EVERY SO OFTEN I despair of the pile of books, letters, old newspaper cuttings, dried-up banana skins, etc, covering my desk and its surrounds, to the point where I almost concede defeat and call in the services of a professional de-clutterer. Then something happens to remind me that, rather than a pile of junk, what is on my desk is an archive. All it needs, really, is a curator.
The de-clutterers of Ireland suffered a major setback some years ago with the arrival in Dublin of Francis Bacon’s studio, now on permanent display at the Hugh Lane gallery. What had been a roomful of chaos in London was lovingly reassembled here and is these days gazed upon with wonder by art lovers, although the horror it provokes among the de-cluttering fraternity may also be shared by any parents who bring teenage children to see it and then try telling them, ever again, to tidy their rooms.
Now the forces of neatness have been dealt yet another blow, thanks to the Denis Mahon archive, some of which has just gone on display at the National Gallery of Ireland. It’s not nearly as dramatic as the Bacon studio, but that’s only because the total collection is far larger. In fact, to have recreated it here, Bacon-style, would have required the use of a five-storey house.
Mahon lived in just such a mansion in London. And during the course of his 100-year-long life, which ended last April, he filled its rooms with books, newspapers, magazines, and documents of all kinds. For the last four decades, he shared his home only with a housekeeper. Despite which, casual visitors could struggle to find a vacant seat.
The director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, recalls that the only route from the door to Mahon’s desk was a narrow path “through a sea of art histories, periodicals, and parliamentary papers, the tide of which had over decades risen to engulf all chairs and tables, leaving . . . nothing for a visitor to sit on but the piles of Paragone [an art journal] or Hansard”.
There were 900 boxes of the stuff transported from London to Merrion Square last year and it will take years to process. What’s now on display is just a small selection of documents, including one from 1917 that marked the then seven-year-old as an archivist in the making. A war-time diary, the page in question is headlined: “If I die, some history about air raids which Denis was in.” He didn’t die. Instead he grew up to be an art expert, specialising in 17th-century Italian painters and in particular Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, nicknamed “Guercino” (the “squinty-eyed”). Guercino and his likes had, for no good reason, become very unfashionable by the 20th century, an ideal situation for an upcoming art collector with a sharp eye. Thanks to Mahon’s scholarship and promotion, their work was soon back in demand, by which time he owned a lot of it.
Independently wealthy (through the family’s Guinness Mahon bank), he never collected for profit. But he was canny buyer who never overpaid, either. In fact, from the evidence of the archive, his approach was not that far removed from the way in which one might buy a horse at the Fair of Muff.
Among the exhibited letters, for example, is one from 1939 to an art dealer who was asking £125 for a painting by Annibale Carracci. In reply, Mahon said he wasn’t sufficiently attracted to pay a “fancy price”, although “unlike most people nowadays” he did have a “certain interest” in “that type of picture”. If “at some future stage”, the dealer was unable to “dispose of it” “above its average market value”, Mahon might make an offer. And so on. He eventually bought the painting for £80.
Throughout his long life, he paid a total of about £50,000 for pictures to whose combined value you could probably now add three zeroes. But even while alive, he had donated much of his collection to museums, including the National Gallery of Ireland, while stipulating that they be exhibited free.
His donations apart, he also gave the Merrion Square gallery one of its greatest coups 20 years ago when helping identify a Jesuit-owned painting of the arrest of Jesus, since loaned permanently, as the work of Caravaggio. Despite the later emergence of a similar, and possibly older, painting in Rome (Caravaggio was well known for plagiarising himself), The Taking of Christ remains one of the gallery’s greatest hits.
MY THANKS to several readers who have suggested that a “chevonier”, the mystery piece of furniture boasted of by the soldier’s wife in the ballad Salonika (Diary, yesterday), is probably better known outside Cork as “chiffonier”.
If so, it is a sort-of closed dresser, with mirror-back, marble top and cupboards: described – a little sniffily – by the Encyclopedia Britannica as “one of the many curious developments of the mixed taste, at once cumbrous and bizarre, which prevailed in furniture during the Empire period”.
The French name means “rag-gatherer”, and suggests, as the encyclopedia puts it, that it was “originally intended as a receptacle for odds and ends which had no place elsewhere”. It now usually serves as a sideboard, I’m told. Which said, it also sounds like the sort of thing into which you could stuff an archive of old newspaper cuttings.