Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

the Coinage Act of 1926 under the chairmanship of W. B. Yeats. Those recommendations were that the Irish coinage, which was first issued in 1928, should bear the images of Irish animals and wildlife rather than the traditional hackneyed symbols of Ireland, round towers, the shamrock, and sunbursts. There were some objections to this decision from individuals who suggested that animal imagery was insufficiently Christian for the Irish nation’s coinage. The choice of birds and beasts as the basis of an Irish coinage’s iconography was in part dictated by the committee’s desire that the coinage should be a unified series of images, but individual members of the committee were firmly persuaded that the images selected bore intimately on the rural nature of Irish life. “What better symbols could we find for this horse-riding, salmon-fishing, cattle-raising country?”¹⁸ wrote the chairman, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Bodkin, a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland and a subsequent director, concurred with his chairman:

      Coins are the tangible tokens of a people’s wealth. Wealth in the earliest times was always calculated in terms of cattle. Thence comes the word pecunia, money, derived from pecus, the beast. The wealth of Ireland is still derived in overwhelming proportion from the products of her soil. What, therefore, could be more appropriate than the depiction upon our coinage of those products?¹⁹

      And so Percy Metcalfe’s beautiful designs were issued in 1928, giving Ireland a coinage that depicted her agricultural, rural, and sporting life in the images of a woodcock, a chicken, a pig with piglets, a hare, a wolfhound, a bull, a hunter, and a salmon.

      Irish painters of the period were also touched by the prevailing rural understanding of Irish identity. As Bruce Arnold has remarked, there is in the work of painters in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Paul Henry, William Conor, Sean O’Sullivan, and Maurice MacGonigal, “often an uncomfortable feeling of strain, a self-consciousness about what ‘being Irish’ meant.”²⁰ From the painters of this period, whom Arnold has broadly defined as comprising a school of “Irish academic realism,” come those pictures of countrymen and women, fishermen, small farmers, turf stacks against cloudy skies, and cottages in secluded places, which seem so representative of the early years of independence. Paul Henry was probably the most popular of these artists, and his simple, often unpeopled landscapes seemed to express for many Irish men and women a sense of essential Irish realities. He was almost the official artist of the Free State – a painting entitled “Errigal Co. Donegal” was used as the frontispiece to the Irish Free State Official Handbook published in 1932. It pictures a small Irish village huddling beneath an austere mountain and a clouded sky. This official handbook, in fact, draws heavily for its illustrations on the work of Henry, Seán O’Sullivan, and Maurice MacGonigal, all artists absorbed by the Irish landscape.

      So cultural life in the new state was dominated by a vision of Ireland, inherited from the period of the Literary Revival, as a rural Gaelic civilization that retained an ancient pastoral distinctiveness. This vision was projected by artists, poets, and polemicists despite the fact that social reality showed distinct signs that the country was adapting to the social forms of the English-speaking world and that conditions in rural Ireland were hardly idyllic. It is probable, as I have suggested, that this imaginative interpretation of Irish rural life, particularly as lived on the western island, served as an integrative symbol of national identity in the early years of independence. It helped to confirm people in a belief in Irish distinctiveness, justifying that political separatism which a revolutionary movement had made a linchpin of political life in the state. As such, it provided an imaginative consolidation of the new order in which a conservative, nationalist people in a society dominated by farmers and their offspring in the professions and in trade believed that they had come at last into their rightful inheritance – possession of the land and political independence.

      But there were other symbolic properties that the new state had enlisted to sustain its sense of its national uniqueness. In addition to the imaginative legacy that the recent past had bequeathed to modern Ireland in powerful images of heroism and idyll, the new Irish state was significantly blessed with a repository of national treasures that had either been unearthed in the preceding century or had entered into the popular consciousness at that time. Many of these treasures were associated with Irish Christianity in the Hiberno-Romanesque period, and they had become charged in the nineteenth century with a national as well as religious symbolism. Great works of art and craft, the Cross of Cong, the Ardagh Chalice, the Books of Kells and Durrow, had become identified with the Celtic genius. Lady Wilde, the mother of the playwright, had written in 1888:

      Early Irish art illustrates in a very remarkable manner those distinctive qualities of Irish nature, which we know from the legendary traditions have characterized our people from the earliest times…All these reverential, artistic, fanciful, and subtle evidences of the peculiar celtic spirit find a full and significant expression in the wonderful splendours of Irish art.²¹

      So profound a sense of national significance became attached to the Celtic treasures, which were widely admired after the opening of the National Museum of Ireland in 1890, that its effects permeated Irish design work of all kinds in the twentieth century. Ireland, such work signified in bookplates, medals, jewellery, Christmas cards, Celtic lettering on shopfronts, letterheads, postage stamps, and tombstones, was once the centre of great artistic achievement, was dignified by the peculiar genius of her people, and could become so again.

      By the 1920s enthusiasm among artists for Celtic design had perhaps passed its peak, the high point of the movement being the work that the Dun Emer Guild produced in the early years of the century. Nevertheless, at a popular, often rather crude level, Celtic designs continued to be associated with Irish national identity in the first decades of Irish independence. Indeed, the Official State Handbook published in 1932 sets the title on a front cover in pseudo-Celtic lettering against a background based on the Book of Kells and contains plates of the National Museum’s treasures, as well as reproductions of Irish landscape art. One aspect of the Celtic revival in arts and craftwork, however, maintained standards of unusual excellence well into the 1930s.

      Many of the Irish treasures which fired the imaginations of designers and artists in the early twentieth century had been works of Christian art, associated with worship and piety. It does not, therefore, seem surprising that concurrently a group of artists, partly at the urging of that pious but practical patron and playwright Edward Martyn, had established a cooperative, An Tur Gloine (The Tower of Glass)²² to provide stained-glass windows for Irish churches which made possible the very remarkable work of Harry Clarke, Michael Healy, and Evie Hone. These artists were to produce some of their finest church windows in the 1920s and 1930s. Certainly they had received part of their inspiration from the fairly widespread English and European interest in craftwork and religious art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the sense of Irish antecedents must also have stimulated them in their labours. Once again Ireland was becoming known as a centre of Christian art as Irish missionaries took their knowledge of this modern achievement abroad with them and as Irish stained-glass work received international recognition. As James White and Michael Wynne affirmed in 1961:

      By the end of the 1920s standards in stained-glass production had so risen in Ireland that it could safely be claimed that this was one sphere of art in which we as a race had taken a commanding position and in which one could point to an individual Irish school. Could it be that these Irish artists had inherited an instinctive feeling for the gleaming colours and dark sinuous lines which make the Celtic illuminators the most remarkably creative beings produced in our island? This suggestion may seem far-fetched since twelve centuries separate the two groups. Yet comparison throws up many similarities, not least of which was a desire in both cases to suggest the sanctity and holiness of the saints and to see them as removed from the worldly ambience so attractive to artists in other mediums.²³

      In this chapter we have seen how images of heroic nobility lost their imaginative potency in the 1920s and how a largely conservative, rurally based society