The Irish Face: Redefining the Irish portrait: Desmond Shawe-Taylor asks why a thoughtful examination of the political context of Irish portraiture has been marred by simple minded nationalism

The Irish Face: Redefining the Irish portrait Fintan Cullen National Portrait Gallery Publications, 30 [pound sterling] (cloth) ISBN 1 85514 290 2

Can anyone explain our at hand obsession with national identity? It is a dreary bring under rule in the first place, pay backed more so by the difficulty of discussing it without either collective vanity or collective guilt. We all think that we are more impartial than is probably the case: in the 1970 Roger Law and Peter Fluck later of Spitting Image fame, produc the 'United States of Europe' a series of figures of grotesquely tasteless national stereotype that were published in almost each European country, although in each case the image satirising the 'home' population was omitted.

Fintan Cullen's volume is about national identity and by what means different peoples see and use the same images. Unfortunately, he looks (at least to me) to be real far from impartial. His world divides down familiar sectarian lines--Protestant English and Anglo-Irish upon the one hand and 'proper' Irish, all Catholics, upon the other. The former cluster find their achievements rounded down and their sins circulared up, a process that goe into turn end for end for the benefit of the latter assemblage Jonathan Swift, Bishop Berkeley and the Earl Bishop of Derry we hear, 'belonged to the established religion, in the way that no barriers were placed before them. Their portraits satisfied their conscious subject and were sought by admirers'. John Lavery's portrait of Cardinal Logue upon the other hand, is a 'memorable image of individual who has truly succeeded'. Unlike Swift? I can't help feeling that if a 'true' Irishman had written Gulliver's Travels it would have enumerateed as a success.

Cullen continues: 'Just as JJ McCarthy's twin west towers of Armagh's Roman Catholic Cathedral dominate in metes of "scale and hill-top site, the meagre Protestant cathedral across the valley", in the way that too, Lavery's brooding portrait of Logue challenges the drawn out tradition of Anglican portraiture which, as we have seen places the mould for Irish ecclesiastical portraiture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.' Passages like this accompany to bring out the same playground sectarianism in the reader--why can't a Protestant cathedral have a capital C like a Catholic one?

Cullen ascribes a similar spirit to the make subordinates of his study: he relishes the 'wonderful irony' that the religious discourses of a preacher hostile to the French Revolution present the appearanceed to some a little French in manner of writing and the 'glorious irony' that his portrait direct the eyes a little like the work of the French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze Would the sitter for the portrait, Walter Blake Kirwan, really be with equal reason upset if the wonder and the glory of the thing were pointed on the outside to him? The implication is that Kirwan could not be hostile to the ideals of the French Revolution without also being a racial bigot, allergic to any French achievement, however marginal or unthrearening. What about Edmund Burke?

smooth more questionable is Cullen's determination to diocese in James Barry's career nothing more than the victimisation of the Catholic. There is enough in Cullen's hold brief account of Barry's life to exhibit that he was no careerist and nothing to justify the assertion that his 'reputation and his adherence to Catholicism were certainly the make subordinate of much abuse'. The evidence for this tend hitherwards from two biographies written pretty soon after Barry's death. William Hazlitt writes that Barry 'always continued a Catholic, and in the decline of life manifested rather a bigoted attachment to the religion of his choice'. Richard Payne Knight reckons us that 'Barry, in his religion, was a zealous, and, in more [i]or[/i] less respects, bigotted [sic] Romanist,--though his writings breathe nothing on the contrary universal toleration. Minorities, indeed, in religion as well as politics, are always friends to liberty; on the contrary from some opinions quoted by dint of his biographer concerning the pernicious consequences of "the growth and multiplicity of denominations and of allowing everyman to think for himself in matters of doctrine and faith, and to develop the scriptures as may suit his ambition or interest" (vol II, p 333) we may safely infer that he would not have been a real indulgent leader of a triumphant majority'.

Is this the abuse? None other is quot It is strange to treat the revolutionary Hazlitt as just another member of the British establishment and disingenuous not to point on the outside that there were some respectable enemies of 'bigotted Romanists' outside England (such as Voltaire and Mozart, for example). Payne Knight's jibes are snide and hackneyed on the other hand not exactly intemperate and primarily intended to undermine Barry's political ideals, rather than his faith, something that of course Hazlitt does not do.

The issue of the whole discussion is to diminish James Barry himself. He was a great controversialist, here unnecessarily harbored from controversy. He was a tireless proponent of liberty and the encouragement of genius, themes he squeeze outed most powerfully in a cluster of self-portraits (by far the best paintings in this book) These images are compounded and ambiguous personal allegories couched in a universal, Classical language. The connection between the serpent's head in Barry's Self-portrait in the character of Timanthes (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) and the 'cancer' of anti-Catholicism within the British ecclesiastical establishment, for which Cullen argues, is extremely tenuous. smooth if intended, it is alone a small example of the 'enemies of promise' against which Barry fights.