WHYTE'S EXCEPTIONAL IRISH ART MONDAY 7 DECEMBER 2020

EXCEPTIONAL IRISH ART ·7 DECEMBER 2020 AT 6PM 69 Literature: ’Irish Art in London’, Freeman’s Journal, 26 April 1904, p.6 ‘Racing Pictures’, The Sportsman, 3 May 1924, p.4 ‘The Royal Academy – A First Look Round’, The Scotsman, 3 May 1924, p. 11 ‘The London Exhibition’, Edinburgh Evening News, 3 May 1924, p. 5 ‘Irish Art in London’, Weekly Freeman’s Journal, 3 May 1924, p. 4 ‘The Royal Academy ...’, Belfast Newsletter, 5 May 1924, p. 9 ‘Art – The Royal Academy I’, Truth, 7 May 1924, p. 863 W.G. Constable, ‘The Royal Academy’, The Saturday Review, 17 May 1924, p. 501 By 1924 Orpen’s portrait commissions were all-consuming and with those of John McCormack (National Gallery of Ireland) and Mr Knoedler at the Royal Academy it was regarded as a brilliant year for the artist. For the contemporary press, the painter, who frequently courted controversy, provided good copy, and 1924 was no exception. The Irish paper, Freeman’s Journal, leaked in advance of the exhibition’s opening, that this year, Orpen ‘is expected to put Mr Munnings and the most famous painters of horses in the shade’. A week later, other papers repeated the obvious comparison and Punch in its second tranche of Academy cartoons, ‘Second Depressions’, even took up the case, suggesting that one of the protagonists on the left, identified by The Sportsman, actually thought Orpen was ‘Mr Munnings’ (fig 1).1 Whether the picture was compliment or critique, remained an open question. Nevertheless, for the art historian, WG Constable, writing in The Saturday Review, it was obvious that Munnings, the most celebrated English horse painter, was becoming an ‘automatic machine’, and Orpen realised it. Professor Kenneth McConkey November 2020 1 See Kenneth McConkey, ‘English the scene ... English the atmosphere ...’ in An English Idyll, A loan Exhibition of the Works of Sir Alfred Munnings, 2001, (Sotheby’s London), p. 20. Fig 1. Anon, ‘Royal Academy – Second Depressions’, from Punch 1924.