The National CollegePhD Research
Joseph McBrinn
'Mural Painting in Ireland 1850-1950'
This thesis constitutes the first national survey of mural painting in Ireland from the second half of the nineteenth century to first half of the twentieth century. It considers murals in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It is intended to record not only the essential data of mural paintings, such as artist, patron, date, medium, location, and subject-matter, but also to analyse the mural in the context of the artist's objectives, the patron's intentions, and architect's requirements, as well as within a broad range of other social, economic, cultural, religious, political, scientific and historical factors. It is structured into ten chapters which chart developments chronologically. Important schemes considered include, the multitude of religious murals in churches, cathedrals and collegiate chapels; private house decoration for the Ascendancy and the new bourgeoisie mercantile class; civic schemes at Belfast City Hall, Dublin Municipal Gallery and Dublin City Hall; to the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland State commissions, including the murals in the Irish Pavilions at the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition and 1939 New York World's Fair, and the decoration of Belfast Museum, Cathedral and City Hall, from 1932 to 1950. It reconsiders the murals of lesser-known painters such as F.S. Barff, Henry Doyle, George Russell Æ, R.P. Staples, and James Ward, as well as the better known names of Seán Keating, Mainie Jellett, William Conor and John Luke.
With the little attention mural painting has attracted in Irish art historical writing, the vast majority of my research has been concerned with previously unused sources. Unorthodox methodology, including questionnaires, site visits, reports of work in situ, and interviews with mural painters who either worked pre-1950 or had knew muralists who did, was complimented by extensive research in State archives; ecclesiastical records; municipal, civic and local government archives; the commercial records of businesses and companies; and the papers of individual painters in private collections. Archives were uncovered in geographically diverse locations throughout the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain, and in addition, periods of study in France, Germany, Belgium, Scandinavia, as well as America, afforded study of established systems of mural documentation, research and conservation.
In historiographical terms, for murals completed in Ireland during the century from 1850 to 1950, there remains a hiatus in published research. Although much has been written on eighteenth and early nineteenth century Irish decorative painting, principally in Dublin, as well as late twentieth century political wall painting in Northern Ireland, little has been produced on Irish murals of the interim period. This is in marked contrast to Continental and America research, which has for the past twenty years been reclaiming mural painting as a respected area of academic and historical research. This thesis is aimed at filling the gap.
The research contained in this thesis, the sum of almost ten years work, is desired to not only compliment available Irish literature but to place Irish murals in their national, as well as international, contexts. The aim, therefore, is to produce a work of comparable value as such recent surveys as, Judith Ogonovszky-Steffens, La peinture monumentale d'histoire dans les édifices civils en Belgique 1830-1914 (1999), Clare Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain 1840-1940 (2000), Marilyn McKay, Canadian Mural Painting 1860s-1930s (2002), and Bailey van Hook, Public Murals in American Architecture 1893-1917 (2003).
