An Irishman’s Diary on how the Belfast Boys of painting came home

The Belfast Boys have gone home. They came, originally, from different social and religious backgrounds to form an unlikely alliance of artistic talent and a convivial and stimulating friendship that endured until their deaths. All self-taught, they sketched and painted wherever they went, Belfast to start, then Spain and Italy, London, Dublin and Connemara. Three of them formed a close but casual grouping, George Campbell, Gerard Dillon and Arthur Armstrong. Drifting in and out of this loosely knit circle over the years were fellow Northern artists, Daniel O’Neill, James MacIntyre, Markey Robinson, Noreen Rice and others. They created a golden seam of innovative art which spread far beyond the banks of the Lagan and can be seen on the walls of galleries and private homes in many parts of the world.

Now a representative exhibition of their work has been curated by the Dublin art historian Karen Reihill, who has also written an authoritative and beautifully illustrated catalogue, which could pass muster as a scholarly book. It is entitled George Campbell and The Belfast Boys. The exhibition is, perhaps, the most comprehensive collection of Northern art ever assembled outside of national galleries and has been borrowed from private owners all over the country. It has already been seen at the Dublin gallery of Adams, the auctioneers, and has moved to the AVA gallery on the Clandeboye Estate, just outside Belfast, where it will be on view throughout August.

Campbell is given prominence in the catalogue and the exhibition because through sheer force of personality he emerged as the informal leader of the group. He was born in Arklow, Co Wicklow, in 1917 but moved at an early age with his family to Belfast. After a couple of mundane jobs in wartime Belfast he decided, impulsively, to become a full-time painter at the age of 26, just after his marriage to Madge.

Hazardous

Around the same time he met Gerard Dillon, a house painter from the Falls Road, who had already embarked on a career as an artist. Surviving by painting alone in a blitz-battered city which had little interest in art and many other preoccupations was hazardous. They held a joint exhibition in 1944 and sold a grand total of two paintings – the gallery owner’s two sisters buying one from Campbell and one from Dillon.

Around this time they were joined by a younger aspiring artist, Arthur Armstrong, from Carrickfergus, who was studying architecture at Queen’s University. The tripartite adventure had begun.

Campbell, a talented guitarist, was drawn to Spain and in the early 1950s, long before mass tourism, he persuaded Dillon to travel there with himself and Madge.

“We went third-class rail all the way,” Madge recalled. “Day after day down through England, France, then into Spain – Barcelona, Granada, Malaga and ended up in a little fishing village called Petregalejo.”

It was the ideal place for impoverished artists. The light was marvellous and the cost of living was low. Dinner was often a shared plate of sardines, bought for a few pesetas from the local fishing boats. “At times I felt like a mobile cat food factory,” Campbell quipped. But they returned year after year, often accompanied by Armstrong and younger Irish artists like George Walsh and Manus Walsh, who shared Campbell’s interest in Spanish guitar music. There is a roundabout in Petregalejo now, named Glorieta Jorge Campbell, in honour of the Irish painter.

Campbell, Dillon, and Armstrong were non-political. In all the many years I knew them I never heard them discuss politics, regional. national or international. But Campbell hated Franco. He declined to accept an award from the Spanish government (Commander of the Order of the Merito Civile – the equivalent of a British knighthood) until after the dictator’s death.

Armstrong said of himself he “never really noticed whether he was a Protestant or a Catholic”. Although his father and two brothers had served in the British army, Dillon inherited a strong sympathy with Irish nationalism from his mother but it was always smothered by his ready wit and infectious good humour.

It surfaced at the start of The Troubles in the North when a patrol of B-specials ( the part-time wing of the RUC) firebombed and machine-gunned Bombay Street close by his birthplace on the Falls Road. Dillon was incensed.

In a letter to The Irish Times on August 20th, 1969, he wrote: "Being an Irishman and an Ulsterman, I know only too well the arrogance of that unionist mob who think it is their right to rule the Irish people with the jackboot." In the letter he announced he was withdrawing his work from the touring "Irish Exhibition of Living Art" when it left Cork for Belfast as a protest against "the persecution of the Irish people by a planter Government in the Six Counties". His appeal to other artists in the exhibition to do likewise fell largely on deaf ears.

All three died in Dublin where they had settled after their travelling days were over, Dillon in 1971, Campbell in 1979 and Armstrong in 1996. Now, united again, they have travelled the road north, back to Belfast and Clandeboye.