City life, folk customs, fairs and pious practices: there is nothing sentimental in Whipping the Herring, writes Mary Leland

When Quaker timber merchant Cooper Penrose abandoned his commitment to the ideals of classical culture as expressed in France and Italy, it was understood to be because the sculptures he was importing from Rome to Montenotte in Cork had been lost in a shipwreck. In fact, says Peter Murray, director of the Crawford Gallery, it was probably because his concept of "high art" was too remote from the reality of life as he knew it, the life of a city and its people.

That is the life which, expanded with the folk customs, fairs and pious practices of the Irish hinterland, is revealed with sometimes startling energy in Whipping the Herring; Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth-Century Irish Art, the 80-painting exhibition on display in the gallery.

"You could argue", says Murray, who does exactly that with his colleague exhibition officer Dawn Williams, "that 19th-century Cork, by virtue of not having Dublin Castle as the centre of administration after 1801, just concentrated on the business of making money. In Dublin the strong middle-class audience had an appetite for stereotypical and second-rate sentimental images.

"It wasn't in anyone's interest to have the administration confronted with the reality of its own failures; when Daniel Maclise produced his portrait of Captain Rock, it caused such an outcry, such agitation and unrest among his patrons, that he never did it again. And Cork had no academy; the local artists all taught and somehow scraped by, but their work had a tremendous gusto - they painted what the clients wanted to see and what they wanted to see was what was familiar to them."

The arguments had to be about what should be included in an exhibition of this kind, which grew from a shared recognition of research and discovery being carried on, largely in Cork, into different but related aspects of 19th-century Irish art. Murray knew, for example, that UCC historian Tom Dunne was using art as a social document to support his classes; Claudia Kinmonth was working on what was to be her magnum opus, Irish Rural Interiors in Art, while Julian Campbell was studying representations of the west of Ireland.

Bringing it all together took nearly three years, during which Williams, who originated and designed the exhibition, had to find paintings which were known to exist but couldn't be traced.

And then there were pictures which didn't fit the theme. Edward Sheil, for example, was an important painter of his time but appears here only once - his sentimental tendency had too much fiction.

"Not every sunset can be perfect," explains Williams, as she remembers the debate about the inclusion of The Poachers, (1835) a scene by James Arthur O'Connor which might be classified as a moonscape but gets in under the section on working life.

Supported by a catalogue with essays from Dunne, Kinmonth and Campbell, as well as from Murray himself and including plate notes from Williams, Whipping the Herring has as its defining image the procession to mark the end of Lent in Cork. This allowed the public to abuse a dead fish - apparently crucified - which was finally replaced by a leg of lamb to symbolise not so much the Paschal lamb but the return of meat to the domestic table.

THE FACT THAT few enough of the riotous throng following the fish would have meat as their customary diet lends the painting (by Nathaniel Grogan c1800) a satirical vivacity which characterises several other crowd and festive scenes. But satire is one thing, caricature another altogether, and the impulse to distinguish is one of the exhibition's most rewarding aspects, showing as it does how different artists treat similar subjects.

"Treating" the subjects of course also meant treating the issues. In his account of Daniel MacDonald's The Discovery of the Potato Blight in Ireland (c1847), Tom Dunne notes the conflict for artists trying to depict the tragedies of the Famine at a time when narratives of social improvement were officially preferred.

In England, GF Watts had got around this by using religious symbolism such as the Holy Family, while Erskine Nicol tried to adapt to Victorian narrative forms. MacDonald, deliberately aiming his painting at English sensibility, imbued his group of despairing peasants not alone with purposeful theatricality but with references to famous paintings such as Gainsborough's Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher (1785).

The artists here (and the exhibition includes a section on engravings from The Illustrated London News) stretch from Grogan and Petrie to Henry Jones Thaddeus, Howard Helmick, James Humbert Craig, Paul Henry, Walter Osborne and Jack B Yeats. Such a range of styles and conventions doesn't upset the socio-historical balance which Williams and Murray hoped to achieve, all having in common a profound sense of actuality.

Sometimes packed with people, colour and event, sometimes spare, sometimes so honest in their depiction of the hard-working poor as to be painful, the pictures also have a strong narrative sweep, dense with conviction and detail.

"The value of the eye witness in places like Cork was far more potent than in Dublin," says Murray. "Cork had its wealth based on trade, and almost everyone knew the appearance of things and the value of things. Dublin-born James Brenan, for example, who had trained and worked abroad and was so influential as the headmaster of the Cork School of Art, was passionate about recording interior lives, and when he gives a costume or a posture it tends to be based on his absolute witness."

IT IS THIS feeling of the absolute, the total engagement despite the necessary arrangements of art, which fills the Thaddeus painting An Irish Eviction, County Galway (1889). Clearly approached with a specific, unsentimental sympathy, the scene, emphatically of exhibition finish and scale according to the notes by Brendan Rooney, "also features vernacular and dramatic detail that affords it distinct authenticity".

There were many other painters who tackled scenes of this kind (several are in the exhibition) but none which showed such a level of physical resistance, "the final, desperate defiance of one family". The viewer cannot stand aside, but is placed in the midst of the action, almost culpably involved in the drama as it unfolds.

That's the counter-blast to the Victorian view of the countryside as a strange, romantic fiction. "There is a sense of coming face to face with a situation," says Murray. "It's understood that the observer is somehow implicated. So it wasn't a matter of Claudian landscapes or even clean Constable fields and wains for these artists - not all of whom were Irish. Their realism hinted at revolution to the administration, especially as in Ireland the inter-mingling of class was far more subtle and complex than in Britain.

"It's no wonder, really, that so many of these paintings were found in public collections - I don't think too many of them were commercially successful. So it's the first time that this kind of work has come together in Ireland, and it should be noticed."

Whipping the Herring; Survival and Celebration in Nineteenth-Century Irish Art continues at the Crawford Gallery, Cork, to Aug 26. The book of the same name is published by Gandon Editions