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<title>Bruce Arnold Art Articles</title><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/index.html</link><description>Bruce Arnold Art Articles</description><dc:language>en</dc:language><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:rights>Copyright 2009 Bruce Arnold</dc:rights><dc:date>2012-12-12T09:00:00+00:00</dc:date><admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.realmacsoftware.com/" />
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<lastBuildDate>Wed, 4 Feb 2009 10:41:01 +0000</lastBuildDate><item><title>The Yeats family &#x2013; together again for one last time...</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2012-12-12T09:00:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/yeats-family-together.php#unique-entry-id-36</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/yeats-family-together.php#unique-entry-id-36</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Part of the their story&ndash; the whole of it will never be told &ndash; is to be found in a uniquely comprehensive collection of the written works of the Yeats dynasty, father and four siblings, that goes on exhibition this month at Maggs Bookshop in London's Berkeley Square.


The monumental towering figure of John Butler Yeats, father of four surviving children who made their great mark on Irish literature and art, presided over dysfunction as though it were the gift that might enable artistic talent. 

...Their natural love was clouded by their recognition of his failure and of the burden this placed on each of them, most of all on William Butler Yeats, the eldest, and on their mother, Susan Pollexfen, who bore a lifelong burden that shamed her and depressed her, undoubtedly contributing to her early death.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Review: Literary Fiction: The Restored Finnegans Wake James Joyce &#x2013; Edited by Danis Rose and John O&#x2019;Hanlon</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2012-05-19T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/review-finnegans-wake.php#unique-entry-id-35</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/review-finnegans-wake.php#unique-entry-id-35</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Now, after more than 30 years of scholarship, Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, in a new critical edition of Finnegans Wake, have brought us Joyce's masterpiece in a clarified, perfect text within the grasp of every serious reader. 

...It is there in the magisterial introduction of episode openings and closings in Book IV, in the abolition of the hideous run-on text of all other existing versions, down through the other levels of the writing, with poetry properly printed as poetry for the first time, questions as questions, inserts as inserts and dialogue as dialogue.


...It is true that it would be of great help to scholars if we could now at last have alongside this clear-reading text Rose's much desiderated hypertext, with its multidimensional prospect of Joyce's novel, so that we could see as much "as the hen saw". ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Louis MacNeice&#x2019;s Struggles with Ireland</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-05-29T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/louis-macneice-struggles-with-ireland.php#unique-entry-id-32</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/louis-macneice-struggles-with-ireland.php#unique-entry-id-32</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He took a position leaning on a large granite boulder in Michael Scott&rsquo;s garden, beside the Martello Tower, where the opening was to take place, closed his eyes against the bright sunlight and composed what may have been muddled thoughts about this strange event. 

...He had more savage comments about Ulster, derided Orangeism for its fascist tendencies and told Eleanor Clark, with whom he had an affair and to whom he wrote several long love letters including the longest in the whole collection, of a radio interview in Belfast: 


...Have heard a lot of good stories about Yeats lately from Gogarty & Higgins e.g. when Yeats&rsquo; Spanish doctor wrote an account of his health to Gogarty which G. read out, knowing Yeats wouldn&rsquo;t know what it meant -- &lsquo;This is an antique sclerocardiac&hellip;&rsquo; & Yeats stopped him & rolled the word on his tongue & said &lsquo;Sclerocardiac! ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Finnegans second wake</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2010-03-06T09:00:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/second-wake.php#unique-entry-id-31</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/second-wake.php#unique-entry-id-31</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[But essentially his mechanism for re-editing was correct and it has been followed, in a different way but using the same basic approach, by Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon, the two editors of the new Finnegans Wake.


...Modern editorial theory and practice, followed scrupulously by Gabler in Ulysses, with Danis Rose's participation in that project and his endorsement of Gabler, is to invoke all this material, get back into the mind of Joyce, and deliver as pure a text as possible.


...Described by Seamus Deane, another scholar supportive of what Danis Rose and his brother have achieved, as "astonishing and pleasing beyond measure", it has been designed and printed under the direction of Europe's finest private-press printer, Martino Mardersteig, as his last such venture before retiring. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Monuments to One Artist&#x27;s True Genius</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-10-13T17:57:39+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/momuments-genius.php#unique-entry-id-30</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/momuments-genius.php#unique-entry-id-30</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He is best known for his large statues of Irish patriots that adorn the capital -- especially Wolfe Tone in Stephen's Green and the Thomas Davis fountain on College Green.


...Roderick Knowles, in his book, Contemporary Irish Art, publishes a reasonable account of Delaney's life and creative career and, in addition, puts in a short but very readable essay by the writer Wolf Mankovitz, who was then living in Ireland and got to know Delaney quite well.


...However, the first of the monumental works was in 1966 when he was commissioned by the then government to design a memorial statue and fountain to Thomas Davis for College Green. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Wexford Basks in all the Fun of the Fringe</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-10-10T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/wexford-fringe.php#unique-entry-id-29</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/wexford-fringe.php#unique-entry-id-29</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Part of the genius of Tom Walsh's original concept for classical opera in the town was to create a range of artistic and cultural events to accompany the opera programme, and they run from competitive window displays in the shops on Main Street, to the bewildering number of art exhibitions spread, not only through the town, but way beyond it.


...For the last 10 years, this has been centred on Churchtown House and the unique hospitality of Austin and Patricia Cody, whose house outside the village of Tagoat is a hen's race from the beach at Rosslare and close to Kelly's Hotel, for lunch and Guinness after walking the strand.


...The two have been effectively balanced over the years with the Fringe boasting dramas, one-act plays, the long-lived Guinness "Singing & Swinging Pubs", tours of historic Wexford town and county, some classical music recitals, jazz programmes, light opera, horse-racing, musicals, poetry readings and an enormous number of art exhibitions -- some good, some bad, some awful.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Yeats Clan Were Not One Big Happy Family</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-09-12T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/yeats-clan-family.php#unique-entry-id-28</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/yeats-clan-family.php#unique-entry-id-28</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Adding the failure of Gaelic Irish to come up with words for 'Yes' or 'No', the absence of the verb 'to have', and the use of phrases like 'You might not be wrong' where the English mind favours the appreciably more direct, 'you are right', he delivers a portrait of the painter, who is more of a writer to John Purser, that is truly stimulating.


...Maureen Murphy bases her analysis on the evidence of an employee at the Cuala Press from 1907 to 1935, long after all of the children were reared and when the father, John Butler Yeats was finally in transit to the United States, never to return.


...It is eccentric to produce a book entitled The Only Art of Jack Yeats -- meaning the art of living, when in fact the Jack Yeats legacy and 'art' is in his work as a painter, and this is increasingly the case as other factors diminish. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Spirit of the Hare Bounds On</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-09-05T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/barry-flanagan.php#unique-entry-id-26</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/barry-flanagan.php#unique-entry-id-26</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[In the wider sense, of knowing him increasingly well during the past 10 years, I think both of us suffered from our solitary dispositions and our expectation that people would understand difficult concepts, ideas and perceptions on the basis of trust, if they had no better way of understanding. 

...He sat in front of it, clutching a huge vase of flowers -- "I love flowers, they are important to me" -- and he was holding back, diverting attention from what is not there anyway, a clue to what he is creating and how he is processing it. 

...What he then invited, in a simple phrase about the hares, was to see them as 'found' in exactly the same way as his 'found' art of the 1960s and 1970s had been a way of making us see afresh, an endlessly repeated process of making us see differently. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Welcome Ghosts of Opera Past...</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-22T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/wexford-opera-expectations.php#unique-entry-id-25</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/wexford-opera-expectations.php#unique-entry-id-25</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Then there is a farsa deliberata, a modern work by John Corigliano, an American composer who has set out to present a story in the spirit of three worlds of mixed attraction to opera-lovers: the French Revolution, life in the Palace of Versailles, and the haunting, creative world of Beaumarchais, whose plays have been used as libretti for Mozart and Rossini as well as others.


...Without casting any gloom over music that is attractive, even if at times sombre, it has to be said that during this last period of Donizetti's life he became subject to fits of melancholy and abstraction which developed into intense forms followed by attacks of paralysis. 

...The theatre interested itself in the works of young unknown composers but in the case of Rossini he remained loyal to it during his early formative years, so that five out of his first nine operas were first performed there.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A Tale of Two Great Composers at the NCH</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-29T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/NCH-two-great-composers.php#unique-entry-id-24</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/NCH-two-great-composers.php#unique-entry-id-24</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The National Concert Hall is opening its new season of symphony orchestra visits on the first Sunday in September with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra playing music by Mendelssohn to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth. 

...In a long line of conductors, from Johann Friedrich Doles, the first conductor, in 1745, and followed by the more famous Johann Adam Hiller, who presided for 22 years, Mendelssohn's name was probably the most famous up to the end of the 19th century. 

...Its multiple functions as a concert orchestra, an opera orchestra at the Leipzig Opera, and a chamber orchestra which performs cantatas with the world-famous St Thomas Boys Choir at St Thomas's Church puts it directly in line with Leipzig's earlier leadership of music in Germany.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Re-Naming of Sligo Gallery is Absurd</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-08-15T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/sligo-gallery-rename.php#unique-entry-id-22</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/sligo-gallery-rename.php#unique-entry-id-22</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[When I opened the Sligo Art Gallery, nine years ago, I spoke at some length about the contribution Nora Niland had made to Sligo and of my own association with her from the late 1950s until her death in 1988. 

...This was Nora Niland's view and she did a great deal about it, assembling truly significant Yeats paintings over the years and hoping that one day they would be housed in a proper gallery. 

...Then a letter was written to the Sligo Champion, calling a halt to what was being done and the announcement of June 16 hastily informed the public, on behalf of the gallery, that "we had intended to launch this new name", adding "we welcome the rare opportunity this has given us to discuss the new name".
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Still celebrating Joyce with relish</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-06-20T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/celebrate-joyce.php#unique-entry-id-21</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/celebrate-joyce.php#unique-entry-id-21</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA['Eat, read, and appreciate a jest', that is what relish means, as well as the making of something piquant; and the examples given, in my 1929 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, might well have been culled from James Joyce himself -- 'has no relish for poetry', and 'he thought he could relish a lobster'.


...Richly endowed, relatively speaking, by the generous Kent Education Committee -- which thought nothing of funding my exploration of Joyce's city -- I could indeed 'relish a lobster', in the back bar of Jammet's and work on a new Joycean project that devoured my student energies -- the first presentation on the Dublin stage of his play, Exiles, with Terence Brady playing the part of Richard Rowan and Juliet Tatlow acting the part of Bertha.


...Like all writers, James Joyce would identify with the memorable remarks made by William Faulkner when he received the Nobel Prize for literature: "A life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before."]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Ten Years Tasting the Delights of Tuscany</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-06-27T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/delights-of-tuscany.php#unique-entry-id-20</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/delights-of-tuscany.php#unique-entry-id-20</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[This seems to keep them all in good health for 100 days, thus producing a collection of 100 stories by the great humanist writer and friend of Petrach, Giovanni Boccaccio, whose Decameron became a source book for many other writers around the world.


Within our group -- not of 10 but of 12, though the balance of the sexes was not dissimilar from that in 1348 -- there was a writer who gave us all vivid insights into Dante, Boccaccio, Petrach and others, as just one of the threads of knowledge pursued each day and debated each evening.


...Exploring this side of Florence and the Renaissance art was justified by the fact that the rediscovery of much of this art, and its re-identification, belonged, in part, to the age of Berenson and was fostered and publicised by the international community in Florence from the first half of the 19th century.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Blooms with a view is the Wicklow Way</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-07-04T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/blooms-wicklow-way.php#unique-entry-id-19</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/blooms-wicklow-way.php#unique-entry-id-19</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[I look at that rarity, Californica, now in a cascading flood of colour, since its habit is to cascade downwards, and imagine brides carrying bouquets of the strangely intense, deep flush pink flowers in their hands as they walk up the aisle. 

...This runs from Easter to the end of September, not quite early enough to catch the snowdrop collection at Altamont Gardens in Tullow, Co Carlow -- loosely included in Wicklow for gardeners' delight -- and not late enough to welcome the first buds on the camellias in November and December, harbingers of the fuller crop that stretches into spring again.


...I missed her speech at the opening, but I am sure it was direct and forthright, full of enthusiasm for the art that makes plants known to us and probably touched on the fact of gardening having come into its own this year, with fewer people travelling and the weather providing no excuse at all for not being at work in the soil.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>I will arise and go back to Sligo</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-06-13T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/arise-go-sligo.php#unique-entry-id-18</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/arise-go-sligo.php#unique-entry-id-18</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The more important of the two and the second to be published is The Poetry of WB Yeats which appeared in 1941, almost 10 years before Henn's The Lonely Tower, and is I think the first extended study by another poet, and a very great one who easily rivals Yeats among 20th century poets.


...This is 'A Personal Essay' with a very brief preface outlining MacNeice's own views about his work and beginning with the sentence: "This book is a plea for impure poetry, that is, for poetry conditioned by the poet's life and the world around him". 

...The Fiftieth Yeats International Summer School will be held in Sligo from Monday, July 27, to Friday, August 7, and will include contributions from Denis O'Donoghue, Helen Vendler, Roy Foster, John Kelly, Warwick Gould, Edna Longley and Terence Brown all giving lectures, with many other participants involved in seminars. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The essence of light&#x2c; the essence of cool</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-05-23T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/essence-of-light.php#unique-entry-id-17</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/essence-of-light.php#unique-entry-id-17</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[And however cold it was, standing or sitting before an easel in sub-zero temperatures, Monet and Sisley knew they were bringing the new-found plein-air approach to landscape into a magical domain that has left us enriched by what they found.


...It was therefore a welcome discovery to make at the Royal Hibernian Academy show that snowfalls earlier this year attracted the attention of Carey Clarke and Brett McEntagart in a forceful way, producing, in Clarke's Snow Scene in Wicklow, the finest work in the exhibition.


...The same can be said of many other familiar painters, with sections of walls in the various excellent galleries displaying half a dozen Anita Shelbournes here, a trio of plangent views of his beloved Dun Laoghaire by George Potter, the colourful landscapes of Desmond Carrick and James Nolan and the mixed works of Thomas Ryan showing a studio with a painter at work -- not himself -- a couple of flower studies and an interior of the Palm House in the Botanic Gardens.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Music that is like breath upon water</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-05-30T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/music-water.php#unique-entry-id-16</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/music-water.php#unique-entry-id-16</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[For one thing, when not playing, his head was turned towards the orchestra and at times he became a second conductor, his hands raised to invite a particular sweep of orchestral sound before delivering his own magical part of the work.


...When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra came, some years ago, I remember being greatly impressed by the array of double basses, 10 or 12 of them, more than I had ever seen at the NCH, and it became a kind of benchmark (there were seven on Monday, reduced for the concerto but restored for the Dvorak Ninth Symphony).


...The first in the new season, on September 6, a Saturday, is given by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under its music director, Ricardo Chailly, and with Saleem Abboud Ashkar playing the Mendelssohn Piano Concerto. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Exploring the Inner LIfe of Yeats Family</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-05-21T15:21:45+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/inner-yeats-family.php#unique-entry-id-15</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/inner-yeats-family.php#unique-entry-id-15</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[If the June dating of the work is accurate &ndash; which is possibly in doubt, since in June 1900 there was a heat wave and the large glowing fire in the grate suggests winter or autumn &ndash; then Jack&rsquo;s feelings were mixed about his father sitting close to him doing this portrait.  ...  Jack almost certainly blamed this relatively early death on his father, a fact evident in the brass memorial plaque that used to be in St John&rsquo;s Church, in Sligo, and was paid for by Jack who included his mother&rsquo;s name with her four surviving children, but left out his father&rsquo;s name.  

...I think the sad reality at this stage in the painter&rsquo;s life, just a year short of thirty, with modest accomplishments as a painter, was that in his heart he had severed himself from the wilful and wayward father who had put Susan Yeats and the four children through such a difficult upbringing. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Future of Our National Broadcaster</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-02-14T09:00:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Future-of-Our-National-Broadcaster.php#unique-entry-id-14</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Future-of-Our-National-Broadcaster.php#unique-entry-id-14</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He wrote in his end-of-year column: &lsquo;I can't think of a twelve-month period in which RTE made fewer programmes of substance or quality, but, hey, who needs programmes at all when you can marvel at Montrose's mission to turn every nonentity on its payroll into a celebrity?&rsquo;  

...It could be argued, I had my say, which I did; more enjoyable, perhaps, than the turgid, hectoring, ill-tempered and ill-informed interviewing by RTE on current affairs which seems all too often motivated by prejudice and lack of balance.  


Out of this examination, necessarily personal, there came a conclusion that would force on RTE the need to reform itself, strip away the surplus fat and untalented dross &ndash; I am back on diet again &ndash; and refocus its energies on what is left that is good, leading to a creative rebirth.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Glorious Art to be Seen in London</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-02-28T09:00:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/Glorious-Art-to-be-Seen-in-London.php#unique-entry-id-13</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/Glorious-Art-to-be-Seen-in-London.php#unique-entry-id-13</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He arrived first in London in 1620, and for some mysterious and unexplained reason left again shortly after that, returning in 1632 and spending much of the nine years left to him painting portraits that changed the direction and stature of this wonderful art form. 


...Their work influenced Mainie Jellett and Albert Gleizes in their researches and helped form the remarkable movement in art in the period 1917-1924 that was to shape painting throughout the twentieth century, just as Van Dyck had done with portraiture during his short career in the early seventeenth century.


...The Queen, unsurprisingly, has a plentiful supply of Van Dycks,  including two that are in show at the Tate &ndash; the equestrian portrait of the King and the delicious Cupid and Psyche, in which Psyche, modelled by Van Dyck&rsquo;s mistress, her body barely covered with the end of a scarf, lies sleeping on a bank as Cupid gazes in rapture at her.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Synge&#x27;s Travels to Inspire Us Again</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2009-04-11T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/Synges-Travels-to-Inspire-Us-Again.php#unique-entry-id-12</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/Synges-Travels-to-Inspire-Us-Again.php#unique-entry-id-12</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[In that year, at the request of the editor of the Manchester Guardian, Synge embarked on a summer task which was to write about the Congested Districts &ndash; as they were called &ndash; stretching from Gorumna in the south to the wilds of North Mayo around Black Sod Bay and Belmullet. 


...Both men had been commissioned, Yeats negotiating for himself a slightly better financial deal for his drawings than Synge did for his words &ndash; a part of the arrangement that Synge rather resented &ndash; but not to the point that it led to any disaffection. 

...&lsquo;He told me how once at the fair at Tralee he saw an old tinker-woman taken by the police, and she was struggling with them in the centre of the fair; when suddenly, as if her garments were held together by one cord, she hurled every thread of clothing from her, ran down the street and screamed, &lsquo;Let this be the barrack yard,&rsquo; which was perfectly understood by the crowd as suggesting that the police strip and beat their prisoners when they get them shut in, in the barrack yard.&rsquo;
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Hugh Lane Centenary at the Municipal Gallery</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-06-28T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The%20Hugh%20Lane%20Centenary%20at%20the%20Municipal%20Gallery.php#unique-entry-id-11</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The%20Hugh%20Lane%20Centenary%20at%20the%20Municipal%20Gallery.php#unique-entry-id-11</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Lane&rsquo;s codicil to his own Will, but not witnessed, made the bequest to Dublin, and this was found in Hugh Lane&rsquo;s desk at the National Gallery of Ireland after his tragic death which occurred when the Lusitania, on which he was returning from New York, was sunk by German U-Boats in 1915. 


...In forming his early collections and in trying to make them over to Dublin as part of his attempt to persuade the City to build a proper gallery to house his and other works of art, he ran into much controversy and suffered humiliating disparagements of his choice and judgment of pictures, many of which implied dishonesty in attributions. 

...Colonel Plunkett, who was director of the National Museum and had made the premises available for Lane to show his pictures &ndash; including the disputed Corot &ndash; then played a beastly trick on Lane by hanging photographs of the Corot and the Meszoly pictures side by side at the exhibition entrance. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Departure of Miss Joan Hunter Dunne</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-04-26T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Departure-of-Miss-Joan-Hunter-Dunne.php#unique-entry-id-10</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Departure-of-Miss-Joan-Hunter-Dunne.php#unique-entry-id-10</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The poem about her was later performed in Oxford, and he wrote to Roland Pym, who was designing a backcloth and told him &lsquo;she is now Mrs Wycliffe-Jackson and lives in Ashley Gardens and you ought to go and see her, she is a lovely sturdy creole type with curly hair and strong arms and strapping frame and jolly smile and soft laughing voice, a girl to lean against for life and die adoring&rsquo;.


...Their relationship was chaste and he was conscious enough of her and her very English, middle-class background to be able to tell Pym of &lsquo;her house, rather Letchworth and Welwyny, with toothbrushes airing at open bathroom windows and certainly rhododendrons and evergreens &ndash; and the wire netting of a tennis court enclosure.&rsquo;  

...Pakenham formed the impression that Betjeman &lsquo;had carved out a niche for himself that no other Englishman had done, and had won the confidence of a number of extremists who normally were quite proof against British blandishments&rsquo;.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A Visit to the Folklife Museum in Castlebar</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-07-05T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/A-Visit-to-the-Folklife-Museum-in-Castlebar.php#unique-entry-id-9</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/A-Visit-to-the-Folklife-Museum-in-Castlebar.php#unique-entry-id-9</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[The country life which the museum tells us about, and which has changed for ever since they sat at their studies &ndash; was it richer then than it is now and what do they remember of it?


...Part of  the house is as it once was, when the family occupied it, and more rooms will be added to the two that can be seen, giving the other side of social life which is so vividly depicted in the photographs of boys and  girls.


...He and his family were evicted, and they went off to live and work in Lancashire where Davitt, as a youth, lost his left arm in a mill accident and went on to write and campaign for Irish land reform, first with militancy then more peacefully and more effectively through one of the stormier periods in Irish history. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Mary Kenny and the Celebration of W.B. Yeats</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-06-21T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/Mary-Kenny-and-the-Celebration-of-W-B-Yeats.php#unique-entry-id-8</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/Mary-Kenny-and-the-Celebration-of-W-B-Yeats.php#unique-entry-id-8</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[She was beside Sophie Gorman, who was there to introduce her, to prompt or question her if needs be, but in fact sat silent, as her guest, who was launching Summer&rsquo;s Wreath, delivered a flawless elegy on William Butler Yeats. 


...It is as if the National Library is taking careful note of something that Mary Kenny said about the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, which she has attended and where she found a tendency for his life and work to be enveloped by too much academic attention and too little human understanding.


...His son, Michael, used to joke about the absurdities that were conjured out of the chickens that were kept in their garden when they lived in Churchtown, myths ripped from the poor fowls&rsquo; feathers or extracted from the claws that scratched in the dust.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>William Orpen and his Experiences on the Somme</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-11-01T09:00:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/William-Orpen-and-his-Experiences-on-the-Somme.php#unique-entry-id-7</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/William-Orpen-and-his-Experiences-on-the-Somme.php#unique-entry-id-7</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[How did this son of a Dublin solicitor, born in a comfortable family house in Blackrock, taught art at the Metropolitan Art School in Dublin where he was sensationally successful, and then at the Slade school in Dublin, come to be, among other things, one of the greatest war artists ever? 


...While the new book is memorable for its brilliant colour plates of Orpen&rsquo;s work, the scholarly side of it, by Robert Upstone, the Curator of Modern British Art at the Tate Britain, lurches a bit between generalised speculation and  some pertinent new discoveries in correspondence, including a re-examination of Orpen&rsquo;s ill-health in the later stages of the First World War.  ...  This was published by Paul Hannon in Dublin in 1996 and contained new research material about Orpen at the Front, when he brought the Marchionness of Cholmondeley, whose brother, Sir Philip Sassoon, was Field Marshal Earl Haig&rsquo;s private secretary, up to the Front Lines in his Rolls Royce.  ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>A Visit to Cork</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-05-24T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/A-Visit-to-Cork.php#unique-entry-id-6</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/A-Visit-to-Cork.php#unique-entry-id-6</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[It is other things besides; but since I first went there, in the summer of 1958 as a student from Trinity College I have always welcomed its unchanging comforts of familiar streets and buildings, of the lilting accent and the curious challenging look outsiders get, welcoming, but testing you as well with an unasked question &ndash; &lsquo;Are you ready for Cork?&rsquo;


...It seemed so in the early days of my own visits there, staying with friends in Bandon, exploring West Cork, reading out loud from that comic masterpiece, Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. &ndash; the most vital book ever written about horses and hunting, and perhaps the funniest piece of Irish fiction as well &ndash; and then not returning often enough, or for long enough.


...But it is the paintings of Daniel Maclise, possibly Cork&rsquo;s greatest artist, and James Barry, another contender for that honour, that begin one on an exploration of why the Crawford family believed in art sufficiently to inspire in them the continuing development, first of the Crawford School of Art, then of the Crawford Art Gallery.
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>Sligo Yeatses Come to Town</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-03-09T09:00:00+00:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/Sligo-Yeatses-Come-to-Town.php#unique-entry-id-5</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/Sligo-Yeatses-Come-to-Town.php#unique-entry-id-5</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[When I opened the Niland Gallery in Sligo, some years ago, I gave unstinting praise to  the memory of Nora Niland whom I had known since 1958 or 1959, sharing her enthusiasm for the Yeats family and for the various projects in which h she became involved. 

...Most of the essays derive from a seminar held to coincide with the exhibition, &lsquo;Jack B Yeats: Amongst Friends&rsquo; which was organized by Theo Waddington in honour of his father, Victor Waddington, who was Jack&rsquo;s dealer and who, more than any other person in the last century, was responsible for creating and enhancing the artist&rsquo;s reputation over many years.


...Two essays &ndash; by Sighle Bhreathnac Lynch and R&oacute;is&iacute;n Kennedy &ndash; pursue the old road of Jack Yeats&rsquo;s supposed &lsquo;nationalism&rsquo; and its connections with &lsquo;Republicanism&rsquo;; but, apart from the data that emerges, these writings leave us virtually unmoved as to whether he painted with the human spirit in the forefront of his mind, or in pursuit of an Irish national target. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Somme and Modern Memory</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2006-04-15T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Somme-and-Modern-Memory.php#unique-entry-id-4</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Somme-and-Modern-Memory.php#unique-entry-id-4</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[At that point in history, the biggest British army ever sent into battle &ndash; indeed the biggest army ever, anywhere &ndash; achieved a few miles of advance, here and there along a fifteen mile front, at a cost of 60,000 casualties, sixty per cent of them officers, forty per cent other ranks.


...He set out to achieve this as a war artist at the Front after the battle itself was over and when the British Army had moved on to the north-east. 

...Though he had only a modest sense of his abilities as a writer he embarked on a book, An Onlooker in France, which, combined with his paintings, watercolours and drawings, is as close as it is possible to get to the experience of war. 
]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Strange Quest of Neil Shawcross</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-05-12T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Strange-Quest-of-Neil-Shawcross.php#unique-entry-id-3</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Strange-Quest-of-Neil-Shawcross.php#unique-entry-id-3</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[Later that year, 2005, he had a show in the Ulster Museum of his portraits, thirty four of them, dating from his 1968 full-length, seated portrait of Solly Lipsitz to the dramatic Graham Gingles of 2004 and the painting of myself in a yellow coat and a red hat that was later shown at the RHA. ...  No matter, there is always a time for the reassembly of them and it is easier with Neil Shawcross than others because his portraits are not commissioned and he has kept many in his collection,  finding it difficult to part with these jewels of human understanding.


...It was a first visit and I tried, not without a measure of success, to understand how they felt to be drawn into this evolutionary web for a painter, who came to Ireland to teach in Belfast, has always had an association with the south, still speaks with a Bolton accent, and looked with such affection upon the amazed and admiring faces of them all. ]]></content:encoded></item><item><title>The Perfect Concert</title><dc:creator>website@brucearnold.ie</dc:creator><dc:subject>Art Archive</dc:subject><dc:date>2008-05-13T09:00:00+01:00</dc:date><link>http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Perfect-Concert.php#unique-entry-id-2</link><guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.brucearnold.ie/pages/art_files/The-Perfect-Concert.php#unique-entry-id-2</guid><content:encoded><![CDATA[He was a friend of the conductor for the concerts, Ferdinand Hiller, who was also a composer, of opera, among other things,  and they moved in a small but talented circle of composers and performers, among them the great nineteenth-century violinist and teacher, Ferdinand David, who had already worked on the Mendelssohn composition and gave its first performance in March of that year, 1845. 

...Though it is confined within the seemingly predictable brilliance of Mozart&rsquo;s late works &ndash; it was his second-last symphony and came at a difficult time in his personal life, with poverty, marital problems and a decline in his popularity &ndash; it has much in it that is experimental, musically speaking.


If Joshua Bell came on stage masquerading as a twenty-year old neophyte, his conductor, Ivor Bolton, who has directed the musical life of the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg since 2004, looked a bit like a jolly butcher and had strangely awkward gestures of approval and excitement with which he commended for applause the brilliant horn, clarinet, flute and bassoon players at the end of the symphony.
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