THE BEND BACK: RHA 200 from the Crawford Art Gallery Collection

17 November 2023 – 28 January 2024

Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

The thirty-one works from Crawford Art Gallery’s collection selected for this exhibition offer a route or portal into the Royal Hibernian Academy’s past and its membership across two centuries.

Writing in “The Bend Back” (1951), Elizabeth Bowen remarked that ‘one route to the past (or the idea of the past) is factitious memory. That is to say, by art we are made to seem to remember that which we have not actually known.’

The origins of Crawford Art Gallery and the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) stem from a shared moment in Irish history when, in the few years before and after 1820, there was a sustained interest in the training and championing of Irish artists. The arrival of the Canova Casts – now the nucleus of Crawford Art Gallery’s collection – to Cork in November 1818 provided the impetus for the formation of the Cork School of Art (now MTU Crawford College of Art & Design) and the academic study of sculpture, painting, and drawing in the south of Ireland. Similarly, the foundation of the RHA in August 1823 fostered public appetite for visual art and connected artists with new audiences.

This exhibition was prompted by two key moments: the loss, during Easter 1916, of the RHA’s building and collection, and its bicentenary in 2023.

Some of the works displayed in the exhibition reach back into the first century of the RHA’s history and to its earliest members, while others were purchased through the RHA or represent Crawford Art Gallery’s various sub-collections, gifts, and bequests. From Thomas Kirk, Daniel Maclise, and Estella Solomons to Margaret Clarke, Evie Hone, and Barrie Cooke, each of the thirty-one works in this exhibition are by members of the RHA from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Crawford Art Gallery wishes to thank Patrick T. Murphy, Kate McBride, and the RHA team.

Featured artworks:

• Thomas Sautelle Roberts, City of Cork, c.1790.
• Thomas Kirk, Sleeping Child, 1818.
• George Petrie, Gougane Barra, Co. Cork, 1835.
• Daniel Maclise, Finished study for 'The Farewell of the Departure of Bayard for the Wars', c.1843.
• Stephen Catterson Smith, Miss Catherine O'Conor of Mount Druid with Harp, undated.
• Nathaniel Hill, Goose Girl in a Breton Farmyard, 1884.
• Walter Osborne, A November Morning, 1888.
• Joseph Malachy Kavanagh, Killeshine Ponds, c.1890.
• John Lavery, Habiba, 1892.
• John Butler Yeats, John Redmond (unfinished), c.1905.
• Gerald Festus Kelly, Sir Hugh Lane, c.1911.
• Margaret Clarke, Dolly Robinson, 1918.
• William Orpen, The Marchioness of Crewe, c.1918.
• Estella Solomons, Self-Portrait, undated.
• Jack B. Yeats, In Capel Street, Dublin, 1923.
• Dermod O'Brien, Place de l'Eglise, Montreuil, 1925.
• Leo Whelan, The Kitchen Window, c.1926.
• Albert Power, Death Mask of Austin Stack, c.1929.
• Mary Swanzy, Swans, c.1930.
• William John Leech, Reflections, c.1930.
• Séamus Murphy, Ruth Ripley, 1934.
• Oliver Sheppard, Aida, 1935.
• James Sinton Sleator, Portrait of Jack B. Yeats, 1943.
• Grace Henry, Mountain Sheep, 1946.
• Evie Hone, Landscape, County Wicklow, 1947.
• Maurice MacGonigal, George Moore’s Garden, undated.
• Brigid Ganly, Faiche Laighean (Leinster Lawn), undated.
• Kitty Wilmer O’Brien, Cliffs of Moher, undated.
• Patrick Hennessy, Self Portrait and Cat, 1978.
• Barrie Cooke, Portrait of the Lough Derg Pike: Life size, with relics, 1980.
• Louis le Brocquy, Fantail Pigeons, 1985.

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