5 September 1922: John Lavery presents his painting, ‘Michael Collins , love of Ireland’
Painting the Nation Sate
by Róisín Kennedy
On 5 September 1922 John Lavery presented his painting, ‘Michael Collins, Love of Ireland’ (1922, Hugh Lane Gallery), to the press in his London home. His actions spoke volumes for his diplomatic aspirations and his hopes for the persuasive function of art. His friendship with Collins had been formed in the house where the painting was shown, and this personal connection to the subject added a poignant note to the work and to Lavery’s ambition to provide a befitting imagery of the foundation of the new Irish state, sublimating its brutality and carnage into more refined representations of valour and stability.
John Ruskin asserted that ‘Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art’.¹ The book of the new Irish state’s art opened on a promising page in January 1922 when a major exhibition of Irish visual and decorative art was shown in Paris as part of the World Congress of the Irish Race.² Just a few weeks prior to its launch, however, the minister for Fine Arts, Count Plunkett, had resigned in protest at the Treaty, and the ministry was abolished. The second Dáil went on to eliminate drawing as a subject in national schools, a decision that had a detrimental impact on the future understanding of art and design in Ireland.
The painter, Jack B. Yeats spoke at the Race Congress on the relationship between the artist and the nation, declaring in uncharacteristically forthright terms that
the roots of every art must be in the country of the artist, and no men can have two countries; and this applies with greater force to the artist than to anyone else, for the true painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints.³
While landscape and genre scenes dominated the painting section, some of the exhibits at Paris, such as John Lavery’s ‘Funeral of Terence MacSwiney, Mayor of Cork’, referred to the impact of violence and militarism on Irish life. But they did so in a noble and elevating fashion. Yeats’s ‘Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory’ (1915, National Gallery of Ireland), exhibited for the first time since it was painted in 1915, depicts a graceful flower girl on the Dublin quays. Isolated from the other figures in the painting, she alone mourns those killed in the aftermath of the Howth gun running. The work empathises with the complex situation of the ordinary citizen in the face of civic disintegration. Yeats’s ability to elevate commonplace scenes into epic moments of human history endeared his work to many.
Lavery’s work, by contrast, takes a more elevated view, focusing on the great figures of Irish political and religious life and on moments of pomp and splendour. A consummate painter of British imperial pageantry, he put his skills to great effect in the grand baroque painting of the funeral of MacSwiney (and later of Collins). His ‘Blessing of the Colours’ (1921, Hugh Lane Gallery), a version of which was shown in Paris, depicts an archbishop standing on the altar of a cavernous church, identified as the Pro-Cathedral.⁴ He is consecrating a tricolour, held by a kneeling soldier. The immense flowing form of the flag symbolises the new state, and the obsequious young man expresses the allegiance of its citizens to the state and to the Roman Catholic Church. The prominent inclusion of a deacon holding the prayer book adds to the hierarchical arrangement of symbols and figures and conveys order and stability.
A Belfast-born Catholic of modest origins, John Lavery had become an extremely successful portraitist in London. Knighted in 1918, he and his society hostess wife, Hazel, played an important role in facilitating informal interactions amongst the Treaty delegates over the course of the negotiations. As a result, Lavery was the artist most closely associated with the political establishment of the new state in the immediate aftermath of the Treaty. His portrait of Hazel as Kathleen ní Houlihan graced Irish Free State banknotes from 1927. In 1928, he had hoped to replace his friend, Timothy Healy, as Governor General.
Lavery painted ‘Michael Collins, Love of Ireland’ while Collins’s body lay in the mortuary chapel in St Vincent’s Hospital. He later recalled that
Any grossness in his features, even the peculiar little dent near the point of his nose, had disappeared. He might have been Napoleon in marble as he lay in his uniform, covered by the Free State flag, with a crucifix on his breast. Four soldiers stood round the bier. The stillness was broken at long intervals by someone entering the chapel on tiptoe, kissing the brow, and then slipping to the door where I could hear a burst of suppressed grief. One woman kissed the dead lips, making it hard for me to continue my work.⁵
Collins is depicted as Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State army, in full uniform with the tricolour across his body and a crucifix placed prominently. The badly wounded head, shown bandaged in contemporary photographs of the body, appears untouched in Lavery’s painting. The words ‘Love of Ireland’ are inscribed in the vacant space to the right of the figure. They confirm in plain terms Collins’s patriotism, and, like the prominent symbols of state and religion, refute any notion of the man as a renegade. The solitary nature of the body recalls Christian iconography of the Passion. It is also akin to established representations of heroic deathbed scenes, such as the French academic painter, Horace Vernet’s ‘Napoleon on his Deathbed’ (1825), in which the laurel-crowned Napoleon expires alone with a crucifix resting on his chest. One journalist proclaimed of Collins that ‘the pallor of death adds nothing terrible. It seems only to bring out the spiritual aspects of the features’.⁶
The fact that ‘Michael Collins, Love of Ireland’ was formally exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon in October 1922 heightened the international importance of its subject matter, reflecting Lavery’s ambition to be perceived as a significant maker of contemporary history painting. He had arranged for the painting to be reproduced as a colour print by George Pulman and Sons, part of his pretext for showing it to the press on 5 September.⁷ This has been interpreted as a ploy to profit from Collins’s now legendary status, but the reproduction of paintings in print form accords with a long-standing convention and was more likely motivated by a genuine desire to make the image accessible to a wider public.⁸ (Many of Lavery’s paintings of Irish affairs were reproduced in this way.) The picture could now be hung in private homes, perhaps becoming part of the pantheon of Irish martyrs. More significantly, the circulation of the image would facilitate a new official iconography of Irish nationalism, one that marked an allegiance to the new Irish state and the principles of personal sacrifice, military discipline and Roman Catholic faith on which it was founded. This differentiated it from earlier imagery of rebels and insurgents, as well as countermanding the negative representations of the Irish that dominated British visual culture.
Lavery intended that both ‘Michael Collins, Love of Ireland’ and ‘Blessing of the Colours’ would, along with his portraits of Irish leaders and events, become part of the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. There, like the artworks in the recently established Imperial War Museum in London, the traumas and triumphs of contemporary history would be commemorated for future generations. The gallery did not accept work by living artists, so Lavery lent the paintings to the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art; in 1935 he bequeathed the paintings to that institution, in memory of Hazel Lavery. He also donated a separate collection of portraits and works of art to the Belfast Art Gallery, where they were housed in a special Lavery Room in 1929.
Extracted from Ireland 1922 edited by Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry and published by the Royal Irish Academy with support from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme. Click here to view more articles in this series, or click the image below to visit the RIA website for more information.
