60
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
68
Attributed to
Daniel MacDonald
(
or McDaniel) (1821-1853)
TASTING THE POITÍN IN IRELAND
oil on canvas
14
by 18in. (35.56 by 45.72cm)
Daniel MacDonald showed promise as an artist from a very young age.
His father James, whose real name was MacDaniel, was an
accomplished artist and musician. Daniel was born in Cork where, like
his father, he began to be noticed for sketches and caricatures of local
people, which they both published in the same volume of prose. He
was only 13 when he produced these illustrative etchings. From his
father’s Patrick street address in 1842 he sent his first four pictures to
Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Academy, and subsequently just one to
London’s Royal Academy. As his life and promising career was cut
short by fever (he died in 1853), only a few of this talented artist’s
pictures survive.
His surviving work demonstrates his fascination and concern with
local people’s lives. His socio-realist and narrative paintings are
valuable windows onto Irish material culture. Like contemporary
artists such as Topham and Fripp, who pleased the critics with
‘
truthful’ representations, he entices sympathy with the hardships of
rural life. His
An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their
Store
(
fig.1) (Collection of the National folklore Collection, UCD) is one
of the only pictures graphically delineating the horror of discovery of
the potato blight. Other titles further suggest his concern for the
National tragedy of the Great Famine, on a personal level, for example
Figures Gathered Round a Coffin
(
National Gallery of Ireland
collection).
The covert distillation of whiskey known as “poitín”, using potatoes
and barley, was widespread in rural Ireland, but highly illegal.
MacDonald’s depiction of this was perhaps influenced by that of the
famous Scottish genre painter Sir David Wilkie who toured Ireland in
1835.
Wilkie’s huge painting
The Irish Whiskey Still
(1840)
resulted, and
was well known. Both artists’ paintings include three generations
assembled with their typical small pot distilling equipment; a barrel
surmounted by a funnel, a worm, earthenware vessel and jug, at the
crucial point of tasting. Like Wilkie, MacDonald places his taster
standing on the right, facing his ragged children on the left, complete
with their Irish wolfhound. Classical training encouraged artists like
Wilkie to depict bare limbed figures in specific poses, perhaps more
appropriate to the Mediterranean than Ireland. From what is known
about Irish stills, MacDonald’s version, with his cave-like shelter seems
the more realistic, as his
still is outside on a
mountainside, where
smoke was
inconspicuous, rather
than indoors.The
inconspicuous makeshift
thatch over MacDonald’s
hearth, propped between
the hillside and a tree,
gives just enough shelter
to the fire that was
essential to the
distillation process.
MacDonald’s style is
characterised by his depiction of attenuated, slim family figures,
highlighted with areas of red, the women and ragged children usually
barefoot (often with a dog), ranged against a background of
mountains and troubled skies.Their aspects of despair, invite viewers
to sympathise with the families’ predicaments.
The arrangement with the taster on the right, facing the family to the
left, that leads the viewer’s eye around in a studied oval composition,
is very similar to that in MacDonald’s painting of fig. 1. Details such as
the father’s single brogue, are fascinating, because shoes were indeed
a very precious commodity, yet essential for digging turf (the brown
fuel heaped in the openwork basket or creel beside the tree).To clarify
this, the artist shows him with his foot resting on his turf slean (spade).
It’s exactly the same type of spade is also painted in fig.1., and the
man’s leg rests in the same singular pose as that of the father in that
painting. Both paintings show a child on the far left with very similar
profiles, both include despairing figures (on the right side) with their
heads on their arms. So many common characteristics of detail,
subject and composition, make it highly likely that this is newly
discovered painting can be attributed to Daniel MacDonald.
Dr Claudia Kinmonth MA(RCA)
November 2012
Further examples:
Claudia Kinmonth,
Irish Rural Interiors in Art
,
Yale University Press,
2006,
fig.201
Peter Murray ed.,
Whipping the Herring
,
Gandon, Cork, 2006, pp.2, 18,
29, 46, 65, 78-9, 98-9, 101-3, 122-3, 134-5, 150-151
€
5,000-
€
7,000 (
£4,000-£5,600 approx)
Fig. 1
An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the
Blight of their Store
.
Image Courtesy of The National Folklore Collection, UCD