Brigid Ganly is 89 this year, and can look back on a solid, professional and moderately distinguished career as a painter spanning 70-odd years. She is the daughter of Dermod O'Brien, a formidable and long-serving PRHA, and much of her own career has been bound up with the RHA. This exhibition, however, telescopes her career, compressing it into two moderate-sized rooms.
Her husband was a playwright, so stage and costume designs for his work figure prominently in the early section. Almost inevitably, she was drawn for a time to the Lhote-Gleizes type of Modernism, with its carefully organised colour contrasts, rather mechanical diagonals and "lines of force", and generally codified, schematic outlook.
This represented, for moderately advanced painters of the time, a kind of short cut to Cubism. It is not a style which has worn well - though admirers of Mainie Jellett, for example, may not agree - since its surface modernism barely hid a conventional, even academic core. Brigid Ganly acquitted herself creditably in this field, but in the end it was not really the way she saw things, and almost all the remainder of the exhibition is realist and traditional.
The portrait of Dermod O'Brien is one of the exhibition's highlights, while the excellent The Playwright is presumably Lennox Robinson. There are well-painted flower pieces and still-life, some examples of genre realism which are close stylistically to Leo Whelan, a few landscapes and plein-air scenes of people sitting in parks etc. The single self-portrait is unspectacular but accomplished. Throughout, the technique is well-grounded, solid but also sensitive - something, alas, which cannot be said of the majority of RHAs today.
Stylistically Brigid Ganly belongs to a certain era - that of Sean O'Sullivan, Maurice MacGonigal, and certain others who carried on turn-of-the-century realism into the years between the two world wars, and did so with technical solidity and a scrupulous honesty towards what they saw.
Probably the father, or grandfather, of this style is Orpen and while an imaginative or expressive dimension may be missing, there is always decent craftsmanship and more hard thinking than the bulk of modern viewers probably realise.
With that said, however, I would have liked to see rather more, even though the choice is good; two smallish rooms, or 35 works, is scarcely an adequate space in which to display the essence of a lifetime's painting. The catalogue, by the way, contains some interesting reminiscences by the artist (art historians, please note).
Until May 17th
