Who Owns Irish Art?

Abstract

WHO OWNS IRISH ART? FINTAN CULLEN the story of Seamus Heaney’s refusal to be anthologized in a 1982 volume of contemporary British verse resurfaced recently with the suggestion that Heaney might be appointed British Poet Laureate to succeed Ted Hughes. In September 1983, responding to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, Heaney published a verse letter addressed to the editors of the anthology.1 In “An Open Letter,”2 Heaney complained that his identity had been questioned, even if . . . doubts, admittedly, arise When somebody who publishes In LRB and TLS, The Listener— In other words, whose audience is, Via Faber, A British one, is characterized As British. But don’t be surprised If I demur, for, be advised My passport’s green. Heaney “footered” and “havered” but in the end wrote his letter of disagreement : “I regret/ The awkwardness./ But British, no, the name’s not WHO OWNS IRISH ART? 15 1 Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, eds., The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1982). 2 An Open Letter originally appeared as A Field Day Pamphlet, No. 2 (Derry, 1983). It was republished in Field Day Company, Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985): 23–29; quotation, 25. References in the poem are to London-based literary magazines the London Review of Books (LRB), the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), as well as The Listener; Faber is a London publishing house that has published Heaney’s poetry since Death of a Naturalist in 1966. Until recently, Republic of Ireland passports were green; now they are a standard European Union purple. right.”3 Irish literary confidence received a welcome charge from Heaney’s now famous refusal to be accepted as “British.” By contrast, accounts of the British establishment’s cultural appropriation of Irish visual culture are not so well recorded—nor have they benefited from a Nobel Laureate ’s pen. As an art historian who works on eighteenth-century Irish art and, in particular, as an authority on the Irish portrait painter Hugh Douglas Hamilton (1740–1808), I was recently invited by the British Government Department of Culture, Media and Sport to act as an independent assessor for the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art. The subject of the committee’s deliberations was a splendid late-eighteenthcentury pastel by Hamilton, entitled Antonio Canova in His Studio with Henry Tresham and a Plaster Model for the ‘Cupid and Psyche’ (Plate 2). The J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, wished to purchase the pastel from a private owner for a price in the region of half a million pounds. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London requested a British government deferral of the export license on the basis that the object was of intrinsic British interest. Although the pastel was executed in Rome by an Irish artist and portrays an Italian sculptor and another Irish painter, the Victoria and Albert Museum eventually won the deferral in 1998 and, with the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund, bought the drawing for the nation. As I will discuss further, in acquiring the pastel, the Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A) denied the object its peripheral significance. By boldly declaring it to be a major British object, the V&A ignored not only the drawing’s Irish connections, but also its wider European associations. This article will examine how the role of the periphery, in this case Ireland, is often written out of art history, thus encouraging the perpetuation of a metropolitan dominance that warrants serious re-examination. The pastel shows the celebrated Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757–1822) in his studio with an early version of his famous marble group, Cupid and Psyche (now in the Musée du Louvre). Turning from his carving and still holding his mallet and chisel, the sculptor pauses to talk to the Irish artist and dealer Henry Tresham (1751–1814), who stands on the right. Additional tools lie on a table to the far left. Antonio Canova in His Studio WHO OWNS IRISH ART? 16 3 Ireland’s Field Day, 24 and 29; to footer: from the Irish, “to act in a bungling manner,” T.P. Dolan, ed., A Dictionary of...