CLOSELY-RESEARCHED and often esoteric articles often produce the most interesting material and this year's Review bears is heavily on paintings (just two of the artists dealt with are still alive), there is still room to deal with architecture (Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, Timothy Hevey, Augustus Welby Pugin among others, and Frank McDonald of The Irish Times being candid about some recent Irish buildings), jewellery, glass, gold, furniture, wrought iron and period.
The sale late lasts year of Aloysius O'Kelly's Breton work, Old Couple at the Door of an Inn, was timely - the work is illustrated in one of several articles on the painter, this time by Julian Campbell. The Review has done a fine job by rooting out a mass of detail about O'Kelly, always a figure overshadowed by some of his Irish contemporaries in France.
However, for sheer pathos there is nothing to equal Wanda RyanSmolin's article on that exquisite rural demesne Killua Castle in Westmeath, the onetime home of the Chapmans of Lawrence of Arabia fame (local legend has it that Lawrence on several occasions paid a visit).
Mere vestiges of its former magnificent now cling to what is left of Killua, but the ruin is still for my money the most imposing in the country (except perhaps for Castleboro in Wexford). The potato folly still stands, though it is a little decrepit, one or two of the wonderful gate lodges survive, but the big trees are gone and the lake is now a clotted marsh. William Sadler's exquisitely atmospheric works bring it all back to its former harmony.
The editor, Homan Potterton, pulls few punches in a tough editorial opinion on a variety of targets. But there are obvious perplexities in this book. Why, when this review is dated 1996, include a diary of the art year in Ireland which actually starts in May, 1994? Who on earth wants to read what happened over a year and a half ago? And this diary finishes in June, 1995, a full five months before publication. The price guide to Irish art suffers from the same inexplicable failing, finishing in June of last year.
Apart from that, an immensely erudite and worthwhile publication is one terrific read.
