Ireland on Show: Art, Union, and Nationhood by Fintan Cullen (review)

In his preface, Fintan Cullen declares the focus of Ireland on Show to be “what it was like to see art and have access to an art experience” under the “colonial administration” of Westminster (ix). A few pages later, in the introduction, Cullen notes that key aspects and consequences of that administration in Ireland were the “dearth in artistic patronage, little in the way of administrative patronage and, most importantly, the lack of a sizeable middle class.” Cullen takes Richard D. Altick’s The Shows of London (1978) as his model, explaining that he aims to “analyze the impact of the display of art as a significant political and cultural feature in the make-up of nineteenth-century Ireland” (1). In highlighting the particular role of the middle classes in the public display of art in the nineteenth century, Cullen echoes recent scholarship on both Ireland and museum culture, and raises the particular problem in studying this issue in an Irish context: the problem of defining Irishness and the vexed question of the nature and role of the Irish middle class. Moreover, the book asks the important question of what was actually displayed, rather than what might be of retrospective interest to nationalist historiographies of Irish art: that is, it attempts to disrupt and question nationalist narratives that go back to find evidence of a supposedly authentic Irish art or national school. Thus, for example, he writes that “we must take into account the popularity and preponderance of imperial scenes which offer us an alternative tradition to the concern of recent re-examinations of Irish visual material which has focused mainly on nationalist icons” (55). Indeed, this book makes the very timely intervention of reinserting Ireland into the story of British art exhibitions, and of reexamining Irish art in a British imperial context. In doing so, Cullen contributes to recent work on Irish culture that moves beyond the old nationalist-revisionist controversies to bring the study of Ireland into conversation with the study of European visual culture, the impact of nationalism, the role of the middle class, and the politics of display. That said, Cullen’s case studies reveal that the politics of Home Rule and the particularities of the Irish political and economic situation, the most basic questions of defining “Irishness,” are unavoidable.

This is a short book that moves through case studies rather than through a sustained argument or clear historical contextualization and organization; its methodology might best be characterized as a variety of visual or cultural studies, using snapshots rather than detailed analysis. The first and longest chapter looks at art institutions in nineteenth-century Ireland (meaning Dublin, with a short foray to Cork). The second chapter shows us examples of the dominance of the English school of art and of imperial images in Irish exhibitions, tracing the changing fortunes and controversies over art objects and arguing that imperial art was a byproduct of administration rather than a deliberate policy of anti-nationalism or social control. The third chapter considers representations of Irish suffering in painting and photography (although not, curiously, of the Famine). The fourth chapter delineates some examples of changing representations of the Irish in the United States, noting that increased integration of the Irish-American middle class led from negative stereotyping to an Irish woman being held up as the epitome of American beauty (the Gibson girl). The fifth and final chapter revisits the question of Hugh Lane’s bequest of modern art to Dublin as part of “a wider history—that of the display of and access to art, most especially contemporary art, in Ireland in the period dating from the great Irish Industrial Exhibition held in Dublin in 1853” (161).

In each chapter, it is often unclear why Cullen chose his particular examples, how these fit into a broader context, or what larger argument he is using them to make. Indeed, his conclusions are often banal, as for instance when...