adm €10/€6) (01-6633513)

A couple of points are immediately raised by the National Gallery's exhibition A Time and a Place: Two centuries of Irish Social Life. One is that it overlaps to a significant extent with Cork's Crawford Gallery show Whipping the Herring earlier this year. Another is that it makes one extremely grateful for the advent of modernity and Aer Lingus, for the Late Late Show and the EU, for anything, in fact, that encouraged us to kick over the traces, broaden our horizons, get out and move on. There's a stifling feeling of closed minds, of impoverishment and inwardness, to much of what is on view. Understandably enough, perhaps, given the historical circumstances, but still.

With a substantial number of duplicate paintings, the overlap between the shows is pronounced enough to make one wonder how the two institutions converged to such an extent. The Cork show cast its net wider, encompassing all aspects of daily life, and it was on balance a more thorough project. But there is something slightly dispiriting about the sociological, documentary rationale of both shows, however worthy and informative they might be, as though the works of art are being filleted for the relevant information they contain rather than regarded in any other way.

That is very much the case in A Time and a Place. The detail is usually interesting at the level of historical or anecdotal information, but for most of the time great works of art do not emerge from the artists' engagement with the material. There is no particular reason why that should be so. Great art has been made from the most prosaic subject matter.

Jack B Yeats was able to do it, and it has to be said that his work provides a consistent thread of quality running through the show. But Charles Lamb's epic Pattern Day in Connemara, for example, which should be a showstopper in terms of its scale and ambition and positioning, just refuses to be a great painting. It's just never going to do it.

It's awkward and contrived, looks over-extended as a composition, and the idea of community it projects is characterised by piety and conformity.

There is much piety on view generally. Aloysius O'Kelly's Mass in a Connemara Cabin is meticulously staged, but staged is the operative word. It's a formidable painting, with its battery of descriptive detail, but so po-faced that it cannot be a great one. Religious subject matter does not preclude artistic achievement, though. James Humbert Craig's small study of people making their way to Mass against the background of the Connemara coastline brilliantly captures an atmosphere and, more, the shifting, dancing light of the Western Seaboard. And John Lavery's account of pilgrims on Lough Derg is beautifully made.

The limitations of Victorian genre painting come as no surprise, and there is a great deal, or what feels like a great deal, of such painting included. Caricaturish exaggeration, heavy-handed narrative, over-worked passages of elaborately descriptive painting all add up to richly informative documents but second-rate art.

National Gallery director Raymond Keaveney notes in his introduction that painting played a central documentary role - before the advent of photography. That role is evident in several substantial commissioned group portraits, including James Worsdale's strongly characterised depiction of the members of the Limerick Hellfire Club and, more than 100 years later, William Osborne's extraordinary The Ward Union Hunt.

By 1873, when the Osborne was painted, photography had arrived and, as the many photographic images used to accompany Mary Daly's catalogue essay outlining the history of Irish social life demonstrate, was immediately pressed into service as a powerful documentary medium.

Photography influenced the way painters saw things and arguably freed them from certain menial tasks. Yeats was able to incorporate a zoom lens-eye view of the swimmer in The Liffey Swim, making him quite out of proportion to the spectators but enhancing the composition and the narrative.

William Conor's scenes of daily life have a snapshot quality. They are popular works, but his invariable recourse to smudged, distressed surfaces, with a concomitant pictorial vagueness, is wearing. Various theatrical views, by Maurice MacGonigal and Harry Kernoff, suggest a camera-Degas-Sickert lineage. Le Brocquy's A Picnic specifically references the Lane Bequest Degas at the Hugh Lane which is, indeed, a masterclass in painting in itself.

The two George Russells included are far from his best. Among many accounts of traditional music and dance sessions, Elizabeth Rivers's An Interval in the Ceilidhe stands out for its warmth of human observation and economic expression.

Some paintings do stop you in your tracks. Among those that might is William van der Hagen's State Ball at Dublin Castle from 1931. The view of a couple dancing before massed ranks of seated spectators makes for a surreal spectacle, rendered with topographical exactitude. Odder still is Charles Russell's panoramic view of The O'Connell Centenary Celebrations, looking across O'Connell Bridge towards Nelson's Pillar. Vast in conception, the picture goes awry in myriad little ways, becoming something strange. Joseph Malachy Kavanagh's Gambling for a Goose is a quietly impressive and intriguing little painting, while Maria Spilsbury Taylor's night-time view of strawboys dancing at a wedding in Co Wicklow is positively eerie. Overall, the chances are that you will find A Time and a Place informative, but not enlightening or enlivening.