How all the pieces were traced and put together: On March 9th, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), London launches an exhibition on the Irish in Victorian London.
For almost four years, I have worked with the historian Roy Foster on Conquering England, the first Irish thematic exhibition mounted at the NPG. An exhibition of Irish portraits took place at the gallery a quarter of a century ago, in 1969, but this is the first time a major London venue has addressed the contribution of the Irish to Victorian London. In choosing our material, we have focused on the contribution of migrant Irish writers, actors, artists and politicians to London life to show the rich and long-lasting Irish presence in what was then an imperial capital.
Some years ago, while researching a book on Irish portraiture also commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, I was struck by the large number of Irish Victorian material held by that great institution.
After alerting Roy Foster to the cache of drawings by the illustrator Sydney Prior Hall, executed for the popular journal The Graphic, it struck us that something could be done with such a rich resource. The existence of these drawings (such as the sketch of Parnell with his solicitor entering the Royal Courts of Justice, illustrated above) acted as our inspiration.
The literary success of the Irish in London in the Victorian period was not hard to conceive in terms of visual images.
Roy Foster's work on Yeats had revealed the many portraits and other material relevant to that particular tale, while the NPG is rich in images of Shaw and Wilde.
We had great fun in tracking down an otherwise unpublished poster for the first public dramatisation of Bram Stoker's Dracula in the Royal Shakespeare Company's archive. The politics section of the exhibition was aided by the S.P. Hall drawings of the Parnell era which could then be seen as a continuation of the earlier London fascination with the representation of Daniel O'Connell.
In retrospect, the trickiest part of the curatorial search was in creating a viable visual arts section. That great Victorian success story, the Cork-born Daniel Maclise, was not a problem.
His conquering of London has been well reported. The same could be said of other Irish artists, from the sculptor John Henry Foley to the painter John Lavery.
As I suggest,it was not until I noticed the abundance of Irish female models in Victorian London artists' studios that an argument began to take shape.
A trip to rural Co Kildare brought me face-to-face with a Maclise oil sketch of an allegorised Erin of the 1840s which depicts the Irish writer and campaigner, Caroline Norton.
Back in London, the British Museum Print Room revealed further riches: exquisite prints of some 20 to 30 years later by non-Irish artists such as James McNeill Whistler and James Tissot of Irish women models represented as modern realities. A visual history of the Irish Victorian émigrée soon began to emerge.
Fintan Cullen