Irish Painting [Paperback]

Brian P. Kennedy (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 141 pages
• Publisher: Town House Trinity House (November 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1860590594
• ISBN-13: 978-1860590597
• Product Dimensions: 13 x 10 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,218,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Essential for anyone with a serious interest in Irish art., January 12, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Irish Painting (Paperback)

Mr Kennedy's book covers everything from the sixteenth century onwards - it even dips, briefly, into the celtic and pre-celtic - but it is in the late 18th and early 19th century that he is most at home. All the usual suspects are here: Yeats, Osborne, O'Connor, Henry, and so on. The book does not set out to make any groundbreaking case for or against the existence of a distict "Irish School" as such. Whether or not such a style is identifiable is a cliche topic in an era when later Irish painters - Henry, Yeats et al - are fetching record prices in the salesrooms. Cliche or not, the question is much debated. Kennedy provides a fair amount of ammunition for both sides, while declining, for his own part, to sign up for either. If anything, he follows the conventional notion of defining Irish 19th and early 20th century painting in terms of negatives: it was NOT as heavily influenced as other schools by the Impressionists, or later the Cubists; it did not jump into the Modernist whirlpool that sucked all other European schools into its vortex... and so on. In all this definition-by-default, Kennedy is spot on. What is missing, perhaps, is passion, and a deeply-biased view (always good to have, if only to know where we all stand) of what Kennedy thinks is good, and what is not. That, he might suggest, is not what the book is about - and that, of course, is fine. Still, there is more here, in fairness, than names and dates. In surveying individual painters, he betrays at least a great degree of involvement and enthusiasm, to say nothing of his formidable scholarship. (Primary sources seem to have been consulted in all cases, and perennial howlers have been squashed somewhere between the cuttings library and the Xerox machine...) Keep this book for reference, but wait awhile for someone to do for 19th century and early Irish art what the formidable Dorothy Walker has already done for the Irish contemporaries (See her Modern Art in Ireland). Scholars seem too reverend to apply her feisty style to the trademark names, but it is time that the cobwebs of genteel scholarship were brushed off the Academicians and the entire pre-Impressionists crew. Someone, in other words, should do a Dorothy Walker on them. Why not Dorothy Walker?