sensible and gave James a very contented family life.
James was the instigator in establishing at this time the Association of Irish Art Historians – a novel concept, as there were hardly any Irish art historians to speak of. His principal challenge was to get Françoise Henry to sit round a table with Anne Crookshank; and in this he eventually succeeded. Notwithstanding there being such a very small pool in which to fish, discussions as to who counted as an art historian were protracted. Were the scholars of early Irish art really art historians in the strict sense of the word? There were those who would want to be included – was it enough to have passed the Purser–Griffith exam? – but were not considered sufficiently academic; and there were those who were desirable as members, such as John Teahan15 and Catriona MacLeod16 in the National Museum, but would they join? No question mark hung over the eligibility of the tiny terrier that was Mrs Leask17: she would almost be accepted honoris causa. And what about architectural historians?
Eventually, things got under way, and I was made assistant honorary secretary. James came up with a project for members to update the Irish biographies in the multi-volume Thieme-Becker Künsterlexikon, and lists of suitable entries were solicited. As to whether Thieme-Becker wanted their Irish biographies updated, no one actually knew. But in the event, it did not matter one way or another, as nothing ever happened. I did not know Françoise Henry, but once or twice, following a meeting, she came to the gallery and, on finding me at my desk in the library, sat down opposite me. She was terrifically large (and was to become even larger) and I found her acutely fearsome. She would come to correct some details in the minutes that I had sent out. She did not do this in an unkind or bullying way but more to inculcate in me an appreciation that accuracy was important. It dawned on me after a couple of these sessions that she was actually trying to reach out and befriend me. But as I left the gallery before too long, it was a friendship that had no time to blossom. In spite of that, Françoise was to play a pivotal role at a later – and crucial – stage of my career.
It is difficult to imagine today, when art history is such a firmly established discipline being taught in colleges all over Ireland (and England), and when there are so many people doing research over a very broad spectrum, that in the 1960s the subject was new, with degree courses in Britain limited in the main to the Courtauld Institute, Edinburgh University and the University of East Anglia. Françoise had, from as early as 1934, been giving lectures on European painting in UCD when she was attached to the French Department and, from 1948, to the Department of Archeology. It was only in 1965 that she established the History of Art Department: that was the same year that Anne appeared in Trinity, setting up the Art History Department there. Insofar as post-Renaissance Irish art was concerned, very few people had engaged in research, and publishing outlets had been few. One must rummage through the pages of the Capuchin Annual, the Father Mathew Record and Studies to find what articles on Irish artists there were. There one will come across, among the very few, Máirin Allen (who, I think, was a pupil of Françoise) writing about Evie Hone and other Irish artists as early as the 1940s, and Con Curran (C.P. Curran),18 Tom McGreevy19 and Eithne Waldron20 contributing slightly later. But from the late 1960s things began to change, and it was Anne, more than Françoise, who encouraged research on topics that would hardly have been considered worthy of study a decade earlier. Jeanne Sheehy21 was the first of Anne’s hens who was set to hatch, with an M.Litt thesis on Walter Osborne, and others quickly followed: Michael Wynne22 (Irish stained glass), John Hutchinson23 (James Arthur O’Connor) and Julian Campbell24 (Irish artists in early-twentieth-century France), to cite but three. The Irish Georgian Society Bulletin was an outlet for articles on (mainly) eighteenth-century art and architecture, Studies was still in circulation and, in the North, Charlie Brett was publishing madly under the auspices of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.
From the pages of my 1973 diary, it seems that those of us who were interested in Irish art research formed a very small clique: the names are few, and oft repeated. Anne, the Knight of Glin25 Desmond Guinness, Maurice Craig, Eddie McParland26 Jeanne Sheehy, Hugh Dixon,27 Rolf Loeber,28 Charlie Brett and myself. We were a small clique – and a very Trinity–Georgian Society clique at that. If there were others, in UCD or elsewhere, who were equally active, they mainly eluded us: Michael Wynne (researching Thomas Frye) and Hilary Pyle (Jack B. Yeats) in the National Gallery we knew about, and John Gilmartin had written about the Dublin sculptor Peter Turnerelli; John Turpin29 was working on Daniel Maclise and John O’Grady30 on Sarah Purser; but that was more or less it. The National Museum kept itself out of bounds, with virtually all of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections unavailable, and it was only with the advent years later of Mairead Dunlevy31 there that things (and the curators) became more accessible.
Being now in ‘a proper job’, I was faced with finding a place to live in Dublin. I saw no reason – except for the fact that I had no money – why I should not buy a house.
‘I can borrow the money from the bank and take lodgers to pay it off,’ I said to my mother when she enquired as to how I intended to proceed.
‘I see,’ she said.
But as I looked for houses, and she saw that I was serious, she offered to help me.
‘There is no use in my leaving you money after my death,’ she said. ‘You won’t need it then. Besides, I don’t intend dying for some years yet.’
She was in her late sixties at the time. I found a house – a beautiful house, 169 Rathgar Road – and bought it at auction for £11,000. My mother gave me £5,000 – ‘That’s your inheritance,’ she said, ‘don’t expect anything more’ – and I got a loan from the bank for the balance. My meagre salary as a temporary cataloguer rendered me ineligible for a proper mortgage.
The house, in brick, was a typical Dublin house of its time (I suppose about 1840) and was, therefore, elegantly planned. Three storeys, with high steps leading up to the hall door, and two beautiful reception rooms linked by a double opening, the detailing of which was Greek Revival. There was a long back garden with a tumbledown mews at the end. Although not divided, it had been in three fairly simple flats, so there were basic kitchens and bathrooms on each floor.
‘It’s all ready for lodgers,’ I said to my mother in my attempts to persuade her that it was an ideal buy.
I moved in the day I bought it, and then went out and bought seven beds: one for me and one for any guest I might have in the reception rooms, three for upstairs, and two for the basement. I put a placard in the upstairs window facing the road: ‘Rooms to Rent’, it read.
There then unfolded a most extraordinary set of circumstances.
Almost immediately, along came three young men. They inspected the upstairs flat, came down, asked what the rent was, and said they would take it. I enquired if any or all of them were gainfully employed.
‘We’re actors,’ they said, with that assurance which actors have, and without actually assuring me that they were employed.
One of them spoke with an English accent, another was Northern Irish, and the third was American. None of this, by my reckoning, augured well, and I had the sense to realise that I would be taking a risk by letting them have the flat. I knew that actors kept very irregular hours and that they also led very irregular (and unconventional) lives, but I liked the look of this trio and felt that they would be more congenial to have upstairs than some more steady lodgers. I delved further.
‘And are any of you actually acting at the moment?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ came the reply. ‘We’re in the Project.’
It was as though they were stating that they were members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The Project, which had only recently been set up, was (to me) a sort of louche arts centre which staged alternative theatre and alternative art exhibitions, poetry readings and the like. It never lasted very long in any one venue and, whenever it was in the news (which was often), it was on account of its irregular finances rather than its artistic programme.