Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/irelandOOkrei G1R6|LAND Edited by Vera Kreilkamp <§> MCMULLEN MUSEUM OF ART BOSTON COLLEGE Distributed by the University of Chicago Press This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Eire/Land, organized by the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. Principal Curator, Alston Conley. Co-curators: Pamela Berger, Lisabeth Buchelt, Vera Kreilkamp, Katherine Nahum, Nancy Netzer. Copyright © 2003 by the Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. Library of Congress Control Number 2002112026 ISBN 1-892850-05-2 Distributed by the University of Chicago Press February 2 — May 19, 2003 This exhibition and catalogue are underwritten by Boston College with an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities and additional support from the following: SPONSORS Patrons of the McMullen Museum BENEFACTORS jjiV^ Cultural Relations Committee Department of Arts, Sports, and Tourism, Ireland Exhibition and Publication Coordination by Naomi Blumberg and Bethany Waywell Copyediting by Naomi Blumberg, Anne Hanrahan, and John McCoy Designer: Keith Ake Art Director: Andrew Capitos Office of Marketing Communications Boston College OMC #2172 Printed by Reynolds *Dewalt, Inc. New Bedford, Massachusetts Cover: James O'Connor Pleasure Grounds, Ballinrobe, c.1818 oil on canvas, 16” x 28” Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland Back Cover: Jack B. Yeats Farewell to Mayo, 1929 oil on canvas, 24” x 36” Friends of Boston College Photo Credits: Veronica Nicholson (nos. 68, 69), Jeff Baird (nos. 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89), Joseph Painter (nos. 70, 75, 76), Dana Salvo (nos. nos. 81, 82), David Caras (nos. 64, 65, 77, 78, 79), Gary Gilbert (nos. 8, 34, 35, 47, 49, 53, 83), Stephen Vedder (nos. 3, u, 27, 39-46, 63, 66, 67, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94) , Susan Byrne Photography (no. 82), Kevin Ryan (nos. 56, 57), Jack Pottle/Esto (nos. 96, 97), British Library Board (nos. 1, 2, 7). Cynthia Livingston SUPPORTERS James Dalsimer Nancy and Steven Fischman Transport provided by: Aer Lingus Jk ■ 1 1 ■ : ■ >' °§° Table of Contents o 5 Editor’s Dedication: Adele Dalsimer, 1939-2000 Vera Kreilkamp 7 Director’s Preface Nancy Netzer 11 “Bogland” Seamus Heaney 13 Introduction: Toward a History of the Irish Landscape Marjorie Howes and Kevin O’Neill Mapping 27 The Turn to the Map: Cartographic Fictions in Irish Culture Claire Connolly 35 Making and Remaking the Irish Landscape in the Early Middle Ages Robin Fleming 41 Shaping and Mis-shaping: Visual Impressions of Ireland in Three Illuminated Manuscripts Michelle P. Brown Digging 49 Art/Full Ground: Unearthing National Identity and an Early Medieval “Golden Age” Nancy Netzer 57 Sacred Landscapes and Ancient Rituals: Two Watercolors by George Petrie Pamela Berger POSSESSI NG 65 Observing Irish Romantic Landscape Painting Katherine Nahum 71 Painting Mayo’s Landscape: The Big House, the Pleasure Grounds, and the Mills Vera Kreilkamp 79 Visualizing the Famine in County Mayo Margaret Preston 85 “The Land for the People”: Post-Famine Images of Eviction L. Perry Curtis, Jr. 93 “The soil of Ireland for the people of Ireland ”: The Politics of Land in Irish Visual Imagery 1850-1936 Robert Savage 99 Painting the West: The Role of Landscape in Irish Identity Sighle Bhreathnach- Lynch Responding Today 109 Exploring Place and Artistic Practice in Northern Mayo Alston Conley 115 The Art of Dinnseanchas. Excavating the Storied Past of Place Lisabeth C. Buchelt 121 Responding Today: Dis/Location and the Land Kate Costello-Sullivan 127 From Icon to Index: Some Contemporary Visions of the Irish Stone Cottage Robin Lydenberg 135 Contributors to the Catalogue Works in the Exhibition 139 DELE DALSIMER arrived at Boston College’s English Department in the late 1960s, with a Yale doctorate on William Butler Yeats but without a single Irish ancestor. She soon realized that although most of her stu- dents were the children, grandchildren, or great-grand-children of immigrants from Ire- land, works by Yeats, James Joyce, and George Bernard Shaw were taught only in the context of English literature courses. Characteristi- cally, Adele moved rapidly into action. Within a decade, she and historian Kevin O’Neill had shaped America’s most innovative Irish Stud- ies program, bringing virtually every major Irish scholar and creative writer to lecture or teach at the university. Today Boston College attracts American and international students to a rich offering of courses and programs in Irish literature, history, music, dance, and visual art. 1 In the last decade of her life, as Professor of English and Co-director of the Irish Studies Program, Adele shifted her scholarly focus from literary studies to the arts . 2 Working closely with colleagues in Irish Studies, Fine °§° Editor’s Dedication: Adele Dalsimer, 1939-2000 Vera Kreilkamp O Arts, and the McMullen Museum, she helped introduce Boston audiences to Ireland’s visual heritage and began the process of integrating works of art into the teaching of Irish history and culture. 3 Her first major achievement in this new endeavor was to conceive and edit an innovative collection of interdisciplinary es- says, Visualizing Ireland: National Identity and the Pictorial Tradition (1993), published to accom- pany an exhibition of watercolors from the Na- tional Gallery of Ireland at Boston College’s museum. Although she had already been diag- nosed with a serious illness, Adele next di- rected her indefatigable energy into another project; I had the privilege of working closely with her as we co-curated and co-edited an in- terdisciplinary catalogue of America’s Eye: Irish Painting from the Collection of Brian P. Burns (1996). That exhibition and catalogue subse- quently traveled from Chestnut Hill to Dublin (1996), to New Haven (1997), and to Washing- ton, D.C. (2000) 4 , bringing work accomplished at Boston College into a widening public realm. After traveling in Northern Ireland and the Republic, visiting galleries, museums, and young artists in their studios, Adele and I co- authored a series of essays on contemporary women artists, including one for the catalogue of McMullen Museum’s exhibition, Re/Dress- ing Cathleen: Contemporary Works from Irish Women Artists (1997). During these years of sustained achievement, Mount Holyoke Col- lege, the University of Ulster, and the National University of Ireland awarded her honorary degrees. In the last year of her life, she was planning to bring yet another art exhibition to Boston College. Eire/Land opens just three years after Adele Dalsimer’s death. She would be gratified to see how a germinating idea — to display contempo- rary paintings from the Ballinglen Arts Foun- dation in County Mayo — has evolved into a wide-ranging examination of representations of the Irish landscape. Eire/Land is the most conceptually ambitious installation of Irish art yet attempted at Boston College, both in the chronological sweep of the objects it exhibits and the interdisciplinary imperatives it placed on contributors to this catalogue. The exhibi- tion exists as a fitting reminder of Adele ’s com- O mitment to collaborative scholarship within the university, a commitment she exemplified in her own teaching career through a series of now legendary courses on Irish literature and history she taught with Kevin O’Neill. For almost two years a group of Boston Col- lege academics — art historians, literary schol- ars, and social and political historians — worked together to shape this project. Gathering to pre- view slides of visual objects, they shared per- ceptions about the relationship of these images to Ireland’s social, political, and cultural his- tory. A developing conceptual focus on Irish land and landscape motivated some partici- pants to venture far afield from their discipli- nary homes. In this richly collaborative process, contributors exchanged bibliogra- phies, shared drafts of each other’s essays, and committed themselves to the rigorous de- mands of interdisciplinary scholarship. As the broad scope of the project defined itself, schol- ars from outside Boston College — Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch from the National Gallery of Ireland; Michelle Brown from the British Library; and Perry Curtis, emeritus professor from Brown University; as well as visiting Professor Claire Connolly from CardiffUniversity — were invited to contribute their special expertise to the catalogue. The objects exhibited in Eire/Land include archeological artifacts; late nineteenth- century revivalist reproductions of such artifacts; maps from colonial land surveys; eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth- century landscape paintings; and contempo- rary video and installation works. Viewed in O the historical contexts provided by the cata- logue’s commentary, these objects invoke the various interactions between nature and man that transformed Ireland’s land into a politi- cal, social, and aesthetic landscape — now etched with markers of a nation’s cultural memory. As contributors worked together and the scope of their concerns broadened, it became increasingly clear that the catalogue might serve not only as an accompanying guide for this exhibition, but could continue to be useful in a larger pedagogical context. Dur- ing the semester in which Eire/Land is exhib- ited in the McMullen Museum, the publica- tion will serve as a textbook for a newly conceived academic course on Irish land and landscape, jointly taught by a historian, liter- ary scholar, and art historian. Such use en- courages me to think of this volume as an- other enduring material artifact, fulfilling the interdisciplinary and collaborative vision so central to Adele Dalsimer’s vision of Irish Studies and the visual arts at Boston College. I thank all contributors for their steady com- mitment to this project in the years of its con- ception and completion. I am especially grate- ful for Robin Lydenberg’s intelligent advice and her willingness to serve as an additional reader of manuscripts. At the McMullen Museum, Publications Coordinator Naomi Blumberg, as well as Intern Anne Hanrahan, provided es- sential assistance, as did Director Nancy Net- zer, in her encouragement and support. ♦> Endnotes 1 Undergraduates at Boston College today may minor in Irish Studies; MA students can earn degrees in Irish history or literature and culture; recipients of the Ph.D. degree in his- tory and English who have concentrated on Ireland now teach in American, Canadian, and Irish universities. Each academic year, a major Irish academic joins the Program to teach and do research as the Burns Scholar. Both under- graduate and graduate students participate in a wide-range of study abroad opportunities in Ireland: in intensive Irish language courses through University College, Galway; in a summer drama workshop through the Abbey Theater; and in general undergraduate programs in every major Irish uni- versity. Each summer, the Gaelic Roots Program attracts American and international students to study Irish music and dance. The Irish Collection at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College offers rich archival support for members of the Irish Studies Program and a larger public, as does the Irish Music Archive. 2 By this date, she had published many articles on nineteenth- and twentieth- century Irish poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as The Unappeasable Shadow: Shelley’s Influence on Yeats (1988) and Kate O’Brien: A Critical Study (1990). 3 In the last decade, collaborative work between the McMullen Museum and the Irish Studies Program brought five exhibitions of Irish art to the campus and to the Boston community: Irish W atercolors and Drawings from the National Gallery of Ireland, Fall 1993; America’s Eye: the Irish Art of Brian Burns, Spring 1996; Redressing Cathleen: Contemporary Works by Irish Women Artists, Fall 19975 Irish Delftware, Summer, 1998; Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political, Fall 1999. 4 Versions of America’s Eye appeared at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, at Yale University’s Mellon Center for British Art, and at the Kennedy Center of Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. 6 °§° Director’s Preface Nancy Netzer O IRE/LAND is the most complex and wide-ranging undertaking in the mu- seum’s commitment to introduce Ireland’s rich visual culture to American audiences. Irish manuscripts, sculpture, and metalwork of the early medieval period have long belonged within the canon of art history taught at North American universities, but the nation’s later art — of the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-centuries — has only recently been included in the academic curriculum. Such a broadening of the canon at this University has developed largely through interdisciplinary collaborations, occurring in the last decade as Boston College’s Irish Studies Program worked with the McMullen Museum to pro- duce several exhibitions of Irish art. Planning for Eire/Land was initiated by Alston Conley’s interest in examining con- temporary depictions of County Mayo’s con- tested landscape. Influenced by Vera Kreilkamp’s conviction that any considera- tion of land and landscape in Ireland had a centuries-long story to tell, a more expansive vision of the exhibition took shape. An inter- disciplinary group of scholars, including liter- ary critics and social and political historians, began to meet with art historians to identify the objects that would best chart a visual nar- rative of Ireland’s land. Working together, this group determined that the exhibition should include some of Ireland’s finest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape paintings as well as early manuscripts, maps, political cartoons about the Land War, and replicas of nineteenth-century archaeological discoveries produced by cultural revivalists. Contributors to this catalogue became deeply involved in the planning of Eire/Land, and their essays reflect a range of questions that arose in their discussions: for example, what does it mean to make art in a landscape whose ground has been contested for cen- turies; to what extent do individual works of art produced within such a context reflect Ire- land’s layered political, economic, and social history; how did cultural revivalists deploy the country’s rich medieval art tradition for their own needs; how can we explain an en- during cultural iconicization of the nation’s western landscape; how do contemporary Irish artists living in a global community re- spond to landscape traditions reflecting a more inward-looking nation? The entire undertaking of exhibition and catalogue could not have been achieved with- out the tireless work of the curators and mu- seum staff. Principal exhibition curator Alston Conley worked with co-curators — Pamela Berger, Lisabeth Buchelt, Vera Kreilkamp, Katherine Nahum, and myself — seeking out a range of works for inclusion. The curators were aided in identifying con- temporary artists by Peter Maxwell and Margo Dolan, founding directors of Mayo’s Ballinglen Arts Foundation that provides artists with fellowships to work in Ireland’s dramatic western settings. Professor Vera Kreilkamp, who edited this catalogue and worked closely with its writers, brought liter- ary and critical skills, as well as her deep knowledge of the history and culture of Ire- land. All contributors to this volume — Pamela Berger, Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Michelle Brown, Lisabeth Buchelt, Alston Conley, 7 Claire Connolly, Kate Costello-Sullivan, L. Perry Curtis, Robin Fleming, Marjorie Howes, Vera Kreilkamp, Robin Lydenberg, Katherine Nahum, Kevin O’Neill, Margaret Preston, and Robert Savage — chart different avenues of inquiry into Ireland’s visual cul- ture. Our debt to each of them is great, and we thank them for participating in this demand- ing collaborative project. We are grateful also to Seamus Heaney for allowing us to publish his poem in this volume. Other members of the University’s faculty, especially Thomas Hachey (Director of the Center for Irish Programs), Seamus Connolly (Music), Phil O’Leary (English), John Michalczyk (Fine Arts), Robert O’Neill, John Atteberry, and Mark Esser (Burns Library) contributed their expertise to the conception of this project and its accompanying pro- grams. Robert Savage arranged a full series of lectures and films to further explicate the is- sues examined in the exhibition. The circle of those involved in the exhibition has extended in numerous directions and drawn on the ex- pertise and generosity of many beyond our campus. Special thanks are due Cormac O’Malley, Stephen and Bessie Seiler, Diana Edwards Murnaghan, Brian and Eileen Burns, Peter Nahum, Eric Aho, Mary Armstrong, Sidney Druckman, Brian Tolle, Brian Clyne, Cheryl Warrick, Michael Yeats, Linda Ma- honey, Catherine Kernan, Barbara Millen, Michael Kulp, Cynthia Knott, Anne Neely, Gwen O’Dowd, Deirdre O’Mahony, Wendy Prellwitz, Jane Proctor, Cynthia Back, Gor- don Loos, David Brewster, Julia Neuberger, O Adam Crescenzi, Henry Barry, C. Michael Daley, Nancy Joyce, Virginia Oliver, Janice Fox, Kevin and Martina O’Toole, Jennifer and Mark Brock, Tim Gardner, Peter Brooke, An- thony Mourek, Dorothy Cross, Janet Mur- naghan, Jane Goldman, Kathy Herbert, Sheila Murnaghan, Susan Shatter, Ray Roberts, Stu- art Shils, Donald Teskey, Niamh Whitfield, Heidi Lange (DC Moore Gallery); Penelope Fussell (Drapers’ Company); Brid McCarthy (Kerlin Gallery); Peter Murray and Anne O’Connor (Crawford Municipal Art Gallery); Barbara Dawson (Hugh Lane Mu- nicipal Gallery of Modern Art); Josephine Kelleher (Rubicon Gallery); Peter Barnet, Charles Little, Christine Brennan, Barbara Boehm, Julien Chapuis, Frances Wallace, and Nestor Montilla (Metropolitan Museum of Art); Meg Wilson (Gallery Naga); Anne Donaghy (Fidelity Investments); Michelle Brown, Barbara O’Connor, and Greg Buzwell (British Library); Raymond Keaveney, Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Sergio Benedetti, and Marie McFeeley (National Gallery of Ire- land); Daniel Lee (University of Chicago Press), Patrick O’Connell and Evelyne O’Halloran (Aer Lingus). The staff of the McMullen Museum and others from across the University have been deeply involved at various stages with this project. In particular, Alston Conley designed the installation to provide a virtual walk through the Irish landscape; our exhibition coordinator Naomi Blumberg, and before her Thea Keith-Lucas, and graduate assistants Bethany Waywell and Lisabeth Buchelt played an invaluable role in the editing and production of the catalogue and in the exhibi- tion’s overall organization. Museum Assis- tant/Registrar John McCoy aided with loans and designed the exhibition’s wall text and web site, and our administrative assistant, He- len Swartz coordinated efforts for the opening. We are grateful as well to Stephen Vedder, Gary Gilbert, Lee Pellegrini, and David Corkum for photography, to Anne Hanrahan for proofreading text and drafting labels, to Michael Prinn and Sean Donaghey for ar- ranging insurance, to Rosanne Pellegrini for publicity, and to the members of our Develop- ment office, especially Mary Lou Crane, Gemma Dorsey, Lisa Hastings, Marianne Lord, and Maria Mick-Mayer, who aided our funding efforts. In designing the catalogue Keith Ake, under the guidance of Andrew Capitos and Ben Birnbaum of the Office of Marketing Communications, has created an icon of Irish landscape in itself. Such an ambitious project could not have been attempted were it not for the generosity of the administration of Boston College. We especially thank president William P. Leahy, S.J., trustees John M. Connors and Peter Lynch, academic vice-president John J. Neuhauser, associate dean of faculties Patri- cia DeLeeuw, and dean of arts and sciences Joseph Quinn. The Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities provided an indemnity for the foreign loans. The Patrons of the Mc- Mullen Museum chaired by C. Michael Da- ley served as Sponsors for this exhibition with contributions from Exhibition Benefac- 8 tors, Cynthia Livingston and the Cultural Re- lations Committee of Ireland, and Exhibition Supporters, James S. Dalsimer and Nancy and Steven Fischman. Transport was pro- vided by Aer Lingus. Finally, we wish to thank an esteemed col- league, the late Professor Adele Dalsimer, who worked with us on previous exhibitions and publications that charted the course for this type of interdisciplinary inquiry of Irish art within American museums. In dedicat- ing the volume to her we hope that it will serve as a lasting tribute to her contribution to this Museum and to Irish Studies at Boston College. ❖ Nancy Netzer Director and Professor of Art History O 9 Note to the Reader Plates are arranged to correspond to the exhibition’s four main sections: Mapping Digging Possessing Responding Today Numbered plates are works in the exhibition Additional images in the essays are designated as figures (fig.) Works cited in the text are listed in full at the end of each essay We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening — Everywhere the eye concedes to Encroaching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country Is bog that keeps crusting Between the sights of the sun. They’ve taken the skeleton Of the Great Irish Elk Out of the peat, set it up, An astounding crate full of air. Butter sunk under More than a hundred years Was recovered salty and white. The ground itself is kind, black butter °§° Bogland For T. P. Flanagan - Seamus Heaney O Melting and opening underfoot, Missing its last definition By millions of years. They’ll never dig coal here, Only the waterlogged trunks Of great firs, soft as pulp. Our pioneers keep striking Inwards and downwards, Every layer they strip Seems camped on before. The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 Faber and Faber, 1998. o 11 Introduction: Toward a History of the Irish Landscape Marjorie Howes and Kevin O’Neill O B oth the exhibition and the catalogue eire/land have BEEN SHAPED TO EXPLORE THE EXTRAORDINARY CENTRALITY OF THE LAND TO IRELAND’S VISUAL CULTURE — AND TO DEMON' STRATE HOW THAT CULTURE IS DEEPLY INTERTWINED WITH THE COUN' try’s INTELLECTUAL AND MATERIAL LIFE. INCLUDING AND JUXTAPOSING works of art of various types, Eire/Land exam- ines their significance within interrelated so- cial, economic, political, and cultural historical narratives. In order to engage with the complex layering of such histories on the land, the cura- tors of the exhibition have included not only major eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth- century painting of Ireland’s iconicized land- scape, but other works such as maps, archaeo- logical artifacts, manuscripts, and political cartoons that have not ordinarily been dis- played with such landscape paintings. Viewed together, such images begin to suggest the var- ied and complex historical interactions be- tween an Irish people and their landscape. In keeping with Eire/Land’s juxtaposition of different visual narratives, the essays collected in this catalogue draw on various disciplines — art history, literary criticism, folklore, and his- tory. In combining such a diverse range of ob- jects and modes of analysis, the organizers have sought to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, to raise questions rather than to impose con- clusive interpretations. There are many ways to map these objects, many possible narratives about them. This introduction seeks to situate the works on exhibit and the commentaries collected here in various historical contexts, in order to help viewers and readers construct such narratives and maps. In so doing, we will be sketching a set of interrelated histories. Several broadly economic histories are at work here: an eco- nomic and ecological account of human inter- action with the landscape, as well as an eco- nomic and social narrative tracing the demise of communal forms of ownership and the rise of private property. Closely related are political histories of invasion and colonization, of the appropriation and exploitation of land and la- bor by a land-owning elite, and an account of the various forms of resistance to colonizers and landlords. Finally, we gesture toward sev- eral relevant cultural histories: the cultures of imperialism and capitalism, popular culture, consciousness and memory, as well as a history of the emergence and development of cultural nationalism, and of the changing concerns and conventions of high art in painting and litera- ture. Some of these histories — particularly those reflecting the concerns of a political and economic elite — appear vividly and consis- tently in the works exhibited. Others represent the material and imaginative transformations of the land that the exhibition’s visual objects, for one reason or another, reflect indirectly, or not at all — through absence rather than pres- ence. Both are important contexts; what a par- ticular object cannot register is, in many cases, as much a part of its meaning as that which it renders visible. This introduction also further broadens the diversity of materials on display by including a brief example from poetry — yet another dis- course that has a rich history of engaging with the Irish land. Seamus Heaney’s “Bogland” — dedicated to T. P. Flanagan, an Irish landscape painter — illustrates some of the central preoc- cupations of the artists in the exhibition and the contributors to this volume. The poem com- pares two ways of thinking about land and its relation to human history. One conceives the land as empty, wild space, waiting for the forces of civilization to tame it and transform it; this conception belongs to the history of the Amer- ican frontier and its pioneers. The other be- longs to the Irish, who “have no prairies / to slice a big sun at evening.” The grand vistas of the American plains fostered fantasies of lim- itless power and expansion. Like many West- ern conquerors of foreign lands, early Ameri- can settlers reveled in the sense that they were “masters of all they surveyed,” a phrase that equated territorial acquisition with visual mas- tery. In Heaney’s Irish landscape, by contrast, looking brings constraint and danger rather than mastery, and the viewer is forced to sub- mit to the land: “Everywhere the eye concedes to / Encroaching horizon, / Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye / Of a tarn.” Heaney repeats the singular “eye” to emphasize its connections to “I,” to emphasize that how we see makes us who we are. The Irish frontier — “our unfenced coun- try” — is a “bog that keeps crusting / Between O the sights of the sun.” And, rather than ex- panding outwards to conquer new virgin terri- tories, “Our pioneers keep striking / Inwards and downwards, / Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before.” For Heaney, the I rish land was never empty; it is saturated with layer upon layer of human history. Moreover, this history is not made up of reliable facts, events, or narratives; it is not finished or lo- cated securely in the past. Rather, it is embod- ied by the soft, shifting, ill-defined contours of the bog itself, a history whose uncertainties, present implications, and potential dangers are infinite: “The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. / The wet centre is bottomless.” Striking inwards and downwards, Heaney’s Irish pioneers confront the wildernesses of the self and of history. “Bogland” suggests that Ireland and the United States view land differently, and that this difference involves disparate kinds of vi- sual imagination, historical awareness, and po- litical tradition. But Heaney’s engagement with the land makes a further point: he also prompts us to re-think what terms such as “land,” “place,” or “geography” mean. Most cultural traditions about land associate it with permanence, stability, home, and the local. In contrast, “Bogland” describes a landscape in which these features are overwhelmed by other, contradictory elements — instability, movement, and transnational connection. The bog preserves things, like the elk’s skele- ton or butter, and this capacity gives it an at- tractive, supportive aspect: “The ground itself is kind, black butter.” But such preservation does not indicate stability. Instead, the ground is always “Melting and opening underfoot.” In addition, this land is not simply local, but rather connected to and penetrated by other, far-off places. The Atlantic seawater that might be in the bogholes forms a conduit — both literal and metaphorical — to other land- masses in the ocean. It gestures toward a con- ception of geography based on water, rather than on land. Atlantic geographies lack the clear, fixed borders of land-based geographies; instead they emphasize movements and con- nections among places. If the image of a house could represent the traditional connotations of land, the best figure for an Atlantic geography might be a ship. In “Bogland,” Heaney de- scribes a landscape that invites both these competing geographies. In this sense, then, the poem’s title describes both a terrain com- mon in Ireland and a clash between incompat- ible intellectual systems. Heaney’s claim that the land in Ireland is saturated with a troubled history and its con- tinuing effects, his sense that this makes Ire- land different from other places, his critical in- terest in the visual imagination and the act of looking, his unsettling of established cultural meanings of land, and his engagement with different forms of mapping all appear repeat- edly in the works on display and in the com- mentaries collected in this catalogue. In imag- ining an Irish landscape that is defined in part by water, Heaney also echoes the subject mat- ter chosen by so many of the visual artists who represent ocean beaches, cliffs, seacoasts, and tidal pools . 1 Such works define Irish land H through its borders and its contacts with the land’s apparent opposite, the sea. In this sense, like “Bogland,” much of Eire/Land ofFers geog- raphies and landscapes that are as much about water as they are about land. For centuries the sea has also represented the traditional means of emigration. Many objects in the exhibition, such as Sean Keating’s 1936 painting Economic Pressure (no. 36), contemporary works like Kathy Fierbert’s site-specific installations (nos. 90, 91, and 92), and Fergus Bourke’s photograph Famine Burial Ground/Flight 133 to Boston (no. 94) underscore the enormous impact that those who left the Irish land have on how that land is imagined. In important respects, such dialec- tics — land and water, presence and absence — structure this exhibition. When poets and painters appropriate as- pects of the physical landscape and transform them into complex symbols, we often assume that the actual, natural land is simply that — natural — and that the artist’s creative imagina- tion lends the landscape its human dimension. Thus for many audiences, the stunning physi- cal aspects of the landscape, such as those Mary Armstrong presents in the Ceide Cliffs Looking West (no. 66), are markers of “nature” at its most robust and pristine. For urban viewers, es- pecially urban Americans, the appeal of this alternative or “natural” world is powerful and enduring. But although such a reading ac- counts for much of the popularity of modern landscape painting, it suppresses various as- pects of the land’s human dimensions. One is the rich archaeological history buried beneath the surface of the landscape and represented in the “Digging” section of the exhibit; another is the material history of the land itself. These buried histories that many of the exhibit’s more recent works of art do not enable us to see and that others can only imply have shaped the Irish land and the people who inhabit it in powerful and permanent ways. Supplying this history allows us to gain a fuller sense of the complex, almost bottomless, historical layering that characterizes landscape in Ireland. This material history reveals that, far from being raw or untamed, the rural Ireland we see today is the product of several thousand years of human engagement with the physical envi- ronment. Over those years, in concert with cli- mate change, the landscape of Ireland has been transformed beyond all recognition. What we see is neither “wild” nor “natural” but one of the most wrought canvases upon which hu- mans have worked. Just beyond the field of vi- sion of Armstrong’s cliffs in Mayo lie the Ceide fields — one of the earliest known human occu- pations in Europe. Fifty centuries ago, before the pyramids were built, pre-Celtic settlers cre- ated the oldest known enclosed landscape in Europe by deforesting the area and moving over one-quarter of a million tons of stone to form the walls that enclosed their fields. This intervention in the Irish landscape came with a heavy price. The initial deforesta- tion, coupled with the high rainfall in the area and a gradual change in climate, led to a slow but radical transformation in the local ecology. We do not yet know exactly how these forces were related. Possibly heavy rainfall in the area would have inevitably led to bog formation on this landscape. But it is also possible that hu- man destruction of a forest canopy absorbing much of the moisture before it reached the soil surface greatly accelerated the leaching of min- erals — and that this led to the sterile soil con- ditions that encouraged bog formation. Per- haps the act of deforestation and enclosure of these fields was sufficient on its own to cause radical deterioration of the soil that supported bog development. We will probably never know the exact nature of the relationship be- tween these human and natural interactions. But we do know the result. Like a slow motion Pompeii, this settlement was buried not by molten rock, but by meters of cold, wet, peat bog. There it remained until archeologists from University College, Dublin began to un- cover it in the 1960s. Over the centuries that followed their ar- rival, Ireland’s early settlers moved beyond their coastal enclaves and cleared extensive ar- eas of forest by felling and burning. At first their primary aim was simply to clear land for agricultural purposes, but as their population increased and their material life became more secure and complex, they found in the forest the source of raw materials for numerous activ- ities. Wood was the major building material for every level of early Irish society. It was used for dwellings, boats, tools, utensils, and even the “corduroy roads” that these early people built to cross the boglands and wetlands that were such an important part of their used environment. Most importantly, the forest was both the pri- mary source of fuel during this period, and a major provider of food. The early Irish har- 15 vested both flora and fauna directly from the woodland, while the ubiquitous pig relied upon it for its forage. Some idea of the utility of the forest and of the diffuse notion of ownership that the peoples of the Celtic age held is pro- vided by a list of entitlements that belonged “in equal right of every condition [of person]”: The night’s supply of kindling from every wood. The cooking material of every wood. The nutgathering of every wood. The frame-work of every vehicle, yoke and plough. Timber of a carriage for a corpse. The shaft fit for a spear. A supple hand implement of a stable (an echlach, or horse-rod, used for guiding horses). The tapering wood of the three parts of a spancel. The making of hoops (for barrels). The makings of a churnstaff. Every wood not subject to treiniugud. (Nesson 28) This tract, along with other evidence, sug- gests that the inhabitants of Ireland did not conceive of the forest, or even its trees, as some- thing liable to private ownership. A king/chief- tain might grant the use of a parcel of forest to a member of the tuath, but he could not alienate ownership of land from the people of the tuath (Nesson 24-8 and 33-9X 2 This pre-history of a wooded Ireland contrasts strikingly with the landscape that later visual artists recorded, par- ticularly after the massive seventeenth-century plantation clearances. Many of the paintings in this exhibition depict landscapes barren of trees, for only about ten percent of the Irish woodland existing in the mid 1600s remained at the time of the first edition of the Ordnance Survey of 1830-44. Today, despite efforts at re- forestation, forests account for only 70/0 of the land area of Ireland, one of the lowest percent- ages in Europe (Aalen, Whelan, and Stout 122-3). In Eire/Land the relatively few images that frame scenes with trees — such as James O’Connor’s The Pleasure Grounds, Ballinrobe or The Eagle’s Nest (nos. 24 and 26) or George Barret’s Extensive Landscape (no. 22) depict controlled parklands or follow European con- ventions of landscape painting, rather than rep- resenting typical Irish settings. The works of art in this exhibition suggest that like its ecological history, the landscape’s political and cultural histories begin early as well. Visual and other evidence from the peri- ods just before and just after the Norman inva- sion indicate that long before the rise of modern nationalism, land was central to the material practices and cultural traditions that structured Irish communities. Collective life of all kinds has important material determinants, but it also always has an imaginative dimension. As Robin Fleming illustrates in “Making and Re- making the Irish Landscape in the Early Mid- dle Ages,” for example, ringforts were origi- nally part of a particular form of social organization and collective life, and they had important symbolic, as well as practical func- tions. Later, such features of the landscape would be appropriated by numerous other cul- tural and political discourses. Fleming’s essay and Michelle Brown’s “Shaping and Mis- shaping: Visual Impressions of Ireland in Three Illuminated Manuscripts” identify one such discourse in Gerald of Wales’ 1186 description of a barbarous and backward Ireland. This de- scription is belied by the skilled artistry of the artifacts in the “Digging” section of Eire/Land; as Fleming and Brown show, Gerald wrote highly fictionalized accounts in the service of extending Angevin control to the island. Like Seamus Heaney, Gerald found that “the soil is soft and watery,” but he drew very different conclusions from such observations. Central to his colonizing discourse was an insistence that the Irish landscape was wild, changeless, and immemorial, and a suppression of any evidence that the island’s inhabitants had themselves previously wrought changes upon the land. In “The Art of Dinnseanchas: Excavating the Storied Past of Place,” Lisabeth Buchelt explores another early discourse that took the land as a starting point for narratives that were, in large part, about something else — the Irish folkloric tradition of dinnseanchas or place lore. In reading the landscape through such traditions, communities are of course reading themselves, and Buchelt’s essay re- veals the complex nature of this endeavor. Her analysis of two sites near Ballycastle — Dun Briste and Poll na Seantoine — demonstrates that these seemingly ancient and “natural” places are, in fact, recent geological develop- ments on the landscape. These sites are <> mapped by layer upon layer of disparate nar- ratives that form a living, changing tradition; often these narratives grapple with the dis- turbing issues and traumas that threaten to disrupt community life. Invaders and settlers from elsewhere brought new forms and ideologies of land use that were to have an enduring impact on later history — and thus on the visual imagery in this exhibition. Fleming suggests that during the late Celtic period powerful elites were able to gain increasing power over their communi- ties — an argument that helps us to recognize that Celtic Ireland may have been less isolated from wider European developments than has often been claimed. This trend toward elite control of resources was to accelerate its pace with the beginning of Norman settlement in Ireland. The first Norman conquerors carried a radically different ideology of ownership, one that would be in conflict with indigenous no- tions of the relationship between authority and natural resources for several centuries. Eoin Nesson notes that “In Irish law it was essen- tially ‘the use of’ the land that was granted or transferred. It was liable to re-transferal if the status of the custodian altered.” And even when ownership was vested in an individual by a king there were restrictions upon the use of both trees and timber. Equally important, “Irish lordship belonged to the political rather than to the economic order of things. It im- ported authority rather than ownership” (Nes- son 33). These aspects of the Irish social and economic order were directly challenged by Norman notions of private property. The differences between “ownership” and “custodi- anship” were to serve as the hinge upon which several centuries of economic and political conflict would turn. With their tools of conquest, the Normans brought the means to exploit Irish forests, seek- ing to introduce what Nesson calls the “brutal forest laws of England”^). This English for- est law, the “Assizes of the Forest,” was prom- ulgated by Fdenry II in 1184. It established courts and administered law that was separate from the Common law of England, and hence provided the Norman monarch with the means to circumvent important economic rights that the common law vested in the people (The struggle over these rights provides the context for Robin Hood). Frank Mitchell and Michael Ryan describe how the arrival of the Normans in Ireland introduced a new and provocative way of considering the landscape. They ...cut through the country smelling out the better lands like well-trained truffle hounds. The Anglo-Normans. ..were only interested in land from which they could hope to draw a dividend on their investment.... This was the first occasion on which financial considera- tions directly impinged on land use in Ireland. (185) This pivotal moment in Irish economic and social history set in motion a series of financial considerations that would reconstruct the Irish landscape and help create the deforested envi- ronments familiar to Ireland’s artists. The transition from custodianship to owner- ship and the introduction of novel financial proj- ects created imperatives to see the land in new ways, and to produce visual representations of these new ways of seeing, as the “Mapping” sec- tion of Eire/Land illustrates. Custodians and communities that had occupied the same land for generations did not need maps; owners and in- vaders did. As Claire Connolly demonstrates in “The Turn to the Map: Cartographic Fictions in Irish Culture,” most of the early visual represen- tations that we have of Irish land were drawn for financial reasons. Early seventeenth-century plantation maps, such as The Map of Moneymore (no. 3), advertised the advantages of individual plantations among prospective investors and set- tlers and provided practical guides to the settlers. More ambitious and official maps, such as those provided with Sir William Petty’s Down Survey later in the century (no. 6), offered an ambitious effort to measure the resources of the island. The Down Survey maps gave the exact area of every surviving woodland in Ireland, indicating the great value that Irish timber had for English in- vestors. The Ordnance Survey maps of the nine- teenth century are a precocious example of na- tional military mapping that were unequalled for detail in the Europe of the period (no. 8). All of these maps were crafted so that the land could be commodified, consumed, and controlled. The victory of these modern notions of property ownership was now complete on the legal and cartographic levels, but at the popular level older notions survived and entered into an often vio- lent dynamic with the new concept of absolute private property. V The institution of landlordism, which was well established by the eighteenth century, de- pended on this radical concept of private prop- erty and on the imperial viewpoint embodied in maps, but it had cultural implications as well. Two images in the “Possessing” section of Eire/Land show that landed elites in Ireland did not merely occupy large tracts of land; they also sought to transform the landscapes under their control in order to reflect their ideas of the su- perior power, wealth, leisure, and civilization of the Ascendancy. As Vera Kreilkamp observes in “Painting Mayo’s Landscape: The Big House, the Pleasure Grounds, and the Mills,” these aggrandizing projects embody an impe- rial aesthetic that positions the landlord as the master of all he surveys and values the land for its symbolic as well as its productive value. Such projects were repeated and reinforced in the conventions of the estate portraits that landlords commissioned of their big houses and grounds. In James O’Connor’s paintings of Ballinrobe House (nos. 24 and 25), these con- ventions coexisted uneasily with acknowledge- ments of the role that middle-class industry and the working poor played in the rural econ- omy. More commonly, eighteenth- and nine- teenth-century paintings of landed estates eliminated such intrusions altogether. The aris- tocratic drive to aestheticize the land had mate- rial consequences for the rest of the population as well; constructing impressive vistas and pleasure grounds generated significant social costs for the tenants displaced in the process. As the most desirable land was effectively mapped and possessed by the powerful and O transformed into private property, country es- tates became symbols of the landholding elites. Meanwhile, the native Irish were increasingly relegated to Ireland’s less fertile, less hospitable terrain. But this land did not simply mark the low social status of the native Irish; it also func- tioned as symbolic and material resource in their struggles for repossession. Irish rebels, certainly absent from landscapes commis- sioned for aristocratic patrons, often hid in re- mote, uncultivated areas, exploiting their supe- rior knowledge of that terrain; one colloquial phrase for them was “hillside men.” Secret agrarian societies like the Whiteboys of the eighteenth century, as well as the Rockites, Terry Alts, and Molly Maguires of the nine- teenth century, were vivid reminders of an al- ternative notion of landscape — one that did not deny the existence of ownership, but which in- sisted upon the rights of the occupier. These agrarian groups both provided “rearguard” pro- tection for communal rights in the land and ad- vanced a tenant’s notion of moral economy. They resisted evictions, rack-renting, sectarian settlements, and especially tithes, which ten- ants were required to pay for the support of the Protestant Church of Ireland. Not only did they contest the nature of “legal” landholding, they also attacked the physical manifestation of the new intensive transformation of the land by destroying weirs, dams, and ditches. Most of these groups have been described by histori- ans as backward looking or atavistic, but such terms fail to convey the significance of these popular movements as means of retaining older notions of the landscape and its role in the social order. Not surprisingly, however, their interpretation of the land seldom found its way into the visual arts, and when it did, as in David Wilkie’s The Peep-O Day Boy’s Cabin, in the West of Ireland (1835-6), it emerged in highly ro- manticized and picturesque genre painting suitable for English middle-class audiences (Cullen 116-27). These contests over land use took place in an increasingly pressurized social and economic space. After 1750, rising population, tightening links with British markets, and increasingly efficient exploitation by landlords, clergy, and tax collectors foreshadowed the crisis of the mid-nineteenth century. The pre-Famine land- scape saw tillage pushed higher and higher on mountainsides, and an increasingly intensive but ecologically dangerous cultivation system evolved in which grain and potato culture were closely linked — the grain feeding the British market and the Irish landlord, the potato feed- ing the Irish. The catastrophe of the Great Hunger in the mid-nineteenth century, far from being a “natural” disaster, was in many ways a modern environmental crisis in which human interference with plant/pathogen evo- lution led to ecological disaster. The new An- dean crop, the potato, gave Irish producers an opportunity to increase not only the export of food to Britain, but also the profitability of agri- culture and the size of the human population. Although the potato was extremely well suited to I rish climate and soils, it was genetically iso- lated, unable to evolve through sexual propaga- tion in Ireland, and isolated, temporarily, from its natural pathogens. When the increasing 18 mobility of the nineteenth century brought the fungus Phytophthora infestans to Ireland in 1845, the dangers of such ecological roulette came home with a vengeance. Margaret Preston gives an account of the vulnerabilities of the rural population and the colonial authorities’ inadequate response to the disaster in “Visualizing the Famine in County Mayo.” The failure of the potato crop, land clearances and evictions by unsympathetic landlords, emigration on an unprecedented scale, and the decline of the Irish language all combined to make the Famine appear in Irish cultural memory as (among other things) a cat- astrophic deracination — a separation of the in- habitants from their rightful and native land. We can see the writing of that tragedy, still, upon the landscape. The deserted cottages and villages, the famine roads, workhouses, and monuments pay witness to what occurred . 3 The political legacies of the Famine were also important and long lasting. Although scholars disagree over exactly when the various imag- ined communities in Ireland first assumed the forms we call nationalism, since at least the mid-eighteenth century, Irish people had been incorporating a national dimension into their ideologies of collective life and privileging that dimension over others. But the emergence of a more radical and militant nationalism is easily dated from the end of the Famine. Yet even before the Famine, few aspects of British rule in Ireland created more severe or more visible social inequalities, or generated as much resentment, than the complex (and sometimes incoherent) set of procedures, prin- ciples, and circumstances that structured land ownership and use. If the Famine radicalized much Irish resistance to British rule, it also so- lidified the land’s position as the central issue at the heart of that resistance. As Robert Savage argues in ‘“The soil of Ireland for the people of Ireland’: The Politics of Land in Irish Visual Imagery 1850-1936,” Irish discontent with colo- nial land policy was a major catalyst in promoting genuinely popular nationalist movements throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. These movements often worked to establish a nation made up of individual owner-occupiers of small farms. The political and economic structures of an- cient Irish land use, of course, had been quite different. In this sense, Irish nationalism sought to “return” the land to a people who had never owned it in the first place. But this real- ity did not lessen the land’s catalytic function in precipitating political grievances and national- ist emotions. Indeed, the emergence of a new economic nationalism organized around this goal led to one of the most remarkable mo- ments in Irish history. The Land War that began in 1879 and ended in various land pur- chase acts dismantled a landlord system with origins in those Norman “trufflehounds” of the twelfth century. As this exhibition demonstrates, the visual arts incorporated the costs and political legacies of the Famine slowly, and the methods of incorporation varied. In “Observing Irish Romantic Landscape Painting,” Katherine Nahum suggests that some nineteenth-century Romantic painting represents a sublimated re- sponse to social trauma; thus she reads George M. W. Atkinson’s A Ship at Anchor at Sunset (no. 29) as a subtle allegory of famine and emigra- tion. Other engagements were more direct. L. Perry Curtis’s essay, ‘The Land for the People’: Post-Famine Images of Eviction,” argues that although few paintings contemporary with the Famine represented its effects, by the 1850s, de- picting Famine-era eviction scenes became something of a subgenre. Eire/Land contains a well-known example, Robert Kelly’s 1848 An Ejectment in Ireland (no. 27). The dominant artis- tic conventions and economic pressures of the mid-nineteenth century, however, militated against such subject matter; Preston observes that Kelly’s painting was still so unusual and so politically explosive that it provoked discussion in the British House of Commons. But by the late-nineteenth century, as the political and cul- tural energies forming the Irish Literary Re- vival coalesced, more artists produced works explicitly criticizing colonial land policy. Cur- tis illustrates how, by the beginning of the Land War in 1879, political cartoons (nos. 17-20) fre- quently represented the trauma of eviction in order to foster nationalist sentiments. Political struggles among Irish nationalists, unionists, and the British were, on some level, always struggles over the territory of Ireland. In these discourses, the land features as far more than a passive prize. Because the politi- cal sovereignty of the modern nation-state is generally conceived as authority over a clearly defined geographical area, like Gerald of Wales, many modern political thinkers appro- priated the physical features of the landscape l 9 as part of their arguments. For example, na- tionalists claimed that the island of Ireland it- self formed a nation, an integrated, natural whole bounded by the sea. And nationalist lit- erature increasingly read the landscape it- self — and particularly the landscape of the West — as a text invoking Irish freedom. As “The West’s Asleep,” the popular 1843 poem by Thomas Davis, had argued, “That chain- less wave and lovely land / Freedom and Na- tionhood demand.” In contrast, unionists and colonialists argued that England’s geographi- cal proximity to Ireland made it inevitable that the latter’s political destiny would be forever bound up with that of her powerful neighbor. Even landlords who wanted to clear their es- tates of tenants and replace them with more lucrative grazing operations advanced claims that the land was inherently more suitable for their agendas. Although some forms of Irish nationalism imagined their struggles as endeavors to re- capture the territory of Ireland, and others as efforts to reform ownership and use, neither of these is a sufficient basis for a modern nation or nation-state. This insufficiency is at the heart of the distinction between a state, which can be based solely on territory, and a nation, which cannot. So, historically, virtually all modern nationalisms have set about constructing other bases for their imagined communities as well, such as shared history, ethnicity, language, or culture. In Ireland such efforts had existed since at least the eighteenth century. These at- tempts at repossession, many of them forms of cultural nationalism, often imagined intimate links between the land and the other elements of nationhood to which they appealed. Nineteenth-century Irish cultural national- ists located a distinctive Irish identity and cul- tural richness primarily in Ireland’s past, and sought to base a revival or regeneration of the national culture on that constructed heritage. As Pamela Berger shows in “Sacred Land- scapes and Ancient Rituals: Two Watercolors by George Petrie,” that well-known nine- teenth-century antiquarian pursued this proj- ect through his paintings, as well as through his scholarship. In both, she argues, Petrie displays his understanding of what modern scholars call syncretism, a process through which ancient sacred spaces are rededicated to new belief sys- tems. Like the dinnseanchas tradition analyzed by Buchelt, Petrie’s work illustrates Ffeaney’s conviction that the land contains layer upon layer of historical meaning. Not all efforts to extract Ireland’s venerable cultural history from the landscape were so disinterested. Nancy Netzer’s “Art/Full Ground: Unearthing National Identity and an Early Medieval ‘Golden Age’” examines how George Water- house harnessed the nationalist meanings of the hill of Tara in the service of commercial en- terprise when he named, or misnamed, an an- cient brooch found ten miles from the hill the “Tara brooch” (no. n) in order to boost its na- tional symbolic value and the marketability of the replicas he produced. Increasingly, literary and visual nationalists turned to the Irish-speaking western periphery of the island as the source of identity that was the least modern and anglicized, and the most Celtic. Thomas Davis’s earlier emphasis on the West was widely shared at the turn of the cen- tury. Both before and after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, the West was a cen- tral icon in the Irish pursuit of national self- definition; in this exhibition, the idealization of that region is perhaps most strikingly exem- plified by Sean Keating’s 1916 Men of the West (no. 37). In “Painting the West: The Role of Landscape in Irish Identity,” Sighle Bhreath- nach- Lynch observes that turn-of-the-century painters imagined a West embodying a rural, Irish speaking, and Catholic identity. For these cultural nationalists the land represented far more than the geographical area to be repos- sessed; it also embodied a particularly Irish way of life rooted in a particular landscape through agriculture, family history, and inheritance. Its Catholic and Irish-speaking elements were bound to the region through folk traditions, which often privileged specific locales, as well as through popular religious practices in which, despite the disapproval of priests, communities often retained their syncretic devotion to sites like the holy well painted by Petrie in St. Brigit’s Well (no. 15). In Charles Lamb’s Loch an Mhuilinn (The Mill Lake) (no. 32), Bhreatnach- Lynch identifies the socially conservative atti- tudes of the new nation’s mainstream Irish pol- itics and culture: a national identity that de- manded traditional gender roles and positioned women as passive and pure, as part of nature rather than of an active male political world. Such forms of national identity were, how- ever, never monolithic. Rather, throughout the history of modern Irish nationalism, they were 20 complex and variable, the subjects of debate and change. The stated purpose of Young Ireland’s publication The Nation in the 1840s was “to cre- ate and to foster public opinion in Ireland — to make it racy of the soil” (8), a motto that com- bined a modernizing conception of national public opinion with an archaic devotion to what L. Perry Curtis, following Seamus Deane, de- scribes as the land when it is ideologically con- structed as a “natal source.” The period of the Literary Revival saw a number of spirited dis- agreements about whether Irish literature should be national — inward looking and fo- cused on the Irish land — or cosmopolitan. And the vision of individual artists often underwent numerous changes over the course of their ca- reers. Robert Savage’s essay traces the various stages of Sean Keating’s engagement with Irish national identity: his early portraits of an heroic rural West in Men of the West (no. 37), his later disillusionment over the Civil War and the conservatism of the Free State in 1925 in An Al- legory (fig. 3 page 96), his renewed optimism in 1929 about alternative forms of Irish heroism embodied in the Shannon hydroelectric scheme in Night Candles are Burnt Out (fig. 4 page 97), and his further disillusionment with the grim realities of rural life and emigration seven years later in Economic Pressure (no. 36). Keating’s efforts to re-define and critique Irish national identity indicate an important as- pect of postcolonial Irish visual art and litera- ture. The Irish Free State has become famous for its economic, social, cultural, and political conservatism and stagnation. In the decades fol- lowing 1922, it pursued national self- definition through economic isolationism, the legislation of Catholic social teachings, and po- litical neutrality during World War II. Such policies revealed a preoccupation with self- sufficiency, promoting the conviction that Ire- land should remain separate from other places, and from the international arena generally (Brown 141-70). They involved a geographical imagination that saw the physical space of Ire- land as incontrovertibly local and defined by its borders — despite the constitution’s territorial claim on the North of Ireland that introduced some complications into such a view. These po- licies also involved a continued idealization of the West of Ireland, and of rural life on the land, especially the life of the small farmer. Although the real lives of rural inhabitants were often grim, much public and political discourse imag- ined a life of simple pleasures, traditional val- ues, and self-reliance. Meanwhile, urbanization and emigration continued to erode the rural population, and government officials worried about how to keep people on the land. Much I rish literature and art turned to realism or satire to register the discrepancies between official ideology and the realities of life on the land, proposing alternative versions of the national imaginary. The title of Patrick Kavanagh’s 1942 poem, “The Great Hunger,” for example, in- vokes the Famine of nearly a hundred years ear- lier in order to offer a withering indictment of contemporary rural life as characterized by spir- itual, sexual, intellectual, and emotional starva- tion. His critique is summed up in the opening image of the land as deadening clay: “Clay is the word and clay is the flesh” (1). After the late 1950s, the Irish landscape and the ways in which the Irish saw that landscape continued to change; increasingly such changes became apparent in the work of visual artists. New economic initiatives paved the way for Ireland’s embrace of international investment and trade. More and more, the landscape be- came a valuable commodity, drawing tourists to the island. The eruption of the Troubles in the 1960s refocused attention on republican na- tionalism and on the border, spurring new ap- propriations of land in political discourses, cre- ating new experiences of the landscape for the population, and provoking new forms of art and literature. In one sense, its massive emigration rates had made Ireland one of the pioneers of global- ization long before commentators began using that term to describe the increasing levels of mobility and interconnectedness that structure the contemporary era. But during the last decades of the twentieth century, Irish culture and society confronted a set of forces — trans- national, European, global — that were new, or at least newly visible. Although the categories of an older nationalism had been central to Irish political, social, economic, and cultural thinking, these new forces began to erode such centrality. Ireland’s membership in the Euro- pean Union in 1973, the Good Friday Agree- ment of 1998, 4 and Irish President Mary Robin- son’s embrace of the Irish diaspora in a speech three years earlier are perhaps the most obvious features of a process with a long history and far- reaching current implications. Never has it been clearer, despite the surviving impulses of 2 1 an inward looking nationalism, that no place — not even an island — can remain an island. The geographical landscapes of contemporary Ire- land are marked by Ireland’s integration into international circuits of travel, trade, and cul- tural exchange. In responding to this integration, many of the artists in the “Responding Today” section of Eire/Land engage with an explicitly national history, but also insist that the centrality of the nation-state and nationalism continues to erode. Like Heaney, they often imply that to represent the Irish land is to engage with an infinitely layered history; Jane Proctor’s Black Lines (no. 63) strikingly suggests such historical or geological layering. Contemporary artists also share Heaney’s conviction that Irish his- tory is unfinished business, unstable, murky, and, like the bog, potentially dangerous. Seek- ing to excavate the buried traumas of that his- tory, they create landscapes that record absence and loss as well as presence. Some of the histo- ries outlined in this introduction that are miss- ing from earlier visual representations make their way into contemporary works. Robin Lydenberg’s essay, “From Icon to Index: Con- temporary Encounters with Irish Landscape,” examines how Kathy Herbert, Dorothy Cross, and Brian Tolle invite us to grapple with an Irish past characterized by famine, migration, and the decline of traditional patterns of life (nos. 90-92, 93, and 95-97). By producing works that offer viewers only partial, fragmented traces of what is no longer there in the land- scape, all three insist, suggests Lydenberg, on the limits of representation. These artists do O not nostalgically restore in art what has been lost through history. Rather, they enact and participate in change and loss, frequently creat- ing temporary site-specific installations that re- fute any notion of an aesthetic timelessness. They often reject official nationalist versions of Irish history. Thus, as Lydenberg points out, Cross, Herbert, and Tolle pursue a critique of a traditional nationalist icon — the rural thatched roof stone cottage. They revise the image of the cottage in order to place absence and loss at the center of it. At the same time, they highlight the mediated and subjective nature of artistic production and foreground the act of percep- tion itself; Cross’s video Endarken offers one in- novative example of this trend. These artists emphasize that how we see and how we re- member make us who we are. Such an emphasis on mediation and subjec- tivity often coexists with a determination to engage the land directly and materially. As Kathleen Costello-Sullivan’s “Responding Today: Dis/Locationand the Land” and Alston Conley’s “Exploring Place and Artistic Practice in Northern Mayo” demonstrate, unlike previ- ous generations, contemporary artists do not pursue this project through the techniques of conventional Realism. Instead, they use mate- rials, methods, and settings that bring them into close contact with the land itself. Such contact takes various forms. As Conley illus- trates, artists such as Mary Armstrong and Catherine Kernan produce their paintings out- side in the natural setting, seeking to capture the fleeting singularities of a specific site in the natural light produced at a particular time of day. Others, such as Deirdre O’Mahony, incor- porate the material, physical existence of the land itself in their work. O’Mahony ’s practice of using wooden boards to collect traces of turf and other material from bogs is as complex and symbolic an appropriation of the land as Heaney’s. Costello-Sullivan argues that the very concreteness of her engagement with the landscape produces a high degree of abstrac- tion. Seen from the micro-level of such physi- cal traces, O’Mahony’s landscapes could be anywhere; as Costello-Sullivan puts it “all dis- cernable specificity of location is lost in the abundant detail they provide” (123). These techniques, and the preoccupations with the limited and partial nature of percep- tion and representation they imply, are very different from the accurate, masterful point of view we associate with traditional maps. But, as Claire Connolly’s essay shows, despite their histories as tools of imperial and capitalist ex- ploitation of the land, maps and mapping have provided important and enabling figures and procedures for contemporary artists as well. In- deed, Connolly argues that “O’Mahony’s methods themselves arguably constitute a kind of mapping: like a cartographer, she conceives of a site within a system and works to convey a precise, accurate and textured sense of that place on what is, finally, a flat surface” (27). She also offers an additional reason why cartogra- phy might be so appealing to contemporary Irish culture: read “against the grain,” and often for what they do not say, maps, too, can inscribe absence and loss. Contemporary visual artists engage in their own versions of syncretism, 22 taking up old imperialist and nationalist forms and giving them new cultural meanings. In figuring an Atlantic geography, a locale permeated by seepage from elsewhere, Heaney’s “Bogland” inscribes, not merely the archaic, lost forms of the past, but the con- temporary, globalizing forms of the present and future. The history of Ireland’s transition from that past to that future — and the com- peting and equally important history of their continuing contemporaneity — is far too long and complicated a story to tell as a narrative in this volume. Indeed, the visual and elastic commentary upon the Irish land provided by the artists in this exhibition may offer a more effective vehicle for conveying its complexities. Fergus Bourke’s Famine Burial Ground/Flight 133 to Boston (no. 94) shows a single, gnarled tree on a bare, steep hillside; in the sky above it a jet trail is visible. Perhaps better than any words, this image invokes the powerful dynamic that Eire/Land was de- signed to represent: the dynamic that contin- ues to connect, and to distance, the land and the people, the local and the global, absence and presence, past and present. ❖ Works Cited Aalen, F. H. A, Kevin Whelan and Matthew Stout. Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape. Cork: Cork University Press, 1997. Brown, Terence. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-1985. London: Fontana, 1985. 141-70. Cullen, Fintan. Visual Politics: The Representation of Ireland 1750-1930. Cork: Cork University Press, 1997. Davis, Thomas. “The West’s Asleep.” The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. 2. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991. 54- Deane, Seamus. “Land & Soil: A Territorial Rhetoric.” History Ireland, Vol. 2 no. 1 (Spring 1994): 31-34. Kavanagh, Patrick. The Great Hunger. Dublin: Cuala Press, 1942. Mitchell, Frank and Michael Ryan. Reading the Irish Landscape. Dublin: Town House, 1997. The Nation. Dublin. Oct. 15, 1842. Nesson, Eoin. A History of Irish Forestry. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1991. Endnotes 1 See, for example, Nathaniel Hone (no. 30), Paul Henry (no. 34), Jack Yeats (nos. 48 and 53), Cynthia Knott (no. 56), Jane Goldman (no. 60), and Donald Teskey (no. 71). 2 The tuath was the basic social and political unit in Celtic Ireland. 3 See contemporary depictions by Dorothy Cross and Kathy Herbert (nos. 90-93) 4 The accord established a power-sharing agreement among the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain, and the Northern statelet. o 2 3 °§° The Turn to the Map: Cartographic Fictions in Irish Culture Claire Connolly O F rom the earliest periods, Ireland’s natural landscape HAS BEEN EXPERIENCED, REPRESENTED, AND REMADE IN VISUAL TERMS. MAPS HAVE PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN THIS PROCESS. THEY TRANSLATE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF PLACE INTO ABSTRACT SPACE, SHAP- ING IN THE PROCESS A SPECIALIZED LANGUAGE THAT HIGHLIGHTS THE relationship between place and representation. Land is mediated via the map in multiple ways; in this respect the science of cartography un- derscores the prominence of visual codes in all encounters with landscape, whether touristic, artistic, or literary. The “Responding Today” section of this ex- hibition gathers together a series of creative replies to an older tradition of landscape art. Al- though the rich variety of works on display cannot be reduced to any simple critical for- mula, they demonstrate a shared desire to rene- gotiate the relationship between artist and land. In particular, several contemporary Irish artists have sought to escape the self-consciously painterly connotations of “landscape.” Kathy Herbert’s site-specific installations (nos. 90, 91, and 92) and Dorothy Cross’s video installation (no. 93) represent the land but reject landscape understood as the formalized aesthetic codes that dictated how nineteenth-century artists perceived their surroundings. Even among the painters in “Responding Today,” the images of- ten reject or distort the panoramic vistas of older canvases, offering instead a close-up focus on soil, rocks, moss, weeds, water. Some of the most intimate instances of such images are Deirdre O’Mahony’s Surface paintings (nos. 68 and 69), the product of a “di- rect” encounter with the environment around the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo. Describing her methods, O’Mahony recounts how in Ballinglen she reversed the conventional artistic journey; rather than bringing memories of a place back to the stu- dio, she took her materials to the site she wished to represent, thus “allowing the place to direct the structure of the work.” She uses elements from the environment as inspiration, material, and method: dipping her paintings into cuts in the bogs and pressing algae from local pools between sheets of paper so that the “trace” it laid down could shape and direct the resulting image. The Surface paintings borrow “the intense green” of the algae and layer it “with passages of fine areas of dense brush- marks.” Two related pieces by O’Mahony, Ceide 1 and 2, have imprinted on their surface “maps of the prehistoric settlements of the Ceide fields” (O’Mahony). In seeking new ways to structure images of land, O’Mahony may seem to be shaking off the tyranny of maps and other systems that in- tervene between a place and its representation. Yet, as the Ceide examples suggest, maps can provide enabling escape routes as well as confining images. Indeed O’Mahony’s meth- ods themselves arguably constitute a kind of mapping: like a cartographer, she conceives of 2 7 a site within a system and works to convey a precise, accurate, and textured sense of that place on what is, finally, a flat surface. Catherine Nash, curator of a recent exhibi- tion entitled Irish Geographies and herself a ge- ographer, has contrasted what we might call map art to landscape art. Because maps “high- light relationships of power,” Nash suggests, they occupy a less romanticized relationship to territory than landscape, “with its iconography of cottages, cloud skies and hills” (6). Although the evidence of this exhibition indicates just how much can still be made of cottages, cloudy skies, and hills, I propose in my essay to de- velop Nash’s sense of map images as innovative and perhaps oppositional, and to explore what the image of the map signifies in contemporary Irish culture. Turn Away The first recognizably modern maps of Ireland have their origin in colonial conquest, a direct product of Britain’s need to survey, know, and thus control its first colony. Given this history, why have so many Irish writers and artists turned to the map as metaphor, or chosen to thematize cartography in a variety of cultural practices? The interest in maps shown by Irish painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, and nov- elists has never been stronger. What is the na- ture of this enduring cultural curiosity about maps and the meanings they generate? It is helpful here to revisit the history of Irish cartography and to consider some of the older maps shown as part of the exhibition. My concern is chiefly with late seventeenth- and O eighteenth-century maps and the beginnings of modern I rish cartography. Modern mapping is rooted in the conflicts that convulsed seventeenth-century Ireland. After Oliver Cromwell’s Irish campaign ended in defeat and dispossession for the Gaelic nobility, proper surveys and maps were needed to facilitate the post-conquest forfeiture and reassignment of their lands. This task fell to William Petty, noted political economist and scientist and Physician General in Cromwell’s army. His ex- tensive “Down Survey” (1654-59), as k was known, not only provided the practical under- pinnings for the Cromwellian confiscations and later Protestant or “new English” settle- ment, but also formed the basis of a new all- Ireland map and atlas. Petty’s cartographic achievements might well be understood in terms of Benedict An- derson’s influential account of colonialism and nationalism. Anderson argues that maps, like censuses and museums, are classificatory sys- tems that operate as technologies of colonial control (163). J. B. Harley, however, the leading theorist of cartography, would have us remem- ber that maps are “thick texts” (52). Maps “speak,” Harley argues, and thus may be ana- lyzed for their discursive strategies. Reading the texts of Petty’s maps is rewarding in itself and also suggests the rich ambiguity of maps in our contemporary moment. The map of Mayo on display in Eire/Land (no. 6) is taken from the 1732 (second) edition of William Petty’s innovative atlas, Hiberniae Delineateo, first published in 1685. Essentially a “book of national, provincial and county maps,” Hiberniae Delineateo was “conventional” in design and execution but startlingly modern in envisaging counties (rather than, say, indi- vidual estates) as the primary administrative unit (Andrews, Shapes of Ireland 130, 140). These maps were not entirely accurate or consistent: Achill Island, for instance, is present on this map of Mayo but missing from the larger Con- naught map. Some of what is missing yields meaning in itself. Petty’s engravers did not adopt the normal practice of spreading what little information was known across the spaces mapped, but rather “always left a sharp edge between densely packed detail and empty space” (Andrews, Shapes of Ireland 136). These empty spaces invite interpretation. We can glean a sense of what is missing from Petty’s map by contrasting it with the seventeenth-century Mayo map also on dis- play (no. 4). This earlier map features family names of the Gaelic nobility (Costello, Morris) as markers of territory, whereas Petty’s atlas, es- sentially a mapping of a new political order, eliminates such information. Based on the “Down Survey” and thus the post-Cromwellian land forfeitures in which eighty percent of land in Mayo had been lost to Cromwell’s soldiers and undertakers, the Hiberniae Delineateo can be read — against the grain — as “an atlas of Catholic Ireland” (Andrews, Shapes of Ireland 147). To an- alyze Petty’s atlas in this way, however, is to read the map for what it does not say. The force of such readings helped to turn colonial control into nationalist resistance. A nuanced understanding of the shift from control to resistance may be gleaned from an 28 Fig. i: Repeal Association insignia, front page of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 1837. John J. Burns Library, Boston College. analysis of the provenance of this exhibition’s 1833 Ordnance Survey map of County Meath (no. 8). The Ordnance Survey Office was estab- lished in Dublin in 1824 to carry out a survey of the island for land taxation purposes. By 1846, Ireland had been surveyed at a scale of six inches to one mile, making it the first country in the world to be fully mapped in such detail. Topo- graphical and antiquarian information was also recorded and used to facilitate the Anglicization of Irish language place names. This latter feature has caused the Ordnance Survey to be linked in popular memory with the loss of the Irish lan- guage and the defeat of a culture, a chain of con- nections evoked by and embedded in Brian Friel’s play Translations, discussed below. The Ordnance map in this exhibition be- longed to Daniel O’Connell and his brother John, and the atlas in which it appears bears the insignia of the library of the National Repeal Association. This organization emerged in the wake of the successful campaign for Catholic Emancipation, granted by the British govern- ment in 1829 as a result of O’Connell’s pio- neering use of the machinery of democratic politics. Founding the Repeal Association, O’Connell then targeted the Act of Union, leg- islation that since 1801 had formally linked Ireland to Britain. Repeal clubs and reading rooms were both location and vehicle for pop- ular nationalist protest; it is within this context that Eire/Land’s 1833 Ordnance Survey atlas found a home. Rather than simply signifying Britain’s tight administrative grip on its nearest colony, then, the Ordnance Survey maps, with their county by county format, may well have equipped O’Connell and his followers with the tools for democratic organization. Ander- son describes an incipient nationalist con- sciousness that would come to organize itself around what he calls the “logo-map,” or the map that is devoid of “explanatory glosses” but invested with symbolic meaning: the map as “infinitely reproducible. ..pure sign.” “In- stantly recognizable, everywhere visible, the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalisms being born” (Anderson 175). Although the logo-map does not appear as one of the nationalist symbols (round tower, harp, wolfhound and tree of lib- erty; fig. 1) displayed on the Repeal Association insignia stamped inside the exhibited atlas, the history and fate of this particular text suggests the potential of the map to become an icon in the Irish imaginary. The concept of the logo-map allows us to trace a movement from maps such as Petty’s to the representation of cartography in con- temporary art and culture. In Rita Duffy’s painting The Hound of Ulster (1996), for ex- ample, a map forms the backdrop to a clutter of symbols (fig 2). Bearing only the names of provinces (Ulster, Leinster, an abbreviated Connaught), this is Anderson’s logo-map as seen by a Northern Irish artist undoubtedly aware of the demands partition has placed on the cartographical imagination. Ireland here seems to lean away from the viewer, pictured from above as in the “bird’s eye” convention of modern cartography. The dog, however, Fig. 2: Rita Duffy, Hound of Ulster, 1996, oil, wax, and gesso on linen, 4’ x 4’. From Banquet, by Rita Duffy (Belfast: Ormeau Baths Gallery, 1997). 2 9 Fig. 3: Kathy Prendcrgast, Lost, 1999, compass reworked by the artist, 2 1/2” x 2” x .4”. From Kathy Prendergast: The End and The Beginning, by Francis McKee (London: Merrell Holberton, 2000). stares directly out of the painting, creating a disorienting mix of perspectives and scales. At the level of symbol, the painting courts linguistic and iconographic confusion: the “hound” of the title might refer to Cu Chu- lainn, the hero of Irish legend known as the “Hound of Ulster,” but the word also verbally echoes “The Red Hand of Ulster,” symbol of a defiant Ulster identity. The china dog rep- resented in Duffy’s painting appears to favor the former reading, invoking Cu Chulainn once more, but also belongs to the parlor. Meanwhile a trapeze artist straight from the circus balances precariously above Ulster’s Lough Neagh. Does the painting perhaps figure delicate interpretative or political bal- ancing acts? The role of the bodily and the do- mestic in national conflicts? Or are such read- ings too obvious? The power of Duffy’s paint- ing lies in its spatial and metaphoric disorder, with the map finally figuring a certain opac- ity or refusal to conform to any straightfor- wardly symbolic reading. As symbols of colonial authority, maps form part of the contested cultural space of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Ireland, on both sides of the border. Duffy’s desire to question the symbolic power of cartography echoes the work of Kathy Prendergast, whose drawings, sculptures, and reworked objects present perhaps the most sustained artistic en- gagement with cartography in contemporary culture. Nash has described Prendergast’s “critical, ironic and sometimes humorous ap- proach to traditional Irish landscape art” (“Remapping” 230). Her 1983 Body Map series adopted the techniques of engraving and draughtsmanship to produce beautifully de- tailed surveys that treated bodies as if they were landscape. Later three-dimensional work like Land (1991) moved closer still to cartogra- phy. Depicting a canvas tent in the shape of a miniature mountain and painted so as to re- semble relief markings on maps, the piece matched place to representation. In her de- scription of the sculpture, Nash suggests that “Land” appears to give the map’s flat surface “volume and height” (“Remapping” 241). Throughout her career, Kathy Prendergast has fully inhabited the world of cartography, get- ting under the skin of its techniques. Some of her recently exhibited work is entirely ab- sorbed by maps and the meanings they gener- ate, as in the Empty Atlas and reworked com- pass pictured here (figs. 3 and 4). Turn Again Postcolonial critic Edward Said has suggested that Irish writing shares with the cultures of other colonized countries a “cartographic im- pulse” (79) — a desire to reclaim land and terri- tory that extends beyond a transfer of titles and deeds into the realm of representation, metaphor, and cultural identity. Of course, as Said suggests, ample evidence exists of Irish cultural texts seeking to undo the effects of dis- possession or to reclaim psychic territory. But with this psychologized sense of the territorial, relying as it does on a very loosely defined idea of land, also exists a drier and more theoretical interest in the abstract rendering of lived space. Tracing this latter interest through a selection of recent Irish texts, as I propose to do, focuses attention on the map itself as the object of in- terest. In recent Irish art and literature, maps Fig 4: Kathy Prendergast, Map, 1999. The Times Atlas reworked by the artist; acrylic and paint, 21 3/4” x 15”. From Kathy Prendergast: The End and The Beginning, by Francis McKee (London: Merrell Holberton, 2000). are embedded within structures of subjectivity as well as within what Benedict Anderson calls the “grammar” of colonialism (163). They be- long, as the following instance should show, to a history that has been experienced at the level of bodies as well as land. In 1994 Eavan Boland published a poem pro- posing “That the Science of Cartography is Lim- ited,” as part of her collection In a Time of Violence. The coolly rational title of the poem imitates the scientific objectivity assumed to characterize cartography. Its opening lines continue with the steady pace of a geometric proposition: — and not simply by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam, in the gloom of cypresses is what I wish to prove. (In a Time of Violence 174) In the following stanzas the poem breaks out of its frame to become a lyric evocation of memory; the poet, young and in love, is travel- ling west: When you and I were first in love we drove to the borders of Connacht and entered a wood there. As so often in Irish cultural history, the poet’s experience of the West transmutes into a troubling encounter with her country’s past. The landscape becomes a text that is glossed and explicated for her by her lover, who seeks to show her the meanings of a rocky, ivy covered pathway that ends suddenly: “Look down, you said: this was once a famine road.” A vertiginous descent into history com- mences, and in another shift of register the tone replicates that of the history lesson: dates, facts, cautiously voiced interpretation. The incomplete road represents the hunger and death experi- enced in 1847, the worst year of the Great famine, when relief projects like road building were to as- sist the starving Irish. The memory of this bod- ily pain is, in turn, used to indict maps, and the speaker’s lyric voice proclaims a passionate rejec- tion of the cold science of cartography: and when I take down the map of this island, it is never so I can say here is the masterful, the apt rendering of the spherical as flat, nor an ingenious design which persuades a curve into a plane, but to tell myself again that the line which says woodland and cries hunger and gives out among sweet pines and cypress, and finds no horizon will not be there. (175) Boland’s poem establishes a powerfully neg- ative view of cartography. It presents a set of oppositions that serve to align the map with colonial authority and not with those op- pressed by it, with surface rather than depth, and with inert official codes, not movement or flux. The poet’s own body, looking down and leaning away, becomes the vector for the force of memory that challenges the map. The most obvious antecedent for the poem’s deeply felt resentment of cartography is Brian Lriel’s 1980 play Translations, which finds in the history of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland an enabling metaphor for contemporary condi- tions in Northern Ireland. The play associates cartography with oppression and the violent imposition of alien codes. As a historical drama, Translations is rife with anachronistic knowledge of the political future. On stage, characters who dwell in the 1830s are seen to an- ticipate the arrival of famine in the 1840s and to encounter, more controversially, armed British officers whose later role in Northern Ireland the play adumbrates. Translations thus displays an unabashed sense of its own location in the Ireland of 1980; Eriel later commented that he could see no harm in “the tiny bruises” that his play “inflicted on history” (“ Translations and A Paper Landscape” 123). The context for Friel’s observation is his dialogue with J. H. Andrews, the distin- guished historian of Irish cartography, on whose 1975 history of the Ordnance Survey the playwright drew. Andrews responded to Translations first with cautious admiration and later with scholarly puzzlement, noting with some alarm in the early 1990s that “many peo- ple do accept Brian Friel’s account of the Ord- O nance Survey as historically plausible” (“Notes” 93). Andrews has detailed Friel’s slipshod use of cartographic detail, but for my purposes what is perhaps most significant is that in Translations, mapping happens off stage. A stray mention of a theodolite aside, the play is concerned with cartography as metaphor, not as practice. Whereas on the one hand Translations may be said to have inaugu- rated the kind of cultural interest in cartogra- phy that this essay identifies, on the other the play more properly belongs to what Said would call the “new territoriality” of anti- imperialism, with its “assertions, recoveries, and identifications” (79). Cartography clearly forms part of Transla- tions’ contentious claims on public attention, alerting us to a dynamic sense of contest around maps and map metaphors. With such a tension in mind, we might return to Boland and reread her inscription of cartography, this time against the grain. The image of the poet taking down the map and scrutinizing its con- tours offers an arresting focus on the map as material object. Interrogating her imagined text for what it does not say, Boland conveys both emptiness and a terrible clarity: “the line which says woodland and cries hunger.” Here a cartographic marking “says” and “cries” even as its inadequacy is revealed. Accordingly, 1 would suggest that one value attached to car- tography in contemporary culture is its poten- tial to inscribe absence. In Boland’s case, ab- sence is surely related to her sense of the missing place of the woman poet in the na- tional tradition, a void so powerfully figured in Outside History, the collection that appeared just before In a Time of Violence . 1 In her poem, as in Friel’s play, the turn to the map matters as much as the dissatisfied turn away. Wrap it Up This essay deals with the map as symbol in contemporary Irish culture — especially with attempts to evade its iconic power. Yet an awareness of the frailty of the map also exists in Irish culture, even in contexts where its con- nection with surveillance and control seem strongest. Ciaran Carson’s poem/prose collec- tion Belfast Confetti (1989) translates lived city space into cartographic codes. The collection depicts a Belfast that exists as an unreliable map of itself (“the city is a map of the city”). The opening poem, “Turn Again,” sets out its wares in the shape of a map that is both tangi- bly material, yet fragile and insubstantial: “The linen backing is falling apart — The Falls Road hangs by a thread.” As in Paul Muldoon’s poem, “Christo’s,” the country is “under wraps” — ‘“like, as I said, one of your man’s landscapes’/‘Your man’s? You don’t mean Christo’s?’” (Muldoon 122). Ireland here is se- cret yet seen, its status as art object conferred by its outline shape. Muldoon’s image relates the Ireland enfolded within his text to the “wrap- pings” of the Bulgarian artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, whose many achieve- ments include a wrapped German Reichstag as well as several Pacific islands entirely covered in fabric: land meets landscape. No single treatment of mapping (artistic, literary, critical, historical) can exhaust its cul- tural potential. Eavan Boland’s evocation of a remote road that ends suddenly because weak and hungry people have died while making it retains a power beyond my analysis. I n the con- text of this exhibition, Boland’s image can be seen to turn toward and to open up a reading of Brian Tolle’s Hunger Memorial in Battery Park, New York City (no. 97). Tolle’s memorial transports the hungry acre of Irish mythology to a city park, where it sits as a living cross sec- tion taken from the land whose history it rep- resents. Elevated on and cantilevered over a broad platform of simulated geological strata, the “field” projects over layered textual testi- monies to the Famine. The site’s sharp edges and sudden ending are strangely evocative of the Famine roads Boland elegizes. The memorial was inspired, according to its creator, by a trip to the west of Ireland and his sight of “the abruptness of the island’s edge as it meets the sea” (Tolle, qtd. in “Governor Pataki”). A similar fascination with Ireland’s edges occurs in recent Irish writing. In Anne Enright’s What Are You Like, a man haunted by memories of a child he has given away dreams of undertaking a journey round the circumference of the island. En- countering its extreme limits, he describes — in both a literary and a geographical sense — the shape of the land: “He worried about piers. Should he travel the length of them, going up the near side and coming back by the far?” (Enright 10). This desire for cartographic pre- cision stands in sharp contrast to the unmapped emotional spaces that the novel charts: adoption, childlessness, sexual O loneliness, a country “where people did the most appalling things, and shut their mouths, and stayed put” (Enright 222). The dream jour- neys around the island with which the novel opens map cultural dispossession, but not in the sense described by Said or imagined by Friel. Rather than a “cartographic impulse” that seeks to represent, at one remove, some- thing else (history, the death of a language, the Troubles), mapping in this novel is part of a wider effort to renegotiate the relationship be- tween an embodied subjectivity and the social space it inhabits. Cartography becomes a tool with which to measure, assess, and express ex- periences of the most intimate kind. What Are You Like ? shares with Belfast Con- fetti and with “Christo’s” a sense that a place can be a map of itself and, with several of the contemporary artists gathered here, a suspicion of representational codes that seem to impede access to land in its raw immediacy. Rather than simply belonging to the “grammar” of colonialism, maps speak a language with the potential to express a rich array of cultural per- spectives. In Ireland, in particular, in spite of (because of?) its troubled history, mapping re- tains a special ability to arouse creative energies and provoke quarrels. ❖ Endnotes 1 Reading “That The Science Of Cartography Is Limited” alongside a poem from the earlier collection would allow a fuller understanding of the connections here. In “The Making Of An Irish Goddess” the poet registers her knowl- edge of the trauma of famine and seeks to record in her own body “an accurate inscription/of that agony” (Boland, Outside History 32). Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Andrews, J.H. A Paper Landscape. Rev. ed. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002. ---. Shapes of Ireland: Maps and their Makers 1564-1839. Dublin: Geography Publications, 1997. “Notes for a Future Edition of Brian FrieVs Translations .” Irish Review 13 (1992/3): 93-106. Boland, Eavan. Outside History. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990. ---. In a Time of Violence. Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. Carson, Ciaran. Belfast Confetti. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1989. Enright, Anne. What Are You Like?. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. Friel, Brian. Translations. London: Faber, 1981. ---. Friel, Brian, John Andrews, and Kevin Barry. “ Translations and A Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History.” The Crane Bag 7, 2 (1983): 120-122. “Governor Pataki Announces Design For ‘Irish Hunger Memorial.’” 3 August 2002. Harley, J. B. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Ed. Paul Laxton. Introd. J. H. Andrews. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Muldoon, Paul. Selected Poems: 7968-/986. New York: The Ecco Press, 1987. Nash, Catherine. “Remapping the Body/Land: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender, and Landscape in Ireland.” Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. Eds. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose. New York: Guilford Press, 1994. 227-250. “Introduction.” Irish Geographies: Six Contemporary Artists: Pauline Cummins, Frances Hegarty, Kathy Prendergast, Tim Robinson, Chris Wilson, Daphne Wright. Ed. Catherine Nash. Nottingham: Arts Centre, University of Nottingham, 1997. 5 ~ 9 - O’Mahony, Deirdre. “Statement on the Ballinglen Experience.” Interview with Lisabeth Buchelt. 2001. Said, Edward. “Yeats and Decolonization.” Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Ed. Seamus Deane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 69-95. O 33 34 °§o Making and Remaking the Irish Landscape in the Early Middle Ages Robin Fleming O I T IS EASY TO MISTAKE WORKS OF ART PORTRAYING THE IRISH LANDSCAPE FOR HISTORICAL PIECES. PHOTOS LIKE LINDA , mahoney’s killary harbour, co. mayo (no. 72) and paintings LIKE ANNE NEELY’S MY NEIGHBOR’S COWS (NO. 83) BOTH WITH FIELDS AND PASTURES, STONE FENCES, AND UNCULTIVATED HILLS, CAN appear as timeless depictions of an un- changing landscape, as portraits of an Ire- land that the fifth-century holyman St. Patrick or the tenth-century warrior king Brian Boru would still find familiar. Cer- tainly, George Petrie’s paintings, produced in the 1820s and 1830s, make such claims. The pious laypeople in his Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise (no. 16) and St. Brigit’s Well (no. 15) are shown doggedly re- turning to ancient hallowed sites that had persisted for hundreds of years, despite British occupation and insult. This notion of the Irish landscape’s time- lessness is an old one. 1 Gerald of Wales’s Topograpy of Ireland (no. 1), first written in 1186, describes at length how the Ireland of his own day was a place that time forgot. The Irish, so he writes, live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living. While man usually progresses from the woods to the fields, and from the fields to settlements and communities of citi- zens, this people despises work on the land.... They use the fields generally as pasture, but pasture in poor condition. Little is cultivated, and even less [is] sown. (Gerald of Wales 101-2) Both modern romantic notions of the Irish landscape and Gerald of Wales’s imperialist fantasies are false. All settled landscapes, even Ireland’s, are highly changeable and histori- cally constructed. The way land is used and divided, the arrangements by which its fruits are distributed, and the kinds of labor that take place upon it shape the landscape and go a long way in determining its appearance. As society changes, moreover, and as social and political structures mutate, the look of the land changes as well. 2 It is the purpose of this essay to re- construct the historical landscape of the sev- enth, eighth, and ninth centuries; in other words, to uncover the land inhabited by Ire- land’s early saints and kings. We will then witness the landscape’s great transformation around the turn of the first millennium and see the beginnings of the Ireland that Gerald of Wales’s Angevin contemporaries were so determined to conquer. In doing so, we shall see that the Ireland of the Early Christian pe- riod was unlike either twelfth-century Ireland or the Ireland depicted in modern works of art, and learn the ways in which Gerald’s de- piction of Ireland’s primitive and aberrant landscape is a fiction. 35 Fig. i: Five ringforts, each marking the settlement of a single household, near Ardfert, in Co. Kerry. Ringforts were often built in close proximity to one another, and the households living within them probably cooperated during planting, harvesting and booleying. (From G. Stout and M. Stout, “Early landscapes: from prehisto- ry to plantation,” in F.H.A. Aalen, K. Whalen and M. Stout (eds.), Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Cork, 1993, 31-63; fig. 37, p. 21). What did the Irish landscape look like in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries? What kind of society produced it? And how was the look of this land different from the rest of early medieval Europe? 3 Like the vast majority of people living in northwestern Europe, most Irish in the early Middle Ages did not make their homes in village communities. Instead, they lived on dispersed farmsteads, often wi th in sight of other kinsmen, and close enough to cooperate during plowing, harvest- ing, or booleying (fig. 1). This thin scattering of human settlement across the landscape would have had much in common with contemporary landscapes in central England, northern France, or southern Scandinavia. Across Ire- land, however, the particular form these settle- ments took was uniquely Irish. Prosperous Irish people, unlike people elsewhere in Eu- rope, built ringforts — sometimes called ralhs or cashels — to mark their homesteads. 4 An esti- mated 45,000 ringforts were built between the beginning of the seventh century and the end of the ninth, and several thousand survive to this day; some are still marked by impressive earthen or drystone walls two meters high or more (fig. 2). One of the strangest and most charming medieval descriptions of a ringfort is found in the satirical poem, Aisling Meic Con- glinne, or The Vision of MacConglinne, which tells of a ringfort made of food: The fort we reached was beautiful With works of custard thick beyond the lock. New butter was the bridge in front, The rubble dyke was wheaten white, Bacon the palisade. Stately, pleasant it sat, A compact house and strong. Then I went in The door was of dry meat, The threshold was bare bread, Cheese curds the side. (36) Ringforts were built for and occupied by a whole spectrum of prosperous people: well-to- do farmers, who owed labor services, a portion of their agricultural surplus and some of their cattle to more powerful men; chieftains with a few followers of their own; and kings with aris- tocratic retinues and crowds of lesser clients. A single family, whether modest or grand, com- prised of an extended household of relatives, re- tainers, and slaves, would have lived within each ringfort, usually in two or three houses. And we know from archaeological excavations that many of these sites were inhabited for a century or more. The poets of early medieval Ireland extolled their antiquity: The fort opposite the oak wood Once it was Bruidge’s, it was Cathal’s, It was Aed’s, it was Aillil’s It was Conaing’s, it was Cuiline’s And it was Maelduin’s — The fort remains after each in his time. ( Early Irish Lyrics xvi) In spite of their name, the walls or ditches that defined these enclosures did not make them well-defended forts. Generally, their dry- stone or earthen walls could keep livestock in Fig. 2: The restored ringfort at Drumena, in Co. Down. (From Colm J. Donnelly, Living Places: Archaeology, Continuity and Change at Historic Monuments in Northern Ireland (Belfast, 1997; fig. 69, p. 68). o Fig. 3: An early medieval crannog, still in use in the early seventeenth century, is illustrated on Richard Bartlett’s 1602 pictorial map of Armagh. National Library of Ireland. and wild animals out, and they would have dis- couraged casual thievery, but they could not have withstood concerted attacks by armed men. Ringfort walls could, however, be seen from afar; thus they advertised the prestige of their proprietors to all those residing in or rid- ing through the neighborhood. The eighth-century legal tract Crith Gablach makes clear that the size of a ringfort and the number of its banks and ditches helped to define its owner’s social status (McNeill 265-316). Men from the higher ranks of society owned slaves, and they were owed fixed amounts of labor from their free dependents, in- cluding help with the construction of ringforts. As a result, the more substantial the ringfort or the more circles of banks and ditches it had, the more clients and human property under its owner’s control. This correlation between ring- fort size and social importance is supported by modern archaeological excavations. The vast majority are somewhere between twenty and fifty meters in diameter, and they are encircled by a single bank and ditch. When excavated, ringforts of this size produce modest jewelry, agricultural equipment, textile and leather working implements, and the detritus from bone and iron working. These would have been the homes of the boaire or ocaire, strong farmers rather than great lords, the kind of men one ninth-century poet ridiculed when quipping: “I have heard that he gives no steeds for poems; /He gives what is natural to him — a cow!” (Murphy 91). On the other hand, excavations of the most extensive ringforts — those between ninety and one-hundred-ten meters in diameter or those that are double- or triple-ditched — have uncovered the workshops of luxury craftsmen and scribes. Sites like these were clearly the res- idences of nobles or kings. Crannogs, artificial islands built near lakeshores as platforms for settlements, served the same powerful strata of society as the grandest ringforts, although crannogs were de- fensible in a way that only the most elaborate ringforts could be. 5 Because of the huge amounts of timber, stone, and labor involved, the two thousand or so crannogs built by 800 AD seem to have been universally of high status, and some, we know from written sources, were, indeed, royal. Gerald of Wales mentions crannogs a number of times in his Topography, and he was clearly impressed, in spite of him- self, by these structures (37, 95, 120). Most were built in the late sixth and seventh centuries, but, like ringforts, many were occupied for hundreds of years. Indeed, the great cartogra- pher Richard Bartlett’s pictorial map of 1602 de- picts a crannog still in use (fig. 3). The houses built in both ringforts and on crannogs up through the ninth century were ex- tremely conservative in form. They were roundhouses, a domestic architectural style that had dominated Ireland since the Iron Age (Lynn 81-94). These roundhouses were gener- ally fashioned from double-walled, woven wicker, or from posts and wattle. As far as we can tell, the roundhouses of kings and great lords were larger than those of other men, but they were not better constructed nor built from finer materials than the houses of people of lower social standing. Indeed, the Irish elite seem to have had little interest in expressing their high status through their houses. Instead they asserted their prestige with large herds of cattle, great feasts, extraordinary brooches (nos. 9, 10, 11, 12, and 14), and the high banks and walls of their ringforts. Cattle farming and dairying, as Gerald of Wales’s account suggests, dominated the agri- cultural practices of ringfort and crannog dwellers; and the size of a man’s herd, like the size of his ringfort, was a measure of his status. Nonetheless, and despite Gerald’s claims, crop husbandry was of crucial importance to Irish farmers . 6 Kilns, which were used for the drying of grain in Ireland’s damp climate, and hori- zontal water mills, which could process large amounts of cereal, were common in the period. Indeed, Ireland has the largest corpus of early medieval water mill sites in the world. 37 Through dendrochronology we know that the vast majority were built between 581 and 843 AD, the period when ringfort and crannog con- struction was at its height. Kings and nobles, presiding over some 150 circumscribed little territories known as tuatha and living in this world of cultivated fields and dairy herds, received tribute from their clients, carefully calibrated to the particular social ranks of the parties involved. According to two early law tracts, Crith Gablach and Cain Aigillne, clients contracted with nobles, who furnished them with set amounts of land, livestock, and/or other material goods, and a promise of legal and military support. In turn, the clients provided set labor services and entertainment. More important, they gave annual renders of milk cows, dairy products, meat, malt, grain, and other foodstuffs, and it was these renders that fed great men and their hangers-on. 7 Most of the players in this system — the small and strong farmers who followed greater men, the nobles, and the multitude of kings — would have all lived in ringforts or crannogs, although the few hundred men who sat at the top of this system would have resided in the largest and most impressively bounded settlements. This settlement pattern, these settlement sites, and the social structures and agricultural regimens that supported them were long- standing and well entrenched by the ninth cen- tury. But in the century or so between c. 900 AD and c. 1000 AD, the Irish landscape began to be remade: social relations were restructured and the long-dominant political unit, the tuath, disappeared as larger political entities came to the fore. Under these circumstances novel kinds of communities began to form, and a new settlement pattern began to emerge (Warner 47-68; Graham 19-57). The clearest evidence for all of this is the waning of the ringfort. Ringforts ceased to be built over the course of a single century, and none appear to have been constructed after the year 1000. When Gerald of Wales was in Ire- land, the remains of abandoned ringforts could be seen across the countryside: To this day, as remains and traces of ancient times, you will find here many trenches, very high and round and often in groups of three, one outside of the other. ..now standing empty and abandoned. ( Gerald of Wales 119) During this period of transition, the sites around many ringforts remained occupied, but the spaces bounded by walls were abandoned. Apparently the area within the confines of the ringforts ceased to be an appropriate dwelling space for all but the most powerful kings and nobles. Instead, what we find is that houses were increasingly put up just outside the walls of more middling ringforts. These new houses, moreover, were built in a novel fashion: they were rectangular rather than round, and they were generally built with drystone or turf walls. This dramatic shift in form and materi- als cannot be explained simply as technological or practical improvements, since hazel-rod construction is remarkably strong and cheap, and since unmortared stone structures can be damp and drafty. Nonetheless, the millennia- old roundhouse, within the course of a single century, apparently came to be seen as socially unfitting; those who could rebuilt their houses following this new fashion. There is no evi- dence for rectangular houses in the Irish coun- tryside before the tenth century, but the transi- tion from round to rectangular was almost complete by the year 1000 (Lynn 81-94). Irish houses, moreover, were now often built in close association with a new kind of structure, the souterrain: a stone-lined, under- ground passage, sometimes as many as one hundred meters in length. Souterrains, like the ringforts built before them, required skill and large amounts of labor to construct; and like ringforts, they are very impressive monu- ments. But the 3,500 or so that were built during this period functioned differently from ring- forts, since their underground location meant that they could not operate as display structures in the same way that ringforts had. They could, however, act as bolt holes when gangs of slavers were raiding, an increasing problem beginning in the ninth century. Perhaps the ability to pro- tect was the new sign of high social status. Whatever the reasons behind these dramatic transformations, by about the year 1000 the abandonment of the interiors of the smaller ringforts, as well as the construction of rectan- gular houses and souterrains, was the new or- der of the day. A small number of ringforts during this period, however, were evolving differently. Rather than being abandoned, their enclosed interiors were deliberately raised with dumps of stone and clay and heightened to give their inhabitants better views of the surrounding countryside to make the sites truly defensible, and, perhaps, to set them apart from old- fashioned ringforts. In Ireland sites like these are known as raised raths, but in any other European setting they would be called castles, a new form of defensive architecture that was being pioneered on the Continent at just this time. In the same period, many of the great crannogs continued to be occupied. Strongly fortified and strategically sited forts, too, were being thrown up from scratch by kings who wished to extend or hold onto their territories. This, also, was happening on the Continent. More or less contemporary with these changes in high-status sites are hints that rela- tively large, undefended proto-villages were be- ginning to coalesce, and the centuries-old pat- tern of dispersed settlements was starting to evolve toward nucleation. A number of low- status cluster settlements have been found through aerial photography. Most lie along de- serted hillsides in the uplands, just beyond the margins of modern agriculture, so the old foun- dations of early houses and walls have not been damaged by later plowing. One of these settle- ments has been found outside Ballyutoag, in Co. Antrim. Here, settlement was much more extensive than at earlier ringfort sites. Rather than two or three houses and a single house- hold, this site contained at least twenty-three houses and would have accommodated one hundred people or more. Finds were numerous there but limited to coarse pottery and the most basic jewelry; this was hardly the site of a silver- wearing, poet-supporting aristocratic house- hold. A similar cluster settlement housing a vil- lage-worth of people was developing at the pre- historic tomb at Knowth, in Co. Meath, a site that had served as a royal residence from c. 800 AD. A zone outside the royal compound be- came the focus of an extensive, unenclosed set- tlement consisting of thirteen houses and nine souterrains. Concentrations of undefended houses during this period could also be found near some Irish monasteries. Thus, religious communities, secular nobles, and kings seem to have been pioneering new social arrangements with a crowd of people now housed outside their enclosures. Knowth, Ballyutoag, and a number of monastic sites suggest that clustered, open sec- ular settlements were developing around the same time that most ringforts were disappear- ing. Social, political, and economic changes must have been driving these transformations. The intensification of agriculture and the pres- sures of growing population during the sev- enth, eighth, and ninth centuries probably meant that the number of base clients grew by the ninth century to the point where some men’s holdings no longer produced the tributes they needed to give over to their lords in order to meet their social obligations (Monk, “Early Medieval” 33—52). Under these circumstances, failed client families, dislodged from their for- mer homes, may have gravitated toward larger settlements around the compounds of the pow- erful. Beyond this was the coming of the Vikings, whose initial terrifying period of raids (795-840) provided great men with a bona-fide emergency and a useful pretext to better their positions at the expense of their neighbors and clients. Simultaneous to this was a noticeable militarization of Irish society. Together, these events signal a growing gulf between the pow- erful and everyone else. The changing landscape thus suggests that by c. 1000 AD formerly free farmers were being pressed downward by the hard luck of debt, po- litical disruption, and ruthlessly bargained re- lationships with their betters. The simultane- ous death of the ringfort and rise of nucleated settlement suggest that thousands of families were exchanging prior independence and free- dom for a form of servile security. Under these circumstances, those with power — the families settled in raised raths or grand crannogs — may no longer have been satisfied with free-farmer clients, traditional annual food renders, and a share of their followers’ calves. Instead, they may have sought a more subjugated group of underlings, over whose labor, harvests, and herds they had greater control. One wonders if scenes similar to those depicted in Robert Kelly’s An Ejectment in Ireland (no. 27) or Sean Keating’s Economic Pressure (no. 36) played themselves out in the brave new world of tenth- and eleventh-century Ireland, or if the dispossessed and missing evoked in the alto- gether different context of famine-memorial art — the phantoms in Kathy Herbert’s Angel in the Hay, Shadows, or Absent, (nos. 90, 91, 92) — would have found a knowing audience in this earlier period. 39 Open cluster settlements like the ones at Ballyutoag and Knowth have left few traces, but it was probably places like these that the Angevins, when they came in the late twelfth century, referred to as baile. They called them villae in Latin, because they found them similar to the villages they had known back home in England and Wales. Baile first appear in the tenth century as administrative units, and may well be the social and administrative replace- ment of the ringfort. By the time the Angevins arrived, the ringfort-dwelling strong farmers seem to have been largely replaced by a more generic group of people called biatach — or ten- ants. When encountering these rural workers, the Angevins believed them to be the social and legal equivalents of English villeins. These peo- ple, whose ancestors had been ringfort- dwelling clients, were now rent payers: they had become agricultural tenants of little status (Doherty 288-330). The dramatic changes outlined above were far from complete by Gerald of Wales’s own day, and dispersed settlements and old client re- lationships persisted into the twelfth century and beyond. Nonetheless, by the time Gerald put pen to parchment, the Irish landscape and Irish lordship had evolved in many of the same ways as they had elsewhere in northwestern Europe. Ireland’s new landscape reflected a growing gulf between lords and the people who labored for them, a social difference that was in- creasingly emphasized in France and England as well. Thus, Gerald’s Ireland — with its dearth of cultivated fields, its wild men dressed in an- imal skins, its savage kings (see endnote 1), and O its people too shiftless to use the plow— was a carefully crafted fiction, concocted to encour- age his audience to come, to conquer, and to make the Irish landscape its own. ❖ Endnotes 1 On the commonplace of the notion of Irish timelessness, see Leerssen. 2 For an overview of the history of the Irish landscape, see Mitchell and Ryan. 3 For a comparative study of the Irish, English, and Welsh landscapes and the divergent patterns of lordship that stood behind them, see Fleming. 4 For the most complete and up-to-date study of the ringfort, see Stout. 5 For the most complete and up-to-date study on crannogs, see O’Sullivan. 6 For the most recent study of Irish agricultural practices, see F. Kelly, Early Irish Farming. See also Monk, “The archaeob- otanical evidence for crop plants in early historic Ireland,” 315-28. 7 For a study of the intricacies of this system and the archae- ological evidence for it, see McCormick. Works Cited Doherty, C. “The Vikings in Ireland: a review.” Eds. H.B. Clarke, M. Ni Mhaonaigh and R. O Floinn. Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking Age. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998. 288-330. Fleming, Robin. “Lords, landscape, and labour.” Ed. W. Davies. The Short Oxford History of the British Isles, vol. 3: Britain and Ireland in the Ninth through Eleventh Century (in press). Gerald of Wales. The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J.J. O’Meara. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982. Graham, Brian J. “Early medieval Ireland: settlement as an indicator of economic and social transformation, c. 500-1100 AD.” Eds. B.J. Graham and L.J. Proudfoot. An Historical Geography of Ireland. London: Academic Press, 1993. 19—57- Kelly, Fergus. Early Irish Farming: A study based mainly on the law-texts of the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. Dublin: School of Celtic Studies, 1997. Leerssen, Joep. “The western mirage: on the Celtic chronotope in the European imagination.” Ed. T. Collins. Decoding the Landscape: Papers Read at the Inaugural Conference of the Centre for Landscape Studies. 2nd revised ed. Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1997. 1-11. 40 Lynn, C.J. "Houses in rural Ireland AD 500-1000.” Ulster Journal of Archaeology. 57 (1994): 81-94. McCormick, F. “Stockrearing in Early Christian Ireland." Diss. Queen’s University, Belfast, 1987. McNeill, E. “Ancient Irish law: the law of status or franchise.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 38 (1923): 265-316. Mitchell, Frank and Michael Ryan. Reading the Irish Landscape. Revised ed. Dublin: Town House, 1990. Monk, Michael A. “The archaeobotanical evidence for crop plants in early historic Ireland.” Ed. J.M. Renfrew. New Light on Early Farming: Recent Developments in Palaeoethnobotany. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. 315-28. Monk, Michael A. “Early medieval secular and ecclesiastical settlements in Munster.” Ed. M.A. Monk and J. Sheehan. Early Medieval Munster: Archaeology, History and Society. Cork: Cork University Press, 1998. 33-52. Murphy, Gerard. Ed. and trans. Early Irish Lyrics, Eighth to Twelfth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. O’Keeffe, Tadhg. Medieval Ireland: An Archaeology. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2000. O’Sullivan, Aidan. The Archaeology of Lake Settlement in Ireland. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1998. Stout, Matthew. The Irish Ringfort. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. The Vision of MacConglinne: A Middle Irish Wonder Tale. Ed. and trans. K. Meyer. 2nd ed. Felinfach: Llanerch Pub., 1999. Warner, R.B. “The archaeology of early historic Irish king- ship." Ed. S.T. Driscoll and M.R. Nieke. Power and Politics in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988. 47-68. °§° Shaping and Mis'shaping: Visual Impressions of Ireland in Three Illuminated Manuscripts Michelle P. Brown O F or so much of Ireland’s history, visiting strangers HAVE PRODUCED THE SOURCES PROVIDING KNOWLEDGE OF THE LAND — OF ITS TOPOGRAPHY, ITS NATURAL HISTORY, ITS PEOPLE AND THEIR CUSTOMS AND CULTURE. EARLY CHRISTIAN EUROPE BENEFITED FROM THE LABOR OF IRELAND’S CLERICS AND SCHOLARS in the aftermath of the Roman Empire and the emergence of the various successor states which came to form the nations of modern Europe. Nevertheless Ireland’s rich oral tradi- tion and the literary heritage of earlier ages — chronicles, epic tales, law-codes, and Christian documents — were little known outside of the isolated island. Gerald of Wales’s Topography was thus the first account of Ireland available to western audiences since the sixth to ninth cen- turies (the “age of the saints”) when Irish mis- sionaries were active throughout much of Europe . 1 Gerald’s work inaugurated a tradition whereby outsiders shaped the international perception of Ireland. Despite its active tenth- and eleventh- century participation in the Scandinavian trad- ing empire, Ireland remained unfamiliar to other medieval audiences. In the late-twelfth century, a clergyman of Welsh and Norman ancestry, Gerald de Barri — known as Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) — wrote the first widely read account of the country. Gerald boasts that the Topography was almost entirely his own work, composed without reference to earlier sources, with the exception of the final section for which he consulted some of the Irish chronicles (such as the Lehor Gabala). But Gerald’s account was by no means an impartial traveler’s tale of a little-known land; the alleged topographical treatise is, for the most part, merely a peg upon which to hang more covert messages. Harboring ambitious political and religious agendas, Gerald manipulated and fre- quently invented material designed to foster plans to bring Ireland under the rule of the Angevin monarchy, whose territories included England. Such blatant stratagems attracted the criticism even of some of his contemporaries, and today Gerald is demonized by postcolonial commentators, his work frequently con- demned by the Irish themselves . 2 However, without his achievements our knowledge of medieval Ireland would be much the poorer. Gerald is best understood as the product of his time and place. In many ways he epitomizes the plight of the Celt caught between worlds; he champions Celtic culture and loves the lands on the wild Atlantic fringes of Europe, but his livelihood was bound to the fortunes and ambi- tions of an increasingly centralized alien gov- ernment. Having bought into the ethos of that modernizing force himself, Gerald was keen to share what he perceived to be its benefits with the Celtic peoples. In the short-term, his ambi- tions enriched the landscape of Ireland through the building of Norman castles and abbeys, and the towns which arose around them. In the long-term, however, the interests of the Celtic 4 1 people were subjugated to those of the English crown and aristocracy and of the papacy. Gerald belonged to the FitzGerald family, many of whose members had initially been employed in Ireland as mercenaries in in- ternecine struggles and, along with other Nor- mans, were rapidly becoming its overlords. His Topography of Ireland was designed to be a weapon in his armory of arguments to con- vince the Angevin ruler of England, King Henry II, to legitimize conquest as an official state enterprise. In the 1186-88 text, to be com- plemented subsequently by his similar work on Wales, Gerald describes what he allegedly en- countered on his visits to the island. In 1185 he accompanied Prince John of England — later of Magna Carta fame — on a tour to improve the prince’s education and knowledge of the world. On this, the second of Gerald’s three visits to Ireland, he was to preach the Crusade to the Holy Island before the people and the Norman knights living there. Like generations of displaced Irish living in Britain, Gerald always felt himself to be a fish out of water. Against the backdrop of the in- ternationalism of a French-speaking aristoc- racy and a Latinate Church, he was, in the words of Robert Bartlett, “a child of a frontier society at the edge of feudal Europe” (6). His identities appear multiple: by turn a denigrator and champion of the Celtic peoples from whom he claimed part-ancestry, a sycophant and critic of kings and courts, an espouser of the militaristic feudal ideals of the Marcher knights of Wales (from whose ranks he sprang), and an idealistic reforming cleric in- tent upon the unity of Christendom and the in- dependence of the Welsh Church. The grand- son of a Norman knight, Gerald of Windsor, and a Celtic princess, Nesta, the “Helen of Wales,” Gerald was considered a Celtic out- sider at the Angevin court and an English in- truder in Wales and Ireland. Determined to prove his worth, he first em- barked on a career of church politics; but as that chosen vocation came to naught, increasingly in his old age he turned to writing. While in re- tirement at Lincoln early in the thirteenth cen- tury, he had a number of copies of his works written and illuminated in the cathedral scrip- torium, intending to present them to prospec- tive patrons and church communities. He su- pervised the creation of these illuminated manuscripts and may have himself had a hand in devising the lively little illustrations in the margins of some copies of his work. Having spent some time dining out on his traveler’s tales, Gerald seemingly conceived of these commissioned illustrations as a thirteenth- century equivalent to a slide presentation ac- companying his stories. The version exhibited in Eire/Land 4 con- tains a number of authorial additions to both the text and the image cycle made at Lincoln around 1210 — Gerald no doubt peering over the shoulders of its scribe (no. ra-i). Comparison with other early copies of the work, including one in the National Library of Ireland, reveals that this version is the earliest example of an au- thor “illustrating” his own works and using the space in the margins to explore implications and issues raised by his text. Gerald’s achievement inspired a popular response in the more luxuri- ously illuminated books of the Middle Ages. That Gerald wrote with a multifaceted agenda is obvious, for his Topography of Ireland is no literal version of his experiences. Although his travels in Ireland took him to only the east- ern and southern seaboards of the island from Cork to Dublin — perhaps with forays into the interior including visits to Arklow, Wicklow, Kildare, the Shannon near Athlone, and maybe Lough Derg near Donegal — his account stretches northward to Ulster and westward to the Aran Isles. He couches it in the spirit of The Marvels of the East, a popular work of Roman and early medieval derivation that sought to in- troduce western readers to the mysteries and wonders of the people, flora, and fauna of Africa and the East, subjects of particular interest dur- ing the crusades. In the Topography, Gerald hoped to acquaint his European readers with what he presents as the equally exotic regions at the western edges of the known world. The text of the Dublin manuscript is accompanied by a rudimentary map of Europe, Scandinavia, and Iceland. This map includes Ireland and marks its main rivers and settlements: Shannon, Liffey, Dublin, Slaney, Wexford, Suir, Water- ford, and Limerick. Gerald’s description of the country, although detailed, is constrained by the limitations of his actual travel experiences. Ireland is a country of uneven surface and rather mountainous. The soil is soft and watery, and there are many woods and marshes. Even at the tops of high and steep mountains you will find 4 2 pools and swamps. ..some fine plains, but in comparison with the woods they are indeed small. On the whole the land is low-lying on all sides and along the coasts; but further inland it rises up very high to many hills and even high mountains. It is sandy rather than rocky.. .is rich in pastures and meadows, honey and milk and wine, but not vineyards. ...The island is divided and watered by nine principal and magnificent rivers.... Of old the coun- try was divided into five almost equal parts, namely: two Munsters, north and south, Leinster, Ulster and Connacht. The prophecy of Merlin predicted that they would all be reduced to one. ( Gerald of Wales 34-7 [ch. 1-3]) Until Gerald’s mention of Merlin’s prophecy in the above passage — a statement adding an element of literary lore to topo- graphical description and one which placed the Celtic Arthurian traditions concerning unification at the service of the Angevin kings — he seems concerned primarily with describing Ireland’s geography. The accompa- nying illustrations of the manuscript simi- larly provide both realistic information about Ireland’s natural history, and some highly lit- erary speculation. In emulation of the bes- tiary tradition, a merry procession of stags, wolves, beavers, badgers, otters, and other creatures march across the margins of his work (no. ib). But the manuscript also in- cludes other more distinctive local curiosities such as the fish in Carlingford Lough renowned for its golden teeth (no. ic) and the barnacle geese which grew on trees(no. ia) — a misunderstanding of the classical text relating to the crustaceous barnacle. Gerald speaks of the manners and customs of the people, praising their love of music and incomparable skill in its performance, and chastising the Normans for their lack of appre- ciation for such Celtic traits. It is remarkable how, in spite of the great speed of the fingers, the musical proportion is maintained. The melody is kept perfect and full with unimpaired art through everything — through quiv- ering measures and the involved use of several instruments — with a rapidity that charms, a rhythmic pattern that is varied, and a concord achieved through elements discordant. ..the very things that afford unspeakable delight to the minds of those who have a fine percep- tion and can penetrate carefully to the secrets of the art, bore, rather than delight, those who have no such percep- tion — who look without seeing, and hear without being able to understand. When the audience is unsympathetic they succeed only in causing boredom with what appears to be but confused and disordered noise. ( Gerald of Wales 103-4 [ch. 94]) Already in the thirteenth century, Gerald establishes what has come to be viewed as the central colonial modes of speaking about the Irish — as imaginative, musical, but in need of discipline — a program perhaps cul- minating Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). In another part of his text, Gerald de- scribes how Nature “forms and finishes them [the Irish people] in their full strength with beautiful upright bodies and handsome, well- complexioned faces. But although they are fully endowed with natural gifts, their exter- nal characteristics of beard and dress, and in- ternal cultivation of the mind, are so bar- barous that they cannot be said to have any culture.” Such passages establish the tone of Gerald’s narrative: the Irish constitute a peo- ple and a country naturally blessed with beauty and imaginative qualities, but lacking the benefits of “civilization.” Gerald’s major aim, of course, was to be instrumental in be- stowing these benefits. The opening of the manuscript exhibited in Eire/Land (no. ih-ii) depicts a particularly tall tale: Gerald’s version of the kingship ritual at Tirconell, Co. Donegal, of the “Kenelcunill” tribe (the Cenel Conaill), in which, so he al- leges, the king mates with a white mare and then bathes in a broth of her flesh of which he and his people partake. The image may allude to the ancient Ulster Cycle’s symbolic union between the king and a mare — representing the union of the tuath (tribe) with Nature — a ritual guaranteed by the king and ensuring prosperity for the people. In including the episode, Gerald undoubtedly stresses Ireland’s need for en- lightened (Angevin) rule. 43 Elsewhere, and again with a purposeful agenda, Gerald depicts Ireland as the source of a savage bestiality, as a land filled with grotesque and uncivilized figures. Particularly relevant to his covert message is the text’s pre- occupation with bestiality and immorality. He enlivens the Topography with tales of the bearded woman of Limerick who, apart from her flowing beard and hairy spine, “was in other respects sufficiently feminine (no. id).” Also making an appearance is the cow-man of Wicklow, allegedly the progeny of man and domestic beast, who became a pet of the FitzGerald garrison until murdered by envious locals. Gerald even alludes to another notori- ous European scandal concerning bestiality: the mating of Johanna of Paris with a lion (no. ie). That the papal bull eventually approving Henry IPs annexation of Ireland did so on grounds of the land’s alleged immorality — including bestiality — suggests that Gerald’s inclusion of such details may have helped legitimize that political enterprise and encour- age public support of it. Gerald’s tales of Ireland’s strong religious tradition, however, offer a more positive view of that society. He includes passages such as that concerning St. Kevin of Glendalough, whose hand, outstretched in prayer through the windows of his cell, became the nesting place of a blackbird (no. if). So caring of Na- ture was the saint that he obligingly remained still until the fledglings were hatched — a tale since celebrated in Seamus Heaney’s poem “St. Kevin and the Blackbird”(4io-n). Gerald also celebrates a Gospel book at St. Brigid’s Church at Kildare (calling to mind the Book of Kells; no. ic): ...if you take the trouble to look very closely, and penetrate with your eyes to the secret of the artistry, you will notice such intricacies, so delicate and subtle, so close together and well- knitted, so involved and bound togeth- er, and so fresh still in their colourings that you will not hesitate to declare that all these things must have been the result of the work, not of men, but of angels. ( Gerald of Wales 84 [ch. 71]) Gerald’s text also narrates the fate of men who dared set foot within the sacred enclosure of St. Brigid’s fire at Kildare. In another episode, however, Gerald tells of sailors who encoun- tered two men in a curragh, possibly from the Aran Islands, an area with one of the richest Christian heritages in the country (no. ii). Al- though naturally good, these men had never heard of the Christian faith. Even such a more positive tale is designed to justify the need for conquest and conversion. Just as the Jesuit mis- sionaries in sixteenth-century South America celebrated the innocence and innate goodness of the native population while overlooking cen- turies of history, cultural achievement, and re- ligious observance, Gerald presents Ireland as an Eden gone astray. Ireland is, however, ripe for shaping in the image of the mainstream Eu- ropean community — or in the image of Ger- ald’s particular view of that society. Gerald’s political and religious agenda to as- similate Ireland into Europe ultimately proved successful, but the personal disappointments of his career left him embittered and marginalized in his old age. His paternalistic optimism about the benefits such a program would bestow upon the Irish proved to be sadly misplaced. St. Patrick’s Purgatory: a Medieval Pilgrim’s Tale The second manuscript exhibited in Eire/Land 6 is a compilation put together during the first half of the fifteenth century in England of mat- ter relating to visions, travels, and romances (no. 2). The first part contains the “Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” recounting a fictional journey to the Holy Land and the East; the sec- ond is a Breton romance, “Sir Gowghter;” the fourth is “Tundal’s Vision of Hell.” The third, shown here, is an account of St. Patrick’s Pur- gatory, the famous pilgrimage site in Lough Derg, Co. Donegal, which is still the focus of many modern pilgrimages. This text recounts the vision of William Staunton, an English pilgrim from County Durham, seen by him on Friday, 20 September 1409 (Ward ii, 484; Krapp 58). It is written in Middle English and introduced in the manu- script by a colored drawing of St. Patrick, de- picted as a haloed bishop standing on a small patch of ground, representing the island, and surrounded by fiends and souls in torment. The regimen of fasting and grueling physical depri- vation and endurance practiced by those visit- ing Lough Derg surely contributed to its repu- tation, already well-established in the Middle +4 Ages, as a place of mystical experiences and vi- sions. Pilgrims traveled to the island from far and wide, including one knight who came from Hungary in hopes of a divine visitation. Glimpses of hell were especially popular vi- sionary experiences, belonging to a long tradi- tion initiated by the Irish St. Fursey in the early-seventh century and culminating in Dante’s Inferno. Widely circulated accounts of pilgrims’ experiences represented one of the few means by which the rest of Europe learned of Ireland during the later Middle Ages. Illuminated Address Presented to the Marquess of Downshire by his Tenants: a Victorian Vision of the Feudal Ideal The third manuscript exhibited in Eire/Land is an illuminated address presented to Arthur Wills Blundell Trumbull Sandys Ro- den Hill, Earl of Hillsborough, 5th Marquess of Downshire, celebrating his coming of age on his twenty-first birthday, 24 December 1865 — at which time he would have assumed full re- sponsibility for his estates. This much later manuscript perpetuates the medieval traditions of calligraphy and illumination as part of the Victorian Gothic revival. 7 The elaborately bound address was commissioned from the Belfast firm of Marcus Ward and Company by the tenants of the Downshire estates at Dun- drum and Ballykinler, Co. Down. The names of the subscribing tenants are included, as is the Marquess’s signed reply. The manuscript opens with the arms of Lord Hillsborough and is written in a formal Gothic book script, set within elaborate illu- minated borders incorporating vignettes de- picting views of the estates. The Marquess’s residences and hunting lodges appear within romantically idealized settings typical of the contemporary landscape tradition; they are occasionally juxtaposed, as in the exhibited image, to the mills and other working build- ings of the estates. The image invokes the good stewardship of the land and the con- structive working relationship between landowner and tenant. The medieval feudal ideal signaled by the use of Gothic decoration and script was highly appropriate for its pur- pose, but was in stark contrast to the harsh re- alities of life experienced by the majority of Irish people in 1865. ❖ Endnotes 1 For more comprehensive discussions of Gerald of Wales see Richter, Bartlett, O’Meara, and Brown. 2 See, for example, Cohen, especially ch. 5, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: the Bodies of Gerald of Wales,” 86-104; Cairns and Richards 3, 20. 3 In this respect Gerald resembles the twentieth-century writer George Bernard Shaw, as they were given the respec- tive epithets “Gerald the Welshman”/“Bernard the Irishman.” 4 British Library, Royal MS i3.B.viii 5 Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS 700, f.48r 6 British Library, Royal MS 17. B.xliii 7 British Library, Additional MS 51314 Works Cited Bartlett, Robert. Gerald of Wales, 1146-1223. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Brown, M.P. “Marvels of the West: Gerald of Wales and the role of the author in the development of marginal illustration.” Ed. A. Edwards. English Manuscript Studies 6, London: The British Library, forthcoming. Cairns, David and Shaun Richards. Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2000. Gerald of Wales. The History and Topography of Ireland. Ed and trans. J. J. O’Meara. Revised ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Gillingham, John. “The Beginnings of English Imperialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology. 5.4 (1999) 329-409. Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-/996. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Krapp, George Phillip. The Legend of St Patrick’s Purgatory: Its later literary history. Baltimore: J. Murphy Co., 1900. Richter, Michael. Giraldus Cambrensis: The growth of the Welsh nation. Aberystwyth: National library of Wales, 1972. Ward, H. Catalogue of Romances in the Dept, of Manuscripts of the British Museum, 2 vols. 1883-1893. London: Printed by order of the Trustees. O 45 Art/Full Ground: Unearthing National Identity and an Early Medieval “Golden Age” Nancy Netzer °§° O A SACRED NECROPOLIS AND FOCUS OF CEREMONIAL ACTIVITY FROM THE NEOLITHIC PERIOD UNTIL THE INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY, THE HILL OF TARA IN COUNTY MEATH WAS CELEBRATED IN IRISH MYTHOLOGY AS THE CHIEF SEAT OF THE HIGH-KINGS OF IRELAND.' IN l868, ANTIQUARIAN WILLIAM STOKES described the significance of this site within a “national” landscape: The Royal Tara, a grassy hill of moderate height, yet commanding a most extensive prospect, is truly the locality in Ireland of the deepest inter- est to all inquirers into our national history. The oldest bardic legend ascribes to it the honour of having been the seat of a long line of Irish kings, stretching back to the times of the Fir-Bolgs and the Tuatha de Danaan, and down to the time of Patrick and of Christianity, and in addition, notices of Temur of Tara, as a chief seat of government from the third to the sixth century, are held as reliable. Here, too, the various lives of St. Patrick agree that Christianity was first preached to the King of Ireland, and its spread throughout the country dated from this period. It was natural, then, to anticipate that in the existing remains on Tara Hill, so long a place of great importance, some verification of the ancient manuscripts relating to it would be obtained, while these, in their turn, would throw light on the monu- ments themselves. (Stokes 1868, no) In the 1830s, John O’Donovan, archaeologi- cal and place-names officer of Ireland’s Ord- nance Survey, 2 produced a map for County Meath (no. 8), the first connecting the manu- script accounts Stokes cites above to extant ar- chaeological remains on the Tara Hill (O Riordain 9-12; Newman 3-5; Boyne 64-65). O’Donovan’s work was soon amplified by his colleague George Petrie (1790-1866) in a paper on the “History and Antiquities of Tara Hill,” presented in 1837 to the Royal Irish Academy (Petrie 1839). Artist (nos. 15 and 16), musicolo- gist, antiquarian, topographical surveyor, and a founder of Irish archaeology, Petrie J supplied his listeners with a complete compilation of transcriptions and translations of historical ac- counts of Tara, as well as with descriptions of the site’s archaeological remains. In systemati- cally assembling empirical evidence to accom- pany their mapping of Ireland, members of the Survey — often led by Petrie — laid the founda- tions for a scientific knowledge and verification of Ireland’s distinctive early history and cul- ture. Reacting against the hegemony of English values, Petrie and his circle sought to assemble evidence vindicating nationalist claims for a separate Irish cultural identity. 4 In the context 49 Fig. i: “Tara” Brooch, Ireland, c. 700, Silver, gold, copper alloy, amber, and glass, National Museum of Ireland, acc. no R4015. of a growing identification of antiquarian re- search with cultural revival and political na- tionalism, when an exquisite piece of jewelry 5 was discovered on 24 August, 1850 in County Meath, about ten miles from Tara Hill, its owner bestowed it with the misleading appel- lation of the “Tara” Brooch (fig. 1). Although early accounts are inconsistent, the brooch was probably discovered by a poor woman or her children on agricultural land near the seashore “at the foot of a cliff from which a large piece had recently fallen” at Bettystown near Drogheda (Whitfield 1974, 120-142). As a stray find, allegedly plucked from the surface of the earth, the law of Treasure Trove would not have applied to the brooch; therefore it became the property not of Queen Victoria, but of the finder. She reportedly sold her find to Thomas North, a watchmaker in Drogheda, whose cleaning of the brooch revealed the unparalleled splendor of its cast ornament, gold filigree, trumpet and spiral designs, enamel and amber studs, and plaited silver wire chain. Later that same year, North sold the brooch to the Dublin jewelers Waterhouse and Co. of Dame Street for nearly as many pounds sterling as he had paid pence for it (Waterhouse 7). An astute businessman and publicist, George Waterhouse belonged to a group of merchants producing widely marketed replicas of Irish archaeological jewelry 6 (Whitfield 1974, 131; Sheehy 86; Dunlevy 14-19). In naming his brooch, he exploited the royal associations of Tara, the site upon which Petrie had recently focused the attention of the Royal Irish Acad- emy. And, in lending its name to the most sumptuous and elaborate example of Irish me- dieval personal ornament, Tara and its sur- rounding area arguably derived romantic ad- vantage from Waterhouse’s new possession. 7 Indeed, some local people still maintain that the brooch was “dropped by a prince from Tara who came to bathe at Bettystown” (Whitfield 1974, 136). But for Waterhouse, the strategic naming of his new acquisition was a masterful advertising ploy. His appellation implied possi- ble royal ownership of the brooch, bestowing glamour that quickly surrounded the replicas he began producing and marketing (no. 11). Waterhouse set about elevating his “Tara” brooch to national prominence. He first lent it to the Royal Irish Academy for Petrie to study and display in the institution’s museum. The Royal Irish Academy, the recorder of a growing body of material and documentary evidence, was founded in 1785 as a center for encouraging, coordinating, and focusing serious research on Irish civilization . 8 But amateur antiquarians in Ireland began to pay serious attention to their native early Christian metalwork only in the later 1830s. 9 Such attention coincided with a growing interest in “national monuments,” a term and concept that begins to appear with regularity in archaeological publications at this time ' 0 (Champion 123). By about 1835, the Acad- emy, with Petrie playing a pivotal role, had be- gun a campaign to reorganize its collection and to acquire newly excavated works in order to es- tablish a National Museum of Antiquities (Mitchell 109-126, 160). Since the eighteenth century, a burgeoning Irish population’s use of previously marginal land for improvement, agriculture, and drainage had led to increasing discoveries of antiquities (Cooney 153). But for the most part, the finds unearthed were rela- tively modest examples of their types — such as the simple penannular brooches (nos. 9 and 10). Gentlemen scholars, including Petrie himself, began to collect these artifacts privately , 11 espe- cially prizing those from sites with high his- torical profiles. And like Waterhouse, dealers shifted or fabricated connections to the land in order to enhance an object’s symbolic and mon- etary value (Mitchell 130-131; Cooney 153-154). In methodically organizing and collecting such artifacts for the Royal Irish Academy, and for himself as well (Mitchell 97-98), Petrie sought “to rescue the antiquities of [his] native country from unmerited oblivion and give them their just place among those of the old Christian nations of Europe” (Petrie 1845, v). With the goal of ordering the medieval antiq- uities into a systematic account of Ireland’s 50 Fig. 2: “Volunteer Repeal Membership Card (1843-47)" with Irish symbols in the center surrounded by heroes, (from Sheehy, p. 28). Christian past, he developed theories and tech- niques necessary to establish a chronology (Raftery 154). His efforts made these collec- tions increasingly relevant to the aims of cul- tural nationalists in the 1830s and 1840s, who sought to construct an identity for Ireland sur- passing that of Britain’s. Indeed, antiquities in the Academy’s collection even appeared as na- tionalist symbols reproduced on membership cards of Daniel O’Connell’s political campaign to repeal the Act of Union. In 1843 and 1845, O’Connell brilliantly staged his “monster meetings” at historically significant sites, in- cluding the H ill of Tara. 1 2 Here, even before the 1850 discovery, members displayed cards printed with representations of antiquities in- cluding a penannular brooch (fig. 2) — in place of prohibited political flags and banners — as a sign of empowerment (Cooney 152; Owens 1994, 37-39 and 1999, 114-115). Thus, when Waterhouse deposited his “Tara” brooch with Petrie at the Academy in 1850, Petrie surely recognized its potential as a national symbol to be deployed in the ongoing construction of a distinctive Irish identity. Having produced his seminal work on Tara Hill several years earlier, Petrie was careful to refer to the “ancient brooch found near Drogheda” in his 1850 report to the Academy. Dating it in the eleventh or early-twelfth cen- tury, a period when “such arts were carried to the greatest artistic perfection” (1850, 38), he described the brooch as similar in genre to other “Irish fibulae,” but, in its delicate execu- tion and varied ornamentation, clearly “supe- rior” to previous finds (1850, 36). Citing ancient Breton laws that the size and value of a brooch be in proportion to the rank of the wearer, Petrie speculated that the jewelry had belonged to a prince. Most importantly, he attributed its preservation after its recent discovery to the Royal Academy’s efforts “to illustrate the past history of our country, and place it upon a solid basis.” To illustrate the progress of such efforts, Petrie noted how previously, when an Irish an- tiquity had been presented to the Academy, a member queried whether “there exists the slightest evidence to prove that the Irish had any acquaintance with the arts of civilized life anterior to the arrival in Ireland of the Eng- lish.” Declaring that such a remark would now be unthinkable, Petrie concluded his presenta- tion by requesting that as the recipient of “great pecuniary benefit” from the organiza- tion’s efforts to generate interest in such antiq- uities, 13 Waterhouse donate the brooch to the nation — i.e. to the collection of the Academy (Petrie 1850, 39-40). Fortified by Petrie’s imprimatur of its na- tional importance but as yet unwilling to part with his prize possession, Waterhouse sent the “Tara” brooch and replicas for sale (at prices ranging from two to seven guineas) to represent Ireland at several international ex- hibitions. The brooch first traveled to Lon- don’s Great Universal Exhibition of 1851 held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. 14 Accord- ing to Waterhouse in a pamphlet advertising his wares, “visitors. ..flocked in crowds to see it” and two replicas were purchased by the ul- timate arbiter of taste, Queen Victoria (4-5, 14, 19-20). Such visibility attracted growing public interest in the brooch, seemingly mark- ing a turning point in the deployment of me- dieval Irish metalwork as visual evidence in the campaign to shape a national identity on the foundation of a glorious Christian past. Subsequently in 1852, the brooch and replicas were displayed at the Belfast meeting of the British Association, the Great Industrial Ex- hibition of 1853 in Dublin ( Official Catalogue 1853, 91, no. 1181), 1 ’ in Paris in 1856, and again in London in 1863 (Whitfield 1974, 132; Dunlevy 18). The catalogue of the London exhibition, for example, argues that the brooch evidences “the high state of the art of the goldsmith and jeweller, as practiced in Ireland in ancient days.” The entry ends by praising the Tara brooch as the most important relic of its kind yet discovered, and even more significantly, Fig. 3: Ardagh Chalice, Ireland, 8th c., Silver, gold, cop- per alloy, glass, amber, and crystal, National Museum of Ireland, acc. no. 1874:99. by asserting that a people only recently “con- sidered ignorant of almost everything apper- taining to art” possessed a tradition of major artistic achievement ( Exhibition of Art-Indus- try in Dublin 39). Ireland’s past achievement had now become a means of assessing its con- temporary artistry. Varying in quality, size, and style, thou- sands of reproductions of the brooch — some even fabricated as bracelets — were commer- cially produced for private consumption as well as for exhibition. 1 * 5 Sold as emblems of an aris- tocratic past, they were marketed as national ornaments worn by Ireland’s ancient chief- tains. 1 ' The royal patronage of “Tara” brooch replicas touted by Waterhouse in his advertise- ments 1,5 made the more sumptuous examples fashionable ornaments on the bosoms of upper class Irish and English women. Low-end repli- cas in inexpensive hollow-stamped metal were consumed by tourists increasingly attracted to O Ireland by Petrie’s guidebooks and topographi- cal maps (Washer 118). But such popularization of a precious arti- fact was not without risk. During its numer- ous peregrinations the brooch lost several of its ornamental panels (Whitfield 1976, 5-28), causing increasing concern among antiquari- ans. Nationalist and antiquarian Henry O’Neill deplored the “irreparable injury” to the brooch since it came into Waterhouse’s hands and called for its transfer to the Royal Irish Academy (1863, 50). In a consummate act of self-interested philanthropy, the Water- house firm finally sold the “Tara” brooch to the Academy in 1868 for the exorbitant sum of £200, with the condition that it never leave Ire- land (Mitchell 130). In the very year that the brooch moved from commercial ownership to museological protec- tion, a silver chalice 11 * (fig. 3), four brooches/ 0 and a smaller unadorned bronze chalice 21 were dug up by the son of a tenant farmer during a po- tato harvest at the site of a Celtic fort (rath) near the village of Ardagh, in County Limerick. This hoard was buried on the side of a bank in the fortifications, probably as the result of Viking activity in the late-ninth or tenth century (Bhreathnach 2001, 18-19). The path of this find from farmland to the protective ownership by the Royal Irish Academy was strikingly differ- ent from that of the “Tara” brooch that was un- earthed eighteen years earlier. St. Mary’s Con- vent, Limerick, the owner of the property and thus of the objects found on it, conveyed the Ardagh hoard directly to the Royal Irish Acad- emy for examination shortly after it was dis- covered (Dunraven 433-435; Gogan 17-19; Mitchell 138-139, Bhreathnach 2001, 15-16). For the second time in less than twenty years, Irish land yielded nationalists tangible evidence of the splendor of Ireland’s early Christian civilization. So important was the Ardagh discovery that the British expropriated it in accordance with the laws of Treasure Trove and transferred ownership to the Royal Irish Academy. 22 This decision recognized that the objects had been found “buried,” not as in the case of the “Tara” brooch, on the surface of the land. 23 The discovery of the Ardagh hoard fortu- nately coincided with the vice-presidency of the Academy of Petrie’s close friend, Edwin Wyndham-Quin, 3rd Earl of Dunraven (1812-1871). A wealthy amateur antiquarian, steeped in I reland’s landscape and the romantic tradition of medievalism, Dunraven was also a Catholic convert. Having traveled throughout Ireland, drawing and photographing local ru- ins, 24 he chose the foremost British architect A. W. Pugin (1812-1851), designer of the medieval court in the Crystal Palace, to renovate his County Limerick home in a Gothic Revival style (Sheehy 61). As a committed medievalist, Dunraven enthusiastically embraced the newly excavated Ardagh objects, eager to have them analyzed and to record the circumstances of their unearthing. He immediately requested that Edmond Johnson, a jeweler on Suffolk Street in Dublin, 25 study, clean, and repair the chalice. The results of Johnson’s disassembly and investigation formed part of a lengthy pa- per on the chalice that Dunraven presented to 5 2 the Academy at its 22 February 1869 meeting. In memorable language, he spoke of the site and chance unearthing as if recounting a folk tale: In the parish, and close to the village of Ardagh, in the County of Limerick, there is a rath, called Reerasta. This rath is of the usual character, and of average size, its internal diameter being about fifty-seven yards. It is situated on a farm held by a widow of the name of Quin, and has been partly leveled for the purpose of tillage. She has for many years been under the impression that gold in large quantities was secreted somewhere within its precincts. She informed me that about twenty years ago, while tilling the ground, a beautiful chalice of gold was turned up about fifty yards west of the fort. Upon my inquiring what became of it, she told me that one day her children took it out of the house to play with, and that she never saw it again. Towards the end of September, 1868, her son was digging potatoes in the fort at the south-western side. On reaching the base of the bank, and close to a thorn bush, he found the surface soft; he drove the spade down between the roots of the thorn, and felt it strike against something hard, like metal. While cleaning the earth and roots to see what this could be, he thrust down his hand, and laid hold of the long pin of a fibula. He then exca- vated to the depth of about three feet, and found a most beautiful cup laid in the earth, with a rough flagstone on one side of it, and inside the cup was a smaller cup and four fibulae. The small cup was the only article broken by the stroke of the spade. Excavations have since been made in the immediate vicinity of the spot where these articles were found, but nothing has turned up. (Dunraven 433) Dunraven immediately recognized the ec- clesiastical significance of this seemingly secu- lar find. 26 In the very year in which the House of Commons was actively debating a bill for the disestablishment of the Irish church, Dun- raven identified the object as a silver chalice. Comprising 354 pieces according to Edmond Johnson’s analysis (Dunraven 438), it was splendidly decorated in cast gilt bronze, en- graving, delicate punched inscription naming the apostles, enamel, crystal, plaited silver wire, and gold filigree." 7 Such workmanship, Dun- raven wrote, displayed “a freedom of inventive power and play of fancy only to be equaled by the work upon the so-called Tara brooch” (439). Unable to locate a rath named Reerasta in the historical sources, Dunraven cited local lore to support his claim that the horde was deposited during the Danish invasions. In local tradition, he explained, the Irish took refuge in the fort during Danish persecutions: “The old people say that a great battle was fought on this spot before the time of Brian Boromha; the accuracy of the tradition as to the battle is corroborated by the number of human bones dug up in mak- ing the present road beside the fort.” He re- ported, moreover, that “in later times” Mass was celebrated at the site, and that a holy well named after St. Molua (d. 622) in the vicinity of Ardagh suggested that an ancient church was founded there by him (Dunraven 483-484). 28 This tradition, in addition to the “extreme beauty, grace and delicacy of the workman- ship” especially of the “peculiarly Celtic design called the trumpet pattern,” led Dunraven to the conclusion that “this most beautiful exam- ple of our ancient art was executed either in the ninth or tenth century” (451-452). Dunraven’s 1869 address before the members of the Royal Irish Academy launched the chal- ice on a trajectory culminating in its status as na- tional icon. He described it as among Ireland’s greatest early treasures and, perhaps, most significantly, as having no rivals in England. When, in addition, the elegance of form, the rich and harmonious coloring of the component parts, as well as the variety and beauty of the designs, and the surprising skill of the workmanship are taken into consideration, we have every reason to rejoice that so exquisite a specimen of the skill and taste of the workers in metal of this country nearly one thousand years ago has been thus so strangely and unexpectedly brought to light. (452) Together, the Ardagh chalice and the Tara brooch served as principal catalysts for the Celtic Revival decorative style that remained 53 fashionable in the British Isles until the 1920s." 9 Their popularity and influence on world de- sign was due, in no small part, to the work of commercial artisans like Edmondjohnson. By means of electrotype — an accurate moulding method that uses both electrolysis and a plat- ing vat — Johnson began to produce replicas of the chalice (no. 13) and brooches (no. 14) in the Ardagh hoard as well as of the Tara brooch (no. 12). His technical analysis of the construction of many other Irish antiquities in the Royal Irish Academy, as well as his impressions and plaster casts of them, informed these replicas. Although he strove to reproduce the originals in size and method of assembly, he “corrected” and “improved” the works by replacing lost el- ements and areas of wear (Washer 114). In his reproductions, Johnson sought to convey the “magnificence and splendour” of medieval ob- jects that were once in “actual use’ ’ (7)- He thus fabricated modern works like salvers and sugar bowls that imitated design elements of the newly excavated antiquities (Sheehy 155, pi. 124; Washer 116). Through the dissemina- tion of such commercial products, Johnson transformed ordinary domestic objects into daily reminders of Ireland’s medieval past — and, therefore, into ubiquitous emblems of nationality. Nearly two hundred of Johnson’s replicas of Irish antiquities, most reproducing objects from the Royal Irish Academy’s collection, were displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They ranged from the most sumptuous objects to simple fibulae, brooches, and torques, and varied in quality O (see Smith 108-109). Johnson explained the source of this project in an accompanying booklet: The idea of making exact facsimile copies of all the most important speci- mens of our celebrated ancient Irish art metal work occurred to me on the first announcement of the “Great World’s Fair” at Chicago. I had peculiar facili- ties for carrying out this work from the fact that my pattern drawers contained impressions and plaster casts actually taken from these relics of antiquity as they were found from time to time. In nearly every case some slight restora- tion was necessary to clear the dirt of ages from their fine traceries, and thus they found their way into my hands and those of my ancestors who pre- served exact moulds of these art treas- ures which cannot now be touched in any of the various institutions in which these collections are preserved. (7) Johnson’s electrotype replicas appeared in two sections of the Chicago Exposition: in the British Manufactures area and in the two Irish Villages on the Midway. The latter, an amuse- ment section, juxtaposed them with copies of Irish medieval castles, stone crosses, and Dun- raven’s photographs of medieval Irish monu- ments. All of Johnson’s facsimiles in the Expo- sition were bought by the Columbian Museum in Chicago, after which the replicas began to be sold through Marshall Field’s and other stores in the Midwest, as well as at TifFany and Com- pany in New York City (Washer 114). There, they may have come to the attention of the Metropolitan Museum whose curator of met- alwork, John Buck, purchased dozens of repli- cas between 1906 and 1908, including those in this exhibition (nos. 12, 13, and 14). Through decades of international exhibi- tions and commercial exploitation, the Tara brooch and Ardagh chalice, products of what is now termed a “golden age” of Irish art, 0 be- came the major material sources, along with the Book of Kells 31 for constructing icons of Irish nationality. Waterhouse and Johnson’s replicas, as well as those by other firms, 3 " contributed to a process whereby “the two finest examples of goldsmiths’ work of the Christian period in Ireland” (Stokes 1886, 451) gained an audience far greater than that ordinarily available to works of fine arts at the time. In the course of the twentieth century, an original nineteenth- century emphasis on the ground from which these objects came — near Tara in County Meath and in Ardagh, County Limerick — faded before the growing realization of their place in the cultural, historical, and art histori- cal landscape of Ireland ." 3 Carefully mapped on a theoretical spatial and temporal grid by 150 years of scholarship, the Tara brooch and Ardagh chalice epitomize the highest achieve- ment of Irish medieval workmanship, with an artistry comparable to that praised by the twelfth-century Cambro-Norman writer Ger- ald of Wales in his Topography of Ireland. A mar- ginal illustration in the earliest manuscript of his text (no. ig), probably illuminated accord- 54 ing to his instructions, depicts an artist from Kildare illustrating a book that Gerald de- scribes as the “result of the work, not of men, but of angels.” 3 ‘ , Similar language has long been applied to the great discoveries of medieval Irish metalwork: in 1989, for example, the British Museum titled its exhibition including such masterpieces The Work of Angels (Youngs). The exquisite detail of the Tara Brooch and Ardagh chalice is now reproduced photographically on ordinary objects like postal stamps and schoolbook covers, and even digitally on computer screens. But despite years of commercial exploitation, the iconic status of these medieval objects, unearthed at a period of evolving nineteenth-century political and cul- tural nationalism, endures today as a daily re- minder of a shared Irish identity. ❖ I thank Vera Kreilkamp and Niamh Whitfield for numerous suggestions that have informed this essay and my undergraduate research assistant Emily Hankie for collecting bibliography. Endnotes 1 Recent archaeological investigation, however, has led schol- ars to question whether Tara was a “royal” site. See Newman, esp. xiv-xv; Bhreathnach and Newman 7-19 and for bibliography, Bhreathnach 1995. 2 The Ordnance Survey mapped all of Ireland on the scale of six inches to the mile, recording many neglected monu- ments. For discussion see Andrews; Boyne 8-50. 3 On Petrie see Stokes 1868; Raftery 153— 157; Mitchell 95-99 and in this volume Berger 57-61. 4 For discussion of Petrie and his role in the nationalist move- ment, see Hutchinson 74-95. 5 National Museum of Ireland, acc. no. R 4015. For detailed discussion of all aspects of the brooch see Whitfield 1974, 1976, 1993, 1997, and 2001. 6 The connection of these replicas to the Irish land was con- sidered so important that Waterhouse advertised the replicas as made “from the mineral products of Ireland,” including Wicklow gold and Irish pearls and malachite (Dunlevy 18). 7 Only a limited number of objects have been excavated at Tara. The most well known are two gold tores dating from about 1200 BC, unearthed in about 1810. From the early medieval period, there is an annular brooch in the British Museum (Youngs 97-98, no. 77) and a block of red enamel (Youngs 201, no. 196) that may have been found there. For discussion and bibliography see Bhreathnach 1995, 29 and 145-148. 8 On the history of the collections of the Academy see Mitchell 106-144. 9 This move coincided with a program of national archaeolo- gy throughout the British Isles. The Irish Archaeological Society was founded in 1840, and Petrie was active in found- ing the Celtic Society in 1845. The British Archaeological Association was founded in 1843, the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1845. In addition dozens of county societies, including a prominent one at Kilkenny, were founded in the 1840s and 1850s. For discus- sion see Champion. lOFor example, the nationalist and antiquarian artist Henry O’Neill devotes an entire book in 1863 to collecting and illus- trating examples (including the Tara brooch, 49-54) of Irish medieval craftsmanship that he believes to be in a “com- pletely national” style and “the very finest examples of orna- ment ever executed” (V). He also devotes a chapter to quo- tations from non-Irish authors praising the Irish medieval style (9-16). On the “national character” of Irish stone cross- es see O’Neill 1857. The uniqueness of the Irish medieval style, for which O’Neill argues, supports his theory of Ireland as a nation unified by an indigenous medieval artis- tic culture. For discussion and bibliography on Irish stone crosses as cultural emblems see Williams 2000, 1— 11, 43-52; 2001, 141-151. 11 At first, excavated antiquities passed through watchmakers and jewelers, but later specialized dealers took over the trade. On private collections, dealers, and excavations sup- plying Irish antiquities see Mitchell 97-98; 104-112. 12 In his address at Tara ( The Nation, 19 August, 1843, 707), O’Connell (to whom the Ordnance Survey Map, no. 8 in this exhibition, belonged) reveals how the site was exploited for contemporary political purposes by nationalists: “This is emphatically the spot from which emanated the social power — the legal authority — the right to dominion over the furthest extremes of the island, and the power of concen- trating the force of the entire nation for the purpose of national defense. On this important spot... I protest against the continuance of the unfounded and unjust union.” 13 On the day Petrie presented the brooch to the Academy, 9 December 1850, Waterhouse registered a copyright for a design for his Tara replica (Dunlevy 17). 14 Seeing the Tara brooch alongside its replicas at the Crystal Palace and recognizing that many of the brooch's decorative motifs were similar to those painted in the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero D.IV) may have inspired the then Bishop of Durham in 1853 to commission that manuscript’s present metalwork binding based on the book’s illumination (Brown forthcoming). 15 The whole collection of the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy, as well as antiquities and replicas of them from other sources, were displayed, to the public virtually for the first time, at the Irish Industrial Exhibition held in Dublin in 1853. This was the best and most comprehensive collec- tion of Ireland’s antiquities ever brought before the public. The works shown in an antiquities court — an unusual fea- ture for an industrial exhibition at the time — comprised Irish objects, primarily in stone and metal, from the Iron Age through the fifteenth century. The purpose of the inclu- sion was clearly stated repeatedly throughout the Exhibition Expositor and Advertiser, 24 vols, Dublin, 1853. Seeking to conflate the past and present in people’s minds, the organiz- ers used these objects to provide tangible evidence of a peri- od when Ireland was in the forefront of artistic development and to signify that the promise of Ireland’s industrialized future lay in the illustrious past of the Irish people. 16 For examples see Sheehy, pis. 1 1 , 70, 76; Camille 20-21. 17 Waterhouse states “Ireland can now boast of the continued use of peculiarly national ornaments, worn by her princes and nobles in ages long since past” (4). 18 For examples of advertisements see the Conservative of Drogheda September 7, 1850 and the 1853 Tourists Illustrated Handbook of Ireland reproduced in Whitfield 1974, 133 pis. 6a-b. 19 National Museum of Ireland, acc no. 1874:99. 20 National Museum of Ireland, acc. nos. 1874:101-104. See Bhreathnach 2001, 15-16. 21 National Museum of Ireland, acc. no. 18 74:100. 22 For details and discussion of transfer of ownership in the 1870s see Gogan 1932, 19-20 and Mitchell 136-141. In 1861, the crown delegated to the Royal Irish Academy the franchise to administer Treasure Trove in Ireland. 23 For discussion of the “Tara” brooch and the law of Treasure Trove see Whitfield 1974, 122, 133— 134. 24 Margaret Stokes published this work after Dunraven’s death in Notes on Iri$h Architecture. 25 On the firm see Washer 107-121. 26 For recent discussion of the ecclesiastical significance of the hoard’s contents see Bhreathnach 2001, 16-21. 27 The materials and construction of the chalice were analyzed and compared to Johnson’s description in the Research Laboratory of the British Museum between 1961 and 1963. See Organ 238-271. 55 28 Gogan 1932, 20-26 expands upon Dunraven’s historical description of the site, again without revealing any impor- tant political or historical connections. For the most recent discussion of the site see Bhreathnach 2001, 16-19. 29 Based on decorative motifs from ancient Celtic art in Ireland and Britain and closely related to the English Arts and Crafts movement, the style was used to decorate a wide range of objects including metalwork, textiles, jewelry, wall decorations, and stone carvings. Making its first appearance in the 1840s, the Celtic Revival reached the height of popu- larity in the 1890s. For discussion see Sheehy 147-175. 30 Both objects are now dated to the eighth century. For a recent and concise discussion of the “golden age” in Irish metalwork from the later seventh to the mid-ninth cen- turies see Ryan 26-41. The idea of an artistic “golden age” must have been inspired by the same term used by histori- ans, like the nationalist Eoin MacNeill (Phases of History, Dublin 1919), for the early medieval period when, he argued, the Irish people unified through Christianity and hence, the Irish nation was formed (Cooney 154— 155). 31 Dublin, Trinity College Library MS A. 1.6 (58). 32 Including West and Son and Hopkins and Hopkins, which even fabricated a brooch based on the Ardagh Chalice (Sheehy 86-87, 155, pi. 125; Washer 118; Dunlevy 19-20). 33 With the rest of the antiquities in the Royal Irish Academy, the Tara brooch and Ardagh chalice were transferred to Dublin’s newly opened Museum of Science and Art, which, with the emergence of the Irish Free State in 1922, changed its name to the National Museum of Ireland. See Mitchell 132-136. The National Museum, where they remain today, is the national repository for portable archaeological material from Europe. 34 See Brown, “Shaping and Mis-Shaping: Visual Impressions of Ireland in Three Illuminated Manuscripts,” (44). Works Cited Andrews, J. H. A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth Century Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bhreathnach, Edel. Tara: A Select Bibliography. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1995. ---. “The Cultural and Political Milieu of the Deposition and Manufacture of the Hoard Discovered at Reerasta Rath, Ardagh, Co. Limerick.” Pattern and Purpose in Insular Art. Ed. M Redknap, N. Edwards, S. Youngs, A Lane and J. Knight. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2001. 15-23. Bhreathnach, Edel and Conor Newman. Tara. Dublin: Government of Ireland, 1995. Boyne, Patricia. John O'Donovan (1806-1861) a biography. Kilkenny: Boethius, 1987. Brown, Michelle. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe. Lucerne: Facsimile Verlag, forthcoming. Camille, Michael. “Domesticating the Dragon: The Rediscovery, Reproduction, and Re-Invention of Early Irish Metalwork.” Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival 1840-1940. Ed. T.J. Edelstein. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 1992. 1-20. Champion, Timothy. “Three Nations or One? Britain and the National Use of the Past.” Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe. Ed. M. Diaz-Andreu and T. Champion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. 119—145. Cooney, Gabriel. “Building the Future on the Past: Archaeology and the Construction of National Identity in Ireland.” Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe. Ed. M. Diaz-Andreu and T. Champion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. 146-163. Dunlevy, Mairead. Jewelry: 17th to 20th Century. Dublin: National Museum of Ireland, 2001. Dunraven, Earl of. “On an Ancient Chalice and Brooches late- ly found at Ardagh, in the County of Limerick.” Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 24, 1867-1874: 433-454. The Exhibition of Art-Industry in Dublin. Dublin: Virtue & Co., 1853. Gogan, L. S. The Ardagh Chalice. Dublin: Browne and Nolan Limited, 1932. Hutchinson, John. The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State. London: Allen & Unwin, 1987. Johnson, Edmond. Description and History of Irish Antique Metal Work Facsimile Reproductions. Dublin, 1893. Mitchell, G. F. “Antiquities.” The Royal Irish Academy: A Bicentennial History 1785-/985. Ed. T. O. Raifeartaigh. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1985. 93-165. Newman, Conor. Tara: An Archaeological Survey. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1997. O’Neill, Henry. Illustrations of the Most Interesting of the Sculptured Crosses of Ancient Ireland. Dublin, 1857. — . The Fine Art and Civilization of Ancient Ireland. London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1863. Official Catalogue of the Great Industrial Exhibition. Dublin, 1853. Organ, Robert. “Examination of the Ardagh Chalice: A Case History.” Application of Science in Examination of Works of Art. Ed W. Young. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1973. 238-271. O Riordain, Sean P. Tara: The Monuments on the Hill. Dundalk: Dundalgan, 1954. Owens, Gary. “Hedge Schools of Politics: O’Connell’s Monster Meetings.” History Ireland (1994): 35-40. ---. “Visualizing the Liberator: Self-fashioning, Dramaturgy, and the Construction of Daniel O’Connell.” Eire-Ireland 34 (1999): 103-130. Petrie, George. “On the History and Antiquities of Tara Hill.” Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 18 (1839): 25-232. ---. The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, Anterior to the Anglo- Norman Invasion. Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1845. 5 ^ — . “On an Ancient Brooch Found Near Drogheda.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 5 (1850): 36-40. Raftery, Joseph. “George Petrie, 1789-1866: A Re-Assessment.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 72c (1972): 153— 157. Ryan, Michael. Metal Craftsmanship in Early Ireland. Dublin: Country House, 1993. Sheehy, J. The Rediscovery of Ireland's Past: The Celtic Revival, 1830-1930. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980. Smith, Elizabeth. Medieval Art in America. University Park: Palmer Museum of Art, 1996. Stokes, Margaret.” Inquiry as to the Probable Date of the Tara Brooch and Chalice found near Ardagh.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 2 (1886): 451-455. Stokes, William. The Life and Labours in Art and Archaeology of George Petrie. London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1868. Washer, Cheryl. “The Work of Edmond Johnson: Archaeology and Commerce.” Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival 1840-1940. Ed. T. Edelstein. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 1992. 106-121. Waterhouse & Co. Ornamental Irish Antiquities. 2nd ed. Dublin: I. & E. MacDonnell, 1853. Whitfield, Niamh. “The ‘Tara’ Brooch: An Irish Emblem of Status in Its European Context.” From Ireland Coming. Ed. C. Hourihane. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 211-248. ---. “Corinthian Bronze and the Tara Brooch.” Archaeology Ireland 11 (1997): 24-28. — . “The Filigree of the Hunterston and ‘Tara’ Brooches.” The Age of Migrating Ideas. Eds. R.M. Spearman and J. Higgitt. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993. 118-127. — . “The Original Appearance of the Tara Brooch ."Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 106 (1976): 5-30. “The Finding of the Tara Brooch.” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 104 (1974): 120-141. Williams, Margaret. “The Sign of the Cross: Irish High Crosses as Cultural Emblems.” Diss. Columbia University, 2000. — . “Constructing the market Cross at Tuam: The Role of Cultural Patriotism in the Study of Irish High Crosses.” From Ireland Coming. Ed. C. Hourihane. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 141-160. Youngs, Susan. The Work of Angels. London: British Museum, 1989. °§° Sacred Landscapes and Ancient Rituals: Two Water colors by George Petrie Pamela Berger O 4 HE GREAT CELTIC REVIVAL OF LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY IRELAND WAS IN NO SMALL PART INITIATED BY THE WORK OF GEORGE PETRIE. HIS STUDIES OF ANCIENT MONUMENTS AND INSCRIPTIONS, AS WELL AS HIS COLLECTIONS OF EARLY IRISH MUSIC AND METALWORK, LED TO THE FLOURISHING OF A CULT OF Celtic art and history and contributed to the development of cultural nationalism. His studies of motifs from newly discovered sculp- ture, jewelry, and liturgical vessels became a major source for those who were to translate the ancient Celtic style into a national vocab- ulary of ornament. By the early-twentieth century, groups working toward political and cultural autonomy looked to this recently res- urrected past as they fashioned an Irish iden- tity based on what could be read as a rich, in- digenous cultural heritage. Petrie’s work thus both anticipated and nourished the achieve- ments of Ireland’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Literary Revival. This paper focuses on a different dimension of Petrie’s achievements: two of his watercol- ors, both dealing with land that had been sacralized in the distant past. Last Circuit of Pil- grims at Clonmacnoise (1828) depicts the ruins of a monastic burial ground made holy by the re- mains of Early Christian monks (no. 16); St. Brigit’s Well (1830) portrays the pre-Christian cultic site of an ancient therapeutic goddess, a place that, through syncretism, was later dedi- cated to Saint Brigit (no. 15). Both watercolors bear witness to a deep-seated human attach- ment to sacred space. Petrie recorded this at- tachment and valorized such spaces, giving them a new meaning for future generations. Petrie’s career as a scholar was intercon- nected with his work as a painter. What moved him as an artist impelled him to undertake the precise measurements and descriptions neces- sary for rigorous archaeological studies. What excited him about the particularity of the Irish landscape drove him to study the strata of cul- tures on the land. And, in order to arrive at such knowledge, he recorded inscriptions, collected artifacts, and secured ancient manuscripts. Born in Dublin in 1789, George Petrie was an only son of Scottish parents and thus be- longed to a Protestant middle class, rather than to the majority Catholic Irish population or the ruling-class Ascendancy. His earliest journal entries were begun when he was nineteen. 1 In them, he registers the irony that the Irish, with so rich a cultural history, still suffered “under the accumulated evils of poverty and degrada- tion.” Even as a young man, Petrie recognized that they were denied access to their history by scholars who had “taken up the subject to bring it into contempt” (qtd. in Stokes 23). Since the eighteenth century, a growing in- terest in the past encouraged antiquarians to ex- amine the extant ruins of Ireland’s landscape — with a particular focus on the Round Towers appearing throughout the countyside (Leerssen 108). However, these early scholars had none of 57 Fig. i: George Petrie, Ruins of Clonmacnoise , Kings County. Engraved by J. and H. S. Storer, in Beauties of Ireland, Vol. 2. by J.N. Brewer. London. Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper. 1826. the linguistic, textual, or archaeological re- sources necessary for an accurate determina- tion of either the origin or the uses of these unique architectural structures. Thus, they de- veloped some wild hypotheses: that they were Chaldean fire-structures, phallic emblems, or even Buddhist temples. Basing his work on solid scholarship, Petrie ridiculed these fan- tasies and derided those supposedly “learned people” who attributed these Round Towers to the Phoenicians, the Persians, or the “Indo- Sythians” (Petrie Eccles. Arch, n-12, 124). He foresaw that eventually his work would under- mine assumptions that invading or distant cul- tures had erected Irish antiquities. Under- standing the importance of an accurate national history based on firm knowledge of inscrip- tions, manuscripts, and archaeological re- mains, he dedicated his life to that end. When still young, Petrie began visiting re- mote pagan and early Christian sites in the Irish countryside and recorded these youthful experi- ences in his journal. These entries reveal the emotional and intellectual sources of his life- long preoccupation with landscape and the an- cient structures on it. He scrambled through underground vaults and guessed that the re- mains he found within were “human bones burnt” (qtd. in Stokes 2-3). As he walked around circles of standing stones he speculated about the meaning of the strange lines incised on their edges. He learned that pilgrims still flocked to cromlechs and practiced rites that he surmised might be thousands of years old. Marveling at cairns rising up to support what he thought might be “pagan altars,” Petrie wrote about a pre-Christian “spring well renowned for its me- dicinal virtue.” He realized that many of the Christian sites he explored might be related to the still more distant pagan past, and intuited from his knowledge of recent Irish folklore that ancient ruins were later given Irish names. Many of his early hunches were corrobo- rated by twentieth-century scholarship. Arche- ologists now realize that megalithic passage tombs and cromlechs, originally constructed at least two thousand years before the first mil- lennium, were used by later peoples as cultic sites where animal bones formed part of the rites. Today, the incised marks on the edges of the Neolithic uprights are recognized as exam- ples of Ogham script, a pre-Latin form of Celtic writing. Scholars have only recently been able to decipher these Ogham inscrip- tions as memorials. Petrie grasped that the ancient attachment to the land and the rituals associated with it were part of la longue duree. He speculated that the Christian festival manifesting itself in the St. Lammas fairs, celebrated on August 1, was connected with pagan rites; the twentieth- century research of Maire MacNeill demon- strated that such fairs did indeed develop from the pre-Christian Celtic Lughnasa assemblies (287). Indeed, the archaeological vestiges of the many-layered culture of Ireland — Neolithic, Celtic, Christian — were apparent to Petrie, who anticipated the modern scholar’s under- standing of syncretism, of how a feature of the landscape or a structure on it can be “rededi- cated” to a new belief system. From 1817-1821, Petrie studied drawing in England, and upon returning to Ireland, he again explored the countryside, sketching mountains, rivers, waterfalls, and ruins. These images were intended to be turned into engrav- ings for travel books meant for a growing leisure class fleeing England’s industrial revo- lution and seeking “pretty sights” 2 (fig. 1). Ironically, although belonging to a reigning colonial system that contributed to the eradica- tion of Celtic languages and customs, this middle- and upper-class audience delighted in images that included “picturesque” peasants and rustic villages. Unlike his contemporaries, in his own wa- tercolors Petrie rejected the merely picturesque. Whereas recent research on the patterns of Irish landscape arts suggests that contempo- rary Victorian artists stayed close to Dublin and Wicklow, Petrie traveled to relatively inac- cessible areas, remote from the fashionable tourist sites of the day (Duffy 30). His journals 58 O reveal that he sought out historically resonant landscapes “...composed of several of the mon- uments characteristic of the past history of our country, and which will soon cease to exist...” Petrie wrote of his desire to “connect with them the expression of human feelings equally be- longing to our history...” (qtd. in Stokes 15); he achieved his goal in the 1928 watercolor, Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise (no. 16). Themes woven into the journal and de- picted in the watercolors express many of the central tenets of Romanticism, the dominant literary and artistic movement of the nine- teenth century that profoundly influenced Petrie as a young man. Infusing Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise with a light that ap- pears spiritual, Petrie invites the observer to ex- perience something of the sentiments he felt when he first saw the monastic complex. Let the reader picture to himself a gentle eminence on the margin of a noble river, on which, amongst majes- tic stone crosses and a multitude of ancient grave-stones, are placed two lofty round towers and the ruins of seven or eight churches, presenting almost every variety of ancient Christian architecture. A few lofty ash trees, that seem of equal antiquity and sanctity, wave their nearly leafless branches among the silent ruins above the dead.... On the left still remain the ruins of an old castle, once the palace of the bishops, not standing, but rather tumbled about in huge masses on the summit of a lofty mound or rath.... Readers who have had no expe- rience of the feelings excited in the mind by scenes like this, can have little idea of the deep effect they are capable of producing... (qtd. in Stokes 28-29) H ere, the language of a young man’s jour- nal reflects that Romanticism later to be summoned up by his painting of the same scene. Describing ancient Christian monas- tic architecture as well as old castles or raths, Petrie expresses his elevated feelings through words such as “noble,” “majestic,” and “lofty.” Nature in the form of antique, sanctified trees contributes to the silent, ele- giac mood. All his senses were alive to — even excited by — the shapes, colors, and sounds of the sacred place. Although the engraving made from Petrie’s early drawing of Clonmacnoise is viewed from an angle similar to that of the watercolor, the earlier image is rigid and dry by comparison (fig. 1). It is dominated by the verticals of the trees, the block-like ecclesias- tical structures, and stiff unemotional figures; the funeral cortege in the middle ground fails to elicit any sense of melancholy. In the later watercolor, however, Petrie totally transforms the engraving of Clonmacnoise — imbuing the painting with visual representations of his earliest emotional response to the site. The saffron glow of the sky and the setting sun are reflected off the finely incised grave slab in the foreground. The crevice between the small dark knolls behind the slab opens a trajectory that leads past a line of three back-lit pilgrims and through the path of sunlight gleaming on the Shannon. The details of the painting reveal the artist’s interest in nineteenth-century ritual suggestive of medieval pilgrimage: the figures participate in a circuit of the faithful. Those closest to the foreground rise up from the dark chasm surrounding the gravestones. The cav- ernous space out of which they move is remi- niscent of the pits from which souls arise in traditional medieval Last Judgements. As the figures in the foreground emerge from the abyss, they proceed to the left and approach a church facade. In front of the arched entrance, a penitent kneels in prayer before she enters. To the right of the church is another stop on the circuit, an ancient stone cross. At the foot of the shaft are worshippers, some prostrate, others kneeling or bending in silent medita- tion, as the sun illuminates the sculpture that adorns the side of the shaft. The scenes carved on this cross at Clonmacnoise depict the Crucifixion and the Last Judgement, themes pertinent to this watercolor, although Petrie has chosen to set the cross into a hazy middle ground where the sculpted figures are dis- solved in tones of gold and gray. One pilgrim has left the circle around the cross and passes into a space crowned by the distant ruins of a Norman castle and a chapel. The stone slabs of the graveyard are arranged so that they form L-shapes leading the eye toward the right. A procession of supplicants passes in front of the round tower and down the slope toward the next holy site, as a pilgrim, 59 wearing a flowing cloak and holding the tra- ditional staff, points out the way. The themes woven into Petrie’s journal and depicted iconographically and stylistically in this watercolor are part of the fluid movement known as Romanticism. As with other roman- tic painters, Petrie seeks to elicit a strong emo- tional response, first through his style, with a highly contrasted palette, warm tones, dra- matic lighting, and sweeping diagonal vistas, and then through his subject matter. He has chosen particularly romantic motifs: majestic ruins evoking the distant past; tombs in a graveyard calling forth thoughts of the end of life; thousand-year-old structures representing the long-neglected and rich “medievalism” found in the Irish landscape; churches, crosses, and processions bearing witness to the religious revivalism inspired by the reactions against eighteenth-century rationalism. As with other romantic painters, Petrie is fascinated with the “folk,” the peasants enacting their ancient rites. By his thematic choice to portray the poor Catholic supplicants with dignity, he reveals a subtle hostility toward an establishment that demeaned Catholic tradition. Although the elements of the watercolor — the church, the castle, the round tower, and the cross — are diffused in a romantic haze, the artist’s knowledge of archaeology is evident in his imagery. From his study of inscriptions on the slabs of Clonmacnoise, as well as from the early manuscripts he had consulted, Petrie knew that this monastic complex had once been the cemetery of princes desiring burial in sacred ground close to where monks had O worked and prayed. He was aware that those medieval monks, who had copied Celtic mythological and early Christian texts, had long been unrecognized and undervalued: “In a dark age,” he declared, these monks “marched among the foremost on the road to life and civ- ilization” but were “checked and barbarized by those who were journeying in the same course and ought to have cheered them on” (qtd. in Stokes 34). The land at Clonmacnoise had been consid- ered holy for over a thousand years: the site of the second Petrie watercolor in the exhibition, St. Brigit’s W ell (no. 15), for over two thousand. In this small painting, Petrie again evokes long-practiced rituals — supplicants petitioning divine powers for health and well being. Both works are grounded in his fascination with the ancient resonances of sacred space. Although the site depicted in St. Brigit’s Well was nomi- nally Christian, Petrie understood its deep pa- gan antecedents; as with so many other pagan holy places it was “rededicated” to a Christian saint. Early medieval culture provides many examples of such rededications, the process now recognized as syncretism. A couplet in the “Leabhar Breac” — an Early Christian Irish text — describes the sixth-century St. Columba consecrating a pre-Christian well: “He blessed three hundred miraculous crosses. / He blessed three hundred wells which were constant” (qtd. in Stokes 17). Again, Petrie visually explored what schol- arship has since recognized. In pre-Christian Ireland goddesses were usually linked with the earth, but they were also associated with water. Though Eire, the Great Mother goddess, was a personification of the land, the name of the River Shannon reveals that it too was con- nected with an Ancient Goddess. 3 Even more frequently than rivers, springs are associated with pagan goddesses, especially Brigid, and thus, when the goddess was syncretized with the sixth-century historical figure Saint Brigit, the springs and wells formerly linked with the goddess came to be dedicated to the saint. Cogitosus, Brigit’s eighth-century biogra- pher, verifies this link. He recounts how, to heal her sick foster mother, Brigit drew water from a well and made it into a “tasty and intoxicat- ing” liquid that immediately cured the woman (Cogitosus 123). Later, Brigit produced a mirac- ulous spring when her brothers taunted her by saying that she would be forced to marry: the “...beautiful eye which is in [her] head will be united with a man.” “Brigit promptly told them to ‘...apply... my staff to that sod in front of you.’ It was done. A stream gushed forth from the earth” (Cogitosus 125). These tales from the earliest stratum of the Brigit legends are multiplied many times in later texts and folkloric accounts. Petrie chose a surprising angle from which to depict the site, for his interest is not in the well, but in the petitioners who have come to seek healing. On the right, a stream emerges from a dark cavern screened by craggy branches. The water snakes around a promon- tory and disappears behind a hillock on the left. The vessels and staff in the right foreground al- lude to a classical motif; such urns evoke those traditionally held by river gods often reclining 60 Fig. 2: Stephen Vedder, Megalithic Upright, 1988, infrared black and white photograph. Collection of the photographer. in the corners of earlier classicizing paintings. Petrie paints the pilgrims in garments that, for him, evoked the red and purple colors of tradi- tional Irish dress. The women face what we cannot see, the well of holy water. In some locales, the practice of visiting ther- apeutic wells dates only from the last few hun- dred years. Petrie’s holy well, however, has far more ancient resonance, for on top of the grassy mound that shields the well is a standing stone — one of the many megalithic uprights still found in the Irish landscape (fig. 2). Al- though their purpose remains enigmatic, schol- ars are confident they date from the Neolithic past (before 2500 BCE). These uprights might have had astronomical relevance or they might have marked a sacred site, as seems to be the case in this image. The Celts incised their own symbolism or their Ogham script on the up- rights. After the fifth-century Christianization of Ireland, these Celtic symbols were supple- mented by crosses, a syncretistic effort to newly sacralize the ancient megaliths. Stand- ing stones, such as the one in Petrie’s water- color, bear witness to the Neolithic, Celtic, and Early Christian layers of Irish history. St. Brigit’s Well and The Last Circuit of Pil- grims at Clonmacnoise depict sacred landscapes and the rituals they inspired — devotional prac- tices that, in certain cases, have continued un- til our own time. 4 In these watercolors Petrie celebrates not only the multi-layered history of Ireland, but also the deep emotions that these landscapes and their monuments can evoke. Both his writings and his painting, indeed his whole life’s work, call for an appreciation and preservation of the ancient remains that had been ravaged by neglect. 5 Petrie was a pioneer, putting Irish history on a more scholarly foun- dation and giving value to its monuments of cultural heritage so that they could be protected and preserved. The guardianship of the land was a problem in Petrie’s time: how much more so in our own. ❖ Endnotes 1 William Stokes published excerpts from Petrie’s journals, as well as his own commentaries in The Life and Labours in Art and Archaeology of George Petrie, London, 1868. 2 See Ireland Illustrated, by George Newenham Wright, 1840; The Beauties of Ireland, by James Norris Brewer, 1926. 3 In Ptolemy’s second-century map of Ireland the Shannon is named Senos, the Irish word sean, the Welsh hen, standing for “Ancient Goddess.” See O Madagain, 54. 4 Over a dozen holy wells in Ireland are dedicated to Saint Brigit and are now protected by the community. Petitioners still leave votive offerings, crutches, rosaries, ribbons and holy pictures at these wells (Logan 136). Professor Mary Ellen Doona recounts her visit in February 2000 to a Saint Brigit holy site in County Cork. She saw a “bubbling pool of water" below a “Biddy Tree” covered with strips of cloth that had recently been tied on the branches. Beside the tree and spring was a life-size statue of Brigit. (Personal communication). 5 None of the churches, towers, sculpted crosses, or slabs was valued or protected in the 1820s when Petrie first visited Clonmacnoise. The church walls sheltered cattle, weeds thrust out mortar, broken stones were carried away to be reused. Landed proprietors, churchmen, new settlers, and local country people all were contributing to the slow destruction of the architectural remains. Works Cited Duffy, P. J. “The Changing Rural Landscape 1750 - 1850: Pictorial Evidence.” Ireland, Art into History. Eds. Raymond Gillespie and Brian P. Kennedy. Dublin: Town House, 1994. 26-42. Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination. Cork: Cork University Press, 1996. Logan, Patrick. Irish Folk Medicine. Belfast: Appletree, 1999. MacNeill, Maire. The Festival of Lughnasa. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Cogitosus.“The Old Irish Life of St. Brigit.” Trans. M.A. O’Brien Irish Historical Studies. Vol. I. No. 2, September 1938. 121-134. 0 Madagain, Breandan. “The Picturesque in the Gaelic Tradition.” Decoding the Landscape. Ed. Timothy Collins. Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1994. 48-59. Petrie, George. The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, anterior to the Anglo-Norman Invasion; comprising an essay on the origin and uses of the round towers of Ireland. Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 2nd edition, 1845. Stokes, William. The Life and Labours in Art and Archaeology of George Petrie. London: 1868. O 61 °§° Observing Irish Romantic Landscape Painting Katherine Nahum O HE TERM “ROMANTIC,” ONE OF THE MOST UNWIELDY IN AN M ART HISTORIAN’S VOCABULARY, REFERS TO A BROAD, AND SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY RANGE OF ART. COMMON TO VARYING DEFINITIONS OF ROMANTICISM, HOWEVER, IS THE NOTION THAT THE MOVEMENT PRESENTS ATTITUDES THAT DIFFERED FUNDA' mentally from those of the eighteenth cen- tury in which reason and certainty were thought to underpin all human exchange and artistic expression. These changed attitudes and art are characterized by newly valued extremes of emotions, often experienced by a hero facing an uncertain world. The fol- lowing observations concerning works in the present exhibition suggest that in Ire- land, Romanticism, first associated with the antiquarian movement’s redefinition of the country’s cultural past, 1 also characterized itself in paintings alluding, often in dis- guised or sublimated forms, to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social trauma. 2 Romanticism and its later elaborations in- creasingly became tied to idealized but para- doxical notions of the West as the site of a Gaelic Irish identity. In the nineteenth century, the opportu- nities for Irish artists to appreciate Euro- pean landscape paintings grew through their exposure to Dutch, French, and Eng- lish paintings in London where they trav- eled to find patronage (Crookshank 1978, 211-12). As Ireland experienced the eco- nomic and social trauma of poverty and famine, as well as the political disorder ac- companying a long struggle for independ- ence, painters were moved to find an artis- tic language to address such upheaval. As a far -reaching artistic movement comprised of contradictory definitions and themes, Romanticism offered a flexible visual lan- guage to express complex responses to the social landscape. James Arthur O’Connor Although O’Connor’s Pleasure Grounds, Ballinrobe, 1818 (no. 25), has been described as deriving from Claudian pastorales (Hutchin- son 12-13) or classical landscapes, its arrange- ment suggests an early romantic motif. The compositional focus that begins at the river, drawing the eye inward — past gentle hills, a copse of trees, the great house, and the mill in the background — slyly redirects our gaze from bucolic parkland to the small but heroic red- coated figure of a young man. He is a distinct individual, a romantic figure, 3 perhaps the es- tate owner or a soldier from the barracks to the right. Set before a strict orthogonal path inflected with patterns of light and dark, the figure appears about to embark on some momentous journey or to have arrived at a significant juncture in his life. If he has cast the estate owner as the military hero of his own life and demesne, O’Connor may be cleverly affirming his patron’s ascendancy. % O Fig. i: James Arthur O’Connor, A Thunderstorm, The Frightened Wagoner, 1832, oil on canvas, 25 1/2” x 30”, National Gallery of Ireland. Whereas O’Connor’s earlier landscape frames a subtle, incipient movement toward Romanticism, The Eagle’s Nest, 1830 (no. 26), is overtly romantic. A wagoner attempts to lead horses into the river, while above loom stormy skies and a rocky crag — sublimely hostile as- pects of nature that obstruct any progress along life’s journey. This dramatically visual vocabu- lary culminates in O’Connor’s A Thunderstorm, The Frightened Wagoner, 1832 (fig. 1), the painting for which the artist is best known. The obsta- cles imaged in both romantic works may obliquely refer to the social circumstances of the time and the artist’s own struggles: the stressful lack of English and Irish artistic patronage and a depressed economy in Ireland after the Napoleonic wars. George M.W. Atkinson A recurrent motif of romantic art is the “storm tossed boat,” a subject alluding to man’s course O through life and his spiritual search for mean- ing. 4 Atkinson had been a ship’s carpenter be- fore becoming a self-taught painter in his mid- thirties (Murray 16). The earliest marine paintings we know of imply, through their title or date, the artist’s knowledge of the Great Famine; 5 as he sketched and painted the vessels before him, he presumably became aware of the effect of famine on Irish economic and mar- itime life. These early marines are the stiff, awkward efforts of a fledgling painter, but by the time he undertook A Ship at Anchor at Sun- set, 1851 (no. 29), Atkinson discovered a befitting artistic vocabulary in Romanticism that transcended the specific horrors of famine and cast them in a universal image: the “storm tossed boat.” He may have been aware of Cas- par David Friedrich’s and Thomas Cole’s many paintings depicting boats found in those artists’ “Stages” or “Voyages” of life series, for A Ship at Anchor at Sunset is far more sophisticated than Atkinson’s earlier marines and reflects a familiarity with a broad range of Irish and Eu- ropean romantic paintings. It depicts the same type of ship and employs similar lighting and the mysteriously glowing colors found in An Emigrant Ship, Dublin Bay, Sunset, painted by his compatriot, Edwin Hayes in 1853 (fig. 2). That source enabled Atkinson to suggest an allegory of both emigration and the ship of state wracked by famine. Atkinson may have found in J.M.W. Turner’s strikingly romantic The Fighting Temeraire Towed to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838 (fig. 3), a model upon which to base his own image of Ireland’s troubled statehood. Redolent of Britain’s great but diminished naval power after Nelson and the heroic age of the British Empire during the Napoleonic wars, the Temeraire is being hauled at sunset to the scrap heap, whereas Atkinson’s moldering, three-masted ship has reached its final moor- ing. The fragments of one mast have floated to the rocky shore where a bird, representing the soul, will soon fly off. The ship as a symbol of human destiny faces the dying sun. William McEvoy The Beare Peninsula in Kerry was one of the ar- eas worst hit by the Great Famine, but like Atkinson’s nautical work, McEvoy ’s landscape, Glengariffe from the Kenmare Road, Evening, 1862 (no. 28), does not refer directly to that recent social disaster (Marshall 72). The painting’s inherent moodiness, however, suggests a ro- mantic response to the social trauma, one that conjures countless paintings by Friedrich, and in particular, Mountain with Rising Fog, 1815 Fig. 2: Edwin Hayes, An Emigrant Ship, Dublin Bay, Sunset, 1853, oil on canvas, 23” x 34”, National Gallery of Ireland. 66 '