Curator’s Egg – An Irishman’s Diary about history and art

The career of an artist called Augustus Egg had somehow passed me by until one of his works turned up in the new “Creating History” exhibition at the National Gallery. He sounds like a character from Roald Dahl. But he was a real painter, English, from the mid-19th century. And Evelyn Waugh, at least, considered him a master.

Painting aside, he was a good Egg, generally. Charles Dickens called him a “dear gentle little fellow”. And it was through Egg’s philanthropic work that they met, working together to establish a welfare system for struggling artists.

To this end – I’m digressing here a bit – both men once performed in a fund-raising play by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The latter was a very popular writer of his era but is now perhaps best remembered as the man who started a novel with the infamous words: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

As a result – and I’m digressing from the digression now – he has been immortalised since the 1980s by the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, for the worst opening line of an imaginary novel.

The Bulwer-Lytton is unusual among satirical awards in having itself spawned a dissident breakaway competition. Noting that the winners were growing more verbose every year, somebody else started the “Lyttle Lytton” prize, also now annual, and limited to sentences of 30 or fewer words.

But getting back to the second digression, I may as well mention the winning entry of the 2016 Bulwer-Lytton, a Florida reader’s spoof on the “hard-boiled” crime genre. Thus the opening line: “Even from the hall, the overpowering stench told me the dingy caramel glow in his office would be from a ten-thousand-cigarette layer of nicotine baked on a naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire in the center of a likely cracked and water-stained ceiling, but I was broke, he was cheap, and I had to find her.”

Robert Emmet

Anyway, leaving hard-boiled fiction aside, let me return, with further apology, to the Egg picture in the NGI exhibition. It features Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran, meeting in the former’s prison cell at Kilmainham, the night before his execution.

Or at least that's the inference, although this tale is also a roundabout one. There is no overt reference to Emmet. The picture's title is Come Rest in This Bosom, which is the opening line of a ballad by Thomas Moore. Who was indeed famous for writing about Emmet and Curran, although he wasn't writing about them in that song.

Also, as the exhibition’s notes say, there is no historic evidence for the rendezvous as depicted. Nevertheless, apparently, it is Emmet and Curran. And fictionalised or not, it fits with the exhibition’s subtitle, “Stories of Ireland in Art”.

No less fanciful is the scene painted by another outsider in the show, the Victorian aristocrat Lady Charlotte Schreiber, who was born in England, spent many years in Canada, and may never have visited Ireland.

Even so, she was sufficiently taken by the old ballad The Croppy Boy to make it the subject of her 1879 masterwork, in which a young Catholic rebel attends confession with what he thinks is a Jesuit priest. Blinded by piety, he cannot see that lurking under the robes is a British officer, extracting confession in more ways than one.

In song and painting, the croppy is headed for the gallows. But aristocrat or not, there must have been a bit of a rebel in Lady Charlotte. She bathes the doomed hero in sympathetic light. The dastardly redcoat lurks in shadow.

By political contrast, the exhibition also includes Richard Thomas Moynan's The Death of the Queen (1902). The queen was of course Victoria, who, half a century earlier, had attended that Egg-Dickens play and declared it "full of cleverness, though rather too long".

Street urchin

This might also have served as a verdict on her own reign, but when she died in 1901 she was widely mourned in Ireland. Hence the painting, wherein a Dublin street urchin, learning of her demise from a news-bill on the ground, spends his last penny on a bunch of violets and places them on the headline.

The story was reported, from Grafton Street, by this newspaper, then as loyal as the urchin. But the mockers at the nationalist Dublin Evening Telegraph publicly doubted the pious tableau had ever happened.

So the story had to be reverified by a bookseller who witnessed it. Then Moynan, himself a unionist, recorded the scene for posterity.