A construction firm is the generous patron of a historic exhibition on silver and gold that opens today in Cork, writes Mary Leland.
As our interview ended, John Bowen said, almost as an aside, that he hoped I accepted he didn't have two heads. The allusion, I suspected, was to my own denunciations of the tide of property developers sweeping through the city with which, as head of a prominent building company, he is associated. But I had never considered him as a two-headed ogre: I just disapproved of the way he used the one head he possessed. And yes, that had changed when discussions of the programme for Cork as European Capital of Culture 2005 revealed that John Bowen, chairman and chief executive of the Bowen Construction Group, was organising what promises to be one of the most important exhibitions to be held in the city about the city. Ever.
Airgeadóir; Four Centuries of Cork Silver and Gold will be formally opened at the Crawford Municipal Gallery today by Gay Moloney, Master Warden of the Dublin Company of Goldsmiths.
If, as Browning suggested, man must have a bliss to die with, John Bowen's bliss is history, and particularly the history of the brief flourishing of Cork's silver and gold-smiths. Even while plans for this year were still tentative, there was an awareness that if Cork were to have an artistic renaissance it needed a Medici. Patronage is not a feature of modern progress in the city, and the habit of philanthropy, once enshrined among the wealthy merchants and industrialists of Montenotte and Blackrock, has long died away. In a city where property owners and developers are amassing untold wealth, it is obvious that the instinct for cultural distinction has atrophied and, with a very few and discreet exceptions, is not going to be revived for Cork 2005.
John Bowen would prefer to be discreet, too. But for him, the capital of culture designation was an opportunity to tell a story which hasn't been heard before. "This is not self-promotion, but a sense of what is the right thing to do and yes, there is the philosophy that if it's to be, it must be me! This year is a showcase, and there seemed to be no better time in which to tell this story, even though there's no illusion that this is a mainstream interest. But those who are interested are not few."
Bowen is meticulous in his attributions to fellow sponsors and to Conor O'Brien, co-author of the book which is to be published by Collins Press in association with the exhibition. And while the Bowen group is bearing most of the cost (relieved a little by the construction of the very specific museum-quality showcases in the company work-shops) additional funding, both financial and in kind, has come from Cork 2005 (with a grant understood to be €50,000), the Crawford Gallery, AON Insurances, Wilson Architecture (designers of the exhibition as a series of linked thematic displays), Anglo Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland-Private Banking, Dowling & Dowling Designs Ltd, O'Sullivan PR Ltd, and others who supported the project as their contribution to Cork 2005.
But it's John Bowen's passion and it's his party. A man still happy to reflect the personal and professional influence of his late father Vincent, founder of the company, he has a sturdy sense of civic pride and civic obligation. "I think people who are in a position to do something for the city need to do something. Cork 2005 should be seen as a national event, where the merit lies in attracting people who might otherwise not have come here. But I also believe that the year should function as a catalyst, energising a pride of place and a sense of possibilities. I want it to be something which will speak volumes, which will be 'best in class'."
Bowen is gratified that Dublin's Company of Silversmiths intends - perhaps for the first time - to hold its annual meeting in Cork as a gesture to the concept of this exhibition.
For if there is a unifying personal theme underlying it, it is one of integrity: the validity of the approach matching the intrinsic quality of the subject matter. "Sterling quality was defined no later than 1300. Just think of what hallmarks are: the verification of fineness of quality, the earliest form of consumer protection in a guarantee of a standard integrity of the metal, of the material rather than the workmanship or the design."
This loan exhibition will show 250 items from churches, museums, institutions and galleries and from more than 15 private collections both here and abroad. Apart from a display mounted by Leonard Clarke (returning to Cork from British Columbia for the occasion) in his shop in Academy Street in 1967, nothing of this kind has been attempted before.
"Cork never had its assay office, although the smiths had looked for one frequently and only gave up on that in 1813 - they were thwarted by the opposition of the Dublin smiths who were granted hallmark authority in 1637. That also meant that Cork had the practical problem of safe transport to Dublin for marking."
It was with that almost mythical breed of merchant princes that Cork's most significant tradition of silver making in the city (and in the towns of Kinsale and Youghal) was to develop. Then, as now, Cork had need of princes, having no resident nobility; the men who filled that gap were the urban equivalent of strong farmers, sturdy men, Catholic and Protestant, content (given the city's apparently regular failures in its banking houses) to keep the family wealth in plate. That, of course, also allowed for some display: "Cork's prosperity was built on the provisioning trade and spawned its own kind of middle class which wanted to demonstrate its status and refinement."
Surveying these people and their times, the exhibition establishes a context: the "Master and Wardens and Company of the Society of Goldsmiths of the City of Cork" was incorporated in 1656, but records refer to earlier goldsmiths and silversmiths and the small body of 16th-century ecclesiastical plate suggests an ability to meet local needs.
From about 1700 to the Act of Union provides a period which Bowen has audited thoroughly. Within about 20 years of that act, the craft and trade of hand-wrought silver disappeared almost totally from Cork and was not revived until 1910, after which it enjoyed a relative flowering during much of the 20th century.
Airgeadóir offers a journey of slow-release discovery through this store of riches. Civic regalia such as Robert Goble's 1696 Mace of the Trade Guilds of Cork (sent by the Victoria & Albert Museum) is traced forward to the commissioning of the Mace for University College, Cork, in 1910. Domestic silver of different size, quality and function is included, along with ancient and modern ecclesiastical silver and gold, ranging in dates from the end of the 1500s to the present.
Tankards dated from circa 1675 to c 1715 include one by Youghal goldsmith Hercules Beere in 1675; Youghal was the home of the first Earl of Cork before he moved to Lismore and church plate bearing the same marks is associated with places connected to his descendants, the Earls of Cork, Orrery, Shannon and Burlington. Another tankard is a rare example of Kinsale silver, dating from 1715 and by Joseph or William Wall, while the Huguenot Adam Billon is also represented. Immigrant Huguenots had a strong influence on Cork for a time, not least as gold and silversmiths.
But while John Bowen speaks of the beauty of these tankards, I remember finding in Apsley House, the London home of the Duke of Wellington, a freedom box made by Carden Terry and his daughter Jane Williams of Cork. The exhibition will have an example of another box from the same partnership, this one of 20-carat gold made for the conferring of the freedom of Cork on Wellington's brother, the Lord Lieutenant, Marquess of Wellesley.
It isn't all long ago and far away. Modern silversmiths such as Rachel Newenham and Chris Carroll are included, and there is a special dedication to the firm of William Egan and Sons.
Because the 1910 commission for the UCC mace stipulated that it be actually made in Cork, Egans re-established the trade of hand-wrought silver-making in the city by apprenticing boys from the North Monastery school to imported workers from Dublin. But although once synonymous with the art and craft of the silversmith in 20th-century Cork, Egans' splendid Patrick Street premises have been taken over by a fashion house, and the elegant frame for the clock over the door is now warped and rusted.
It was Egans who made a silver model of St Ann's, Shandon for the Cork Industrial Exhibition of 1883. As this model goes on display once again in Airgeadóir, the hope must be that the current owners of Egans will be reminded of what is due to their premises. And even as developers gradually eliminate Shandon itself from the Cork skyline, perhaps, in the exemplary passion of an individual businessman, Cork has found its Medici.
Airgeadóir; Four Centuries of Cork Silver and Gold at the Crawford Municipal Gallery from tomorrow
