Yes, the major exhibition of Irish art and craft works at the Art Institute of Chicago opened on St. Patrick’s Day.
But it is almost in rebuke to that holiday, or at least to the sloppy, stereotype-laden way it is often celebrated here.
Laid out in the opening rooms like the belongings in a grand country house, the gathering of more than 300 objects on display in “Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690-1840” demonstrates an Irish taste for making and buying the finer things during a century-and-a-half of prosperity.
“We hope an exhibition like this will show there’s another point of view,” said the institute’s Christopher Monkhouse, who curated the exhibition with the assistance of Leslie Fitzpatrick. “I’m trying to put this material back in the mainstream of decorative and fine arthistory.”
“We hope to avoid the ‘paddywhackery,'” said Fitzpatrick, using a term for all that comes along with reductionist Irish stereotypes.
So while Americans may be more familiar, via a certain university’s spirit wear, with the idea of the fighting Irish, this is about the collecting Irish and the creating Irish.
Entering “Ireland,” in the galleries that most recently held the Magritte show, can feel like stepping onto a “Downton Abbey” set minus the characters prattling on about how profoundly times are changing.
Indeed, if visitors come because of “Downton,” or because of resonances with past, popular museum exhibits on English estate treasures, that is fine with Monkhouse.
To the left, as you enter the exhibition, what is technically the last room is dominated by a 22-foot-long dining table, set with three massive silver pieces, symbolic of the silver and furniture to be found in higher concentrations elsewhere in the show.
A chandelier of the period from the Art Institute’s own collection hangs overhead, and a statue at one end of that room speaks to the open arms Irish collectors of the era had. Bought in Italy on a “grand tour” of the continent, the Venus Genetrix dates to the second century, making it one of the oldest objects in the exhibit.
But to go to the last room first is jumping ahead, though you will certainly be forgiven for peeking in that direction, perhaps imagining a meal adorned by the ceramics, linens, glassware, bound books and musical instruments you will see in other galleries.
“They’re very complex, these decorative works shows,” said Douglas Druick, director of the Art Institute. “I think people will talk about that first room.”
They may well listen too. Music, a combination of commissioned and period pieces, plays in the background.
Painting takes a major role in the exhibition, including works by Irishmen Hugh Douglas Hamilton and George Barret and by the Frenchman Jacques-Louis David and the American Gilbert Stuart, who plied his trade for six years in Dublin before returning to America and renown in capturing George Washington.
A ghostly image of a staging of Macbeth” helps tell the story of the performing arts, while a Dublin city and suburbs map is both work of art and geographic touchstone.
Some paintings were political. A 1790 portrait of a Catholic bishop was a provocative act, Fitzpatrick explained, but not as much so as a 1680 portrait by the Catholic Englishman John Michael Wright. Wright painted a young Ulster nobleman, Sir Neil O’Neill, in red tights, sword drawn, an alert Irish wolfhound by his side. O’Neill would die a decade later of wounds suffered in the Battle of the Boyne, in which Protestant forces defeated Catholic.
“The story of religion in Ireland is very complicated,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re trying to tell it in moments.”
As the first show to cover this time period, “Ireland” fills a major gap in the scholarly presentation of Irish decorative arts, Monkhouse said. It was inspired by his Irish friend, the historian and furniture specialist Desmond FitzGerald, the 29th Knight of Glin, a fierce advocate for recognition of Irish artistic expression who died in 2011.
With guidance by FitzGerald early on, Monkhouse and Fitzpatrick have been putting the show together in earnest for the past five years, though it is much longer in germination than that.
“I first went to Dublin in 1966,” Monkhouse said. “I thought, ‘Oh, someday. …'”
At his stops at various museums in his career, he was creating a mental checklist for this show, which the museum is supplementing with a busy slate of lectures and related events (go to artic.edu for more).
The exhibition ranges from the Battle of the Boyne to the years just before the Great Famine, a time when Ireland was, Monkhouse said, “hugely productive” and “the breadbasket of Europe.”
“It is astonishing that such a show has never been mounted before,” pronounced the British art magazine Apollo in its March issue, “certainly not in Ireland, where until recent decades little interest was displayed in the country’s historical renaissance during what has come to be known as the ‘long 18th Century.'”
After the famine hit, Ireland’s treasures, along with its population, began to disperse, with works packed up in containers and sent, in many cases, to the New World, Monkhouse said.
Collectors bought many pieces, but others filtered onto the market in unusual ways. An enormous, elaborate silver cup at the exhibition’s entry — a “great treasure,” Monkhouse said — somehow found its way to Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, from which it was sold in the mid-1920s.
Behind and above the two-handed cup, a massive set of antlers hangs, almost 10 feet across, from a giant elk that died in Ireland 11,000 years ago. It’s a traditional welcoming symbol of the Irish country house.
Monkhouse knew he wanted such prehistoric horns, but finding them wasn’t easy. One potential source would have cost $20,000.
“I said, ‘Oh, Leslie, let’s call the Field Museum,'” said Monkhouse, who heads the Art Institute’s Department of European Decorative Arts. “They said, ‘We have some, but they’re still attached to the body.'”
Instead, he was able, somehow, to find a pair at the American College of Surgeons in Chicago.
Like in contemporary fine dining, local sourcing turned out to be a mantra for the show. Around half of the objects were located in the Chicago area — there’s a breathtaking first edition of Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” from the Newberry Library — and almost all of them in North America. This isn’t provincialism at work, but rather an illustrative point about what happened to the works.
Bringing it all back together, combining high and commonplace to tell a story of a fruitful-but-overlooked period of history, was a loving labor for Fitzpatrick and Monkhouse. Entering the room of furniture, Fitzpatrick exulted over the “really gutsy carvings. The Knight used to call it ‘beastly’ furniture, in the best way.”
If the American St. Patrick’s Day tradition is to let loose a little bit, then, with this show, the curators have done that in their own, carefully modulated way.
“We wanted to have a little bit of everything,” Fitzpatrick said. “We were ambitious.”
In the Art Institute’s cafes during this show, you can order a Guinness and raise a glass to ambition.
When: Through June 7
Where: Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Tickets: Included with $23general admission. 866-512-6326 or artic.edu
Twitter: @StevenKJohnson
