17 August 2017

Jack Yeats and Paul Henry
brought together in
Hunt Museum exhibition

‘Keel, Achill’ (ca 1910-1919) by Paul Henry, on loan from the Ulster Museum (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

I have not been back to Achill Island yet this year. But I was transported back to Achill through the paintings of Paul Henry during the weekend when I visited the summer exhibition at the Hunt Museum in Limerick of paintings by Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry, two of Ireland’s most important 20th century artists.

The exhibition, ‘Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry: Contrasting Visions of Ireland,’ features 50 works, bringing together paintings drawn from private and public collections.

Many of these works are normally not available for public viewing. They include works on loan from the European Investment Bank Collection in Luxembourg and other paintings have been borrowed from private collections.

The former Abbot of Glenstal Abbey, Father Mark Patrick Hederman, launched the exhibition earlier this summer. Speaking in the Hunt Museum, he said this unique exhibition encourages ‘visitors to see Ireland through the eyes of two very different artists working before, during and after the establishment of the Irish Free State.’

The two artists were contemporaries and had much in common. Both were born in the 1870s, and they died within two years of each other in the 1950s after long and prolific careers. Both had family links with the west of Ireland, both began their working lives in London, both married fellow artists, and both returned to Ireland in 1910.

Ten years later, they collaborated in setting up the Society of Dublin Painters in 1920. Each separately discovered and recreated the West of Ireland in ways that captivated the imagination of critics and the Irish public.

Their paintings provided the new Irish Free State with a distinctive and positive image of its people and its land, offering insights into the ‘soul’ of Ireland through its traditions, its landscapes and streetscapes and the ways of life of the Irish people.

Yet, their paintings differ profoundly in style and scope, and demonstrate the diverse ways in which the creative mind responds to its environment, transforming sensations, memories and experiences in their different visions.

‘From Portacloy to Rathlin O’Beirne’ (1932) by Jack B Yeats, oil on canvas, in a private collection (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

John (Jack) Butler Yeats (1871-1957) was a brother of the poet William Butler Yeats and was immensely prolific and innovative in his style and technique. He was born in London and his early style was that of an illustrator – he created the first cartoon strip for Sherlock Holmes and the works of Arthur Conan Doyle. He began to work regularly in oils in 1906, and he moved to Ireland permanently in 1910.

His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, mainly from the west of Ireland, especially in his boyhood home in Co Sligo.

He responded to the distinctive nature of the West of Ireland, especially in his beloved Sligo and in Irish mythology, and to the practices and traditions of its people. He also celebrates the city life of the new Ireland, the Irish love of sport, and social events at the heart of rural Ireland.

Yeats also holds the distinction of winning the Irish Free State’s first medal at the Olympic Games. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, his painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment.

Paul Henry (1876-1958) was born in Belfast, and lived and worked on Achill Island for a decade, from 1910 to 1919. His works are incredibly atmospheric and evocative, and he continued to produce Achill landscapes in later life. He portrays traditional habits and ways of life, as well as the unmistakable landscape features of the West of Ireland. An immensely popular artist, his work has influenced many peoples’ perceptions of the uniqueness of Ireland.

● The exhibition opened on 2 June and continues until the end of next month [Saturday 30 September 2017].

The Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry exhibition continues at the Hunt Museum until 30 September (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Two surviving Art Deco
buildings in Limerick

Debenhams, built in the Art Deco style as Roche’s Stores, is a landmark building in Limerick City Centre (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Patrick Comerford

Limerick has a rich architectural heritage, particularly in the Georgian buildings that are part of the 18th and 19th century development and growth of Newtown Pery. In recent months, I have been enjoying this heritage and also exploring Limerick’s Edwardian architecture and the earlier mediaeval town around Saint Mary’s Cathedral and King John’s Castle.

There are classical banks and Gothic revival churches too. But I have been slower in coming to appreciate some of the mid-20th century buildings that also enrich the city’s streets.

The Art Deco style was popularised in the 1930s, and two of its best-known examples in Limerick were the Savoy Cinema on Bedford Row, which was designed by the English architect Leslie C Norton and demolished in 1989, and the Lyric Cinema on Glentworth Street, also built in the 1930s and demolished in 1981.

Art Deco as a style in the visual arts, architecture and design first developed in France in the years before before World War I. Its name, shortened from Arts Décoratifs, comes from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) in Paris in 1925.

Art Deco combines modernist styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials. In its heyday, Art Deco represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in social and technological progress.

Many of the best surviving examples of Art Deco are cinemas built in the 1920s and 1930s, and I have written in the past about the sad loss of the former Regal Cinema in Lichfield, which was built in the Art Deco style.

. Two surviving buildings in the Art Deco style in Limerick, and that look like so many of those Art Deco cinemas, are the former Roche’s Stores, now Debenhams, on the corner of O’Connell Street, Patrick Street, Sarsfield Street and Arthur’s Quay, and the former ACC Bank, now the Permanent TSB, close-by at 131 O’Connell Street.

The former Roche’s Stores opened around 1937, and despite the change of name and ownership this remains a landmark building in Limerick City Centre. It stands on an important corner site and although its origins are relatively modern, it is the only corner building at this junction with architectural and historical significance. The other three sides were rebuilt in recent decades.

This fine Art Deco style department store, which is virtually intact externally, shows a stripped classicism with Art Deco features on the fluted piers that rise from the first to the third storey.

The angled corner entrance bay has tripartite windows on the second and third floor level over a double-height polished limestone entrance, and the corner is further emphasised by the flanking bipartite window bays.

A five-bay elevation faces O’Connell Street, and a 12-bay elevation faces Sarsfield Street. The building is prolonged by a large red-brick extension, added around 1980, with a frontage on Sarsfield Street and Arthur’s Quay.

The roof is concealed behind a parapet entablature, with a stepped acroteria to the end bays, and a blocking course stepping upwards over the corner entrance bay.

The elevations are arranged with channel rusticated walls framing recessed smooth window bays. These are articulated by the stepped stylised Doric piers with fluted capitals, rising from the first to the third-floor level.

There is a modern glazed shopfront, where the window bays are enhanced by wrought-metal balconettes. Throughout the building there are square-headed window openings with painted sills. The windows are glazed with either nine-over-nine, six-over-six, or four-over-four timber sash windows.

The polished granite doorcase rises to the second floor level and is surmounted by a masonry balconettte with a wrought-metal balustrade. It has canted reveals and a large glazed display window over the entrance, and both are separated by a canopied display window that dates from around 1980.

Classicism is given an Art Deco twist in the former ACC Bank on O’Connell Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Further along O’Connell Street, the Permanent TSB building, formerly the ACC bank, is an Art Deco building at 131 O’Connell Street. This is a unique building in Limerick, as it has the only known ceramic tile clad Art Deco façade in the city.

Its location close to the former Roche’s Stores gives added significance to this building. It is may have been built by Patrick James Sheahan in 1941. The building is largely intact, except for the fascia tiling, which may conceal the original tilework. The metal window is integral to the design of the structure.

This is a terraced, three-bay, two-storey ceramic tiled bank building, built in 1941 in the Art Deco style with Egyptian and Greek Revival motifs, with a pedimented parapet and two modern separate shopfronts at the ground floor.

The roof is hidden behind a parapet wall with a central pediment rising from an entablature of frieze with round discs, and a Greek-style key cornice below with a plain frieze and roll moulding.

Until recently, the pediment had raised ceramic tiled lettering reading: ACC Bank. Above the blank space, there is a palmette keystone that is flanked by two stylised flame burning urns.

On the first floor, the window openings are square-headed with a central tripartite opening flanked by bipartite openings, sharing a moulded ceramic tiled sill course and lintel course. Each opening has half pilasters with palm leaf capitals. The original metal casement windows to each opening have vertical lights and an over-light with a series of square-openings to the metal panels above.

The building has modern shopfronts with fixed-pane display windows and glazed doors, each with a polished granite clad surround. The original fascia above has a lead flashed cornice forming a sill course, and is flanked by the original console brackets with modern tiling to the fascia, dating from 2000, and with an imitation Greek key motif.

It is sad that the lettering reading ‘ACC Bank’ has been removed as this added a distinctive and dashing flourish to this building.