WATCHING the BBC series about Cecil Rhodes has hen like standing on the Cliffs of Moher what you're seeing makes you ill, but you can't drag yourself away. If the programmes are accurate, they confirm everything I have heard about Rhodes - that he was a truly despicable and vile man. His conquests, his lies, his dishonoured word brought calamity to so many Africans, and riches to the predatory few, the most ruthless and dreadful men of their time.
He was fascinatingly horrible - a morally disfigured creature with enormous energy and charisma. Had he been born into a later age that of fascism - it is unnerving to contemplate what he would have been capable of in Europe.
As it happened, he exercised his diabolical visions on the Matabele and the Shona, and from the yoke which he cast those peoples have only emerged in recent times. His determination to confront the Boer Republics and incorporate them in the British Empire finally came to fruition in the Boer War, in which so many Irishmen - professional soldiers, mercenaries, who simply obeyed orders - were to serve and die, tragically and purposelessly (but, of course, no more tragically or purposelessly than any others).
Britain - and, to judge from Somerville and Ross, loyalist Ireland - was much taken by the war. Mafeking briefly entered the English language, as did the disgusting practice of pressing white flowers into, the hands of men in civilian clothes. It was, therefore, a deed of great moral courage for an Irish serving officer, William Butler, to oppose the war a stand for which he was vilified as the pro Boer General.
Honest Soldier
Butler is forgotten now, and his wife, Elizabeth, is barely remembered; yet both deserve to be honoured, not merely because of William's success and honesty as a soldier a recently completed biography by Martin Ryan might lift that oblivion: he is the source for most of what follows but also because Elizabeth was one of the great woman painters of the 19th century. Her success can be measured both in her popularity in both Britain and lie land and as the creator of some of the most powerful political and cultural images, which haunt us still.
Elizabeth painted some of the most evocative paintings in Irish history one is of two young recruits to the Connaught Rangers, one looking wistfully back at the dwelling he is leaving, the other with steely eyes gazing straight ahead. There is a world of meaning in the painting; but none can be interpreted as loyalty to the cause in which they were soon to find themselves serving. Another painting, Evicted, is of a peasant woman outside her ruined dwelling place beneath a tumultuous sky, while the party of evictors vanishes into the consuming hills.
Elizabeth Thompson was born 150 years a go, on November 3rd, 1846, in Lausanne, the daughter of a well to do English couple. Her religious upbringing was deeply Nonconformist, but - like so many grand English people of the time - she converted to Catholicism, in her case, when she was 26. She had by that time already outshone all her contemporaries in the Kensington School of Female Art - little enough livedrawing there, I bet.
She became famous the year after her conversion to Catholicism - no doubt a little reward from God with her painting of survivors from Balaclava. What distinguished this painting from all the other Victorian garbage about war was its total lack of glorification these survivors are not upright, tall and true, the light of victory shining in their manly eyes, but are haggard, sombre, exhausted.
Irish Honeymoon
Two years after she had become a celebrity she met another celebrity Major William Francis Butler, an Irish Catholic officer and best selling travel writer from Tipperary. Fourteen months later they were married by Cardinal Manning, and William gave his bride a choice, honeymoon in Ireland, or in the very Crimea which had made her famous. She chose Ireland, and fell so much in love with it that she made her home here when William was off a soldiering in Africa. For a while she joined him there, however, and spent her tinge painting and drawing.
William Butler was accused bin the early 1880s of being one of four co respondents with Gertrude Campbell, the wife of the youngest son of the Duke of Argyll (are the Argyll women ever capable of sexual continence at all at all?). The others accused were, one, the Duke of Marlborough; two, the leading rectal surgeon of the day - not many applicants for his job, I daresay - and three, the head of the London Fire Brigade. No doubt she was enchanted by the latter's ladder.
Whether William threw the leg with Gertie or not, we shall probably never know. Certainly Elizabeth stayed loyal to him, which was as well, because it was after that scandal, while the Butlers were living in Delgany, that she painted the picture Evicted, based on an eviction which she saw in Glendalough. That painting, and all the horror it portends, has entered the national psyche of the Irish people.
Independence of Mind
It is this fundamentally critical attitude towards the policies of the British Government which caused her to fall out of favour with the Establishment; and her independence of mind was mirrored by her husband, then an acting lieutenant general, who resigned in protest at the belligerent British policy towards the Boers. He returned home Just before that policy successfully brought about war, and the couple retired to live at Bansha Castle in the Suir Valley.
William died there in 1910. Their two sons, Patrick, a soldier, and Richard, a Benedictine priest and chaplain, both served in the Great War, and both survived. Elizabeth continued painting, especially the Galtees, well into old age, when she moved in with her daughter - who had married Viscount Gormanston - at the latter's castle. She died in 1938, just short of her 92nd birthday and is buried at Stamullen graveyard nearby.
Of her great paintings, something is known: but what of her later watercolours and oils? Where are they? And what ale the chances of a full exhibition of the works of this fine and courageous artist?