As Fintan Cullen makes clear in his introduction, there has always been - indeed there continues to be - a problem with Irish art being appropriated by that of our nearest neighbours. To illustrate this difficulty Cullen discusses, at some length, a very fine late 18th-century pastel portrait by Hugh Douglas Hamilton, which was "saved" for the British nation in 1997 - even though there was no direct connection with that country. Neither the artist nor his subjects were British, and the associations with Ireland were - Cullen points out - left unmentioned during the struggle to retain the work in London.
This book, therefore, can be seen as an attempt at reclamation, a process which has been ongoing ever since Professor Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin jointly published their book The Painters of Ire- land, c.1660-1920 more than two decades ago. That work established the Irish credentials of a great many artists, not least Hugh Douglas Hamilton, who until then had frequently featured only in histories of British art.
However, it would be a disservice to Fintan Cullen to suggest he had only a single purpose in producing this book. Another of its many pleasures for the majority of readers will be the discovery of authors whose work is otherwise not easily accessible. It is unlikely that Anthony Pasquin, the alias of an English hack journalist of the late 18th/ early 19th century will be widely known, even though his An Authentic History of the Professors of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Ireland, published in 1796, was the first full-scale account of the visual arts in this country.
The inclusion of Pasquin's entry on James Barry is, therefore, of enormous interest, as are a pair of letters from the Earl of Charlemont to William Hogarth (in which regrets are expressed on his inability to pay the artist), an extract from Thomas Bodkin's discussion on modern Irish art in the Irish Free State Official Handbook of 1932 and Myles na gCopaleen's essay on a Rouault painting in The Irish Times 10 years later. The earliest item in the book dates from the first decades of the 18th century, the latest (an examination of Alice Maher's art) was first published in the mid-1990s. Between the two are many other extracts will can only be of benefit to any analysis of Irish art.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist