‘There are people in this country who are watching very closely the interests of Bernard Shaw... to see that the purpose for which [he] left his money will be fulfilled,’ Emrys Hughes had told Parliament at the end of the 1950s. But as such people died, the knowledge of these interests and that purpose faded. This was what James Pitman had warned the House of Commons might happen. ‘Let it not be said in the world of literature and throughout the whole English-speaking world,’ he exhorted his fellow Members of Parliament, ‘that a great Irishman and genius of the English language who sought to help English literature and English drama found honourable respect for the terms of his will only in Ireland.’
*
Compared with its English counterparts the National Gallery of Ireland had what the Sunday Times described in the early 1960s as a ‘delightful’ policy ‘which is to invest not in shares but in pictures’. No tablets were then placed under pictures bought by the gallery showing the source of the purchase money, and there was no list of the works bought from the Shaw Fund. Gradually rumours began circulating in Dublin pubs that Shaw’s money had been spent on a number of marvellous fakes and forgeries. Barbara Smoker, arriving from London in the 1960s and asking to see some pictures bought from the Shaw bequest, was shown a couple of religious works by Murillo and a Crucifix by Giovanni di Paolo (a rare and highly valued work) which considerably offended her. Twenty years later, when challenged to put on an exhibition of selected works bought from the Shaw Fund over a quarter of a century so as to celebrate the old patronage and invite new business sponsorship, the director of the gallery regretfully declined because ‘it will not be within our resources to mount the Shaw show’. The gallery’s resources were shortly afterwards reported in the Sunday Press. According to figures supplied to the Comptroller and Auditor General, £164,714 had been received by the gallery from the Shaw bequest in the twelve months ending on 31 March 1990, and the total in investments and at the bank was £751,173.
The ‘delightful policy’ of buying pictures had long been modified by the Governors and Guardians of the gallery. Increasingly money from the Shaw Fund was spent on the insurance of paintings and, in the 1980s, on the conversion and refurbishment of an extension to the gallery at 90 Merrion Square, as well as on the purchase of other sites in Clare Street and Clare Lane. The last work bought by the gallery was a modest picture by William Ashford called ‘A bowl of flowers’ in 1985. Nothing was purchased in the following twelve years.
The gallery’s stewardship of the Shaw bequest during much of the time it has been receiving Shaw’s royalties has been set out by one of the Keepers, Dr Michael Wynne.
‘As monies come in from the royalties we endeavour to allow the substantial sum to be accumulated, and from this we buy significant works of art and designate that they have been purchased from the George Bernard Shaw Fund. Occasionally some of the works bought from the fund are relatively minor. This situation arises when towards the end of the financial year we have spent all the government grant for acquisitions and are anxious to seize the opportunity of acquiring something that is important for the collection.’
What was important for the collection was the strengthening of various schools of painting. This has meant that the Shaw Fund purchases were not artistically integral and could not be made to ‘form an exhibition of a worthiness due to our great benefactor,’ Dr Wynne explains (though a very interesting exhibition of this sort was shown in 1987 from purchases made by Sir Michael Levey on his retirement as Director of the National Gallery in London). By the year 2000, Dr Wynne believes, it may be appropriate to publish a brochure with illustrations in colour and a comprehensive list of Shaw acquisitions. ‘In the meantime the best tribute which we can pay is to make sure that the purchases made through the Shaw Fund are correctly labelled, and have the descriptions of them published through books like your own.’ In 1991 Dr Wynne compiled a list of these purchases from the gallery records.
Paintings, watercolours and drawings
1384 DOMENICO TINTORETTO Venice, Queen of the Adriatic (1959)
1385 DOMENICO GHIRLANDAIO (?) Portrait of Clarice Orsini (1959)
1645 LOUIS LE NAIN Adoration of the Shepherds (1961)
1646 JEAN NATTIER Carlotta Frederika Sparre, Countess Fersen (1961)
3315 MAURICE QUENTIN DE LA TOUR Louis August Thibault-Dunois (1961)
1719 MURILLO The Holy Family (1962)
1720 MURILLO St Mary Magdalen (1962)
1721 EL MUDO Abraham welcoming the three angels (1962)
1722 COURBET Dr Adolphe Marlet (1962)
1723 BOUCHER A young girl in a park (1962)
1737 JACK B. YEATS The double jockey act (1963)
1766 JACK B. YEATS About to write a letter (1964)
1768 GIOVANNI DI PAOLO Crucifix (1964)
1769 JACK B. YEATS Grief (1965)
1770 JACQUES IVERNY The Annunciation (1965)
1790 NATHANIEL HONE THE ELDER The Conjuror (1966)
1812 CIGOLI The Siege (1967)
1822 MARQUET Porquerolles (1967)
1824 ROSLIN Le Marquis de Vaudreuil (1967)
1835–58 VARIOUS SCHOOLS Twenty-four icons (The Allen Collection) (1968)
1867 ETIENNE DE LA TOUR The Image of Saint Alexis (1968)
1859 WALTER OSBORNE Portrait of a gentleman (1968)
1860 THOMAS HICKEY Colonel William Kirkpatrick (1968)
1928 GOYA El Sueño (1969)
4025 VALENCIAN SCHOOL Landscape with canopy and a legionary (1971)
4026 VALENCIAN SCHOOL Landscape with an angel bearing a martyr’s crown (1971)
1982 VOUET The four seasons (1971)
4050 EVA GONZALES Two children playing on sand dunes (1972)
4052 THOMAS ROBERTS A landscape (1972)
7515–33 FRANCIS PLACE Twenty-three drawings (1972)
4055 BARON GÉRARD Marie-Julie Bonaparte, Queen of Spain with her two daughters Zenaïde and Charlotte (1972)
4060 JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID The funeral of Patroclus (1973)
4074 NATHANIEL GROGAN A view towards Cork, on the river Lee (1973)
4089 SOGLIANI The Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (1974)
4137 WILLIAM ASHFORD A view of Dublin from Marino (1976)
4138 WILLIAM ASHFORD A view of Dublin from Chapelizod (1976)
4170 FRENCH SCHOOL Large apse (1976)
4171 FRENCH SCHOOL Small apse (1976)
4186 JUAN FERNANDEZ A still life with citrons, a knife etc (1976)
4303 NATHANIEL GROGAN A harbour in County Cork (1978)
4304 PHILIP HUSSEY An interior with members of a family (1978)
4313 FRAGONARD Venus and Cupid (1978)
4315 PROVOOST Triptych: Virgin and Child with saints (1979)
4326 REYNOLDS The Right Honourable John Hely-Hutchinson (1979)
4339 WHEATLEY The Marquess and Marchioness of Antrim (1980)
4355 VAN DONGEN Stella in a flowered hat (1981)
4361 SIGNAC Lady on a terrace, Saint Tropez (1982)
4367 HENRY BROOKE The continence of Scipio (1982)
4459 CAMILLE PISSARRO A bouquet of flowers in a vase (1983)
4463–66 THOMAS ROBERTS Lucan House and three views in the demesne (1983)
4468 ITALIAN SCHOOL A young man of the Branconio family (c. 1610) (1983)
4485 SOUTINE Man walking the stairs (1984)
4490 NOLDE Two women in a garden (1984)
4508 WILLIAM ASHFORD A bowl of flowers (1985)
Sculptures
8011 RENOIR Pendule: hymne à la vie (1966)
8028/29 ATTR. BRUSTOLON A pair of jardinières (1967)
8030 DUQUESNOY Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio (1967)
8031 ATTR. JUAN ALONSO VILLABRILLE Y RON Elias overthrowing the false prophets of Baal (1967)
8050 COURBET Madame Buchon (1968)
8051 ATTR. CAFFIERI Bust of a lady (1968)
8052 THOMAS KIRK Judge Charles Burton (1968)
8081 DIETZ Chronos eating one of his children (1970)
; 8246 RICHIER The Virgin (1978)
8247 RICHIER St John the Evangelist (1978)
8049 GHIBERTI WORKSHOP Virgin and Child (1968)
8303 LAWRENCE MACDONALD Eurydice (1984)
The outstanding features of the gallery’s collection have been a small but spectacularly good choice of seventeenth-century French paintings (among which are an excellent Claude and Poussin), special attention to religious art which has resulted in a fine holding of Italian baroque pictures, and some creditable examples of Irish art. The list of works bought from the Shaw Fund shows how the gallery has complemented these areas with a number of art-historically interesting pictures. To the Claude and Poussin, for example, it has added a composition by a comparatively rare painter Louis Le Nain, a late and beautiful Vouet (whose reputation following an exhibition in Paris early in 1991 has been rising) and a fascinating work showing the extraordinary effects of light by Etienne de la Tour, son of the more famous Georges de la Tour. Additions to the eighteenth-century collection include an excellent portrait by the Swedish painter (of the French school) Roslin and, merging into the nineteenth century, an early and uncommon baroque studio work, David’s Funeral of Patroclus. A more characteristic example of David’s school is represented by the portrait of Marie-Julie Bonaparte by his pupil Baron Gérard.
The Italian baroque section at the gallery, which has works by artists such as Castiglione, Lorenzo Lippi, Felice Ficherelli and Carlo Dolci who are little represented in the United Kingdom and were bought earlier in the century when religious pictures were not greatly valued elsewhere, has been enriched by a unique battle scene from Tasso by Cigoli, a major seventeenth-century Florentine painter. Unable to afford a Simone Martini, the gallery bought instead The Annunciation painted in 1410 by Jacques Iverny. It cost £250,000 in 1965 and was valued at considerably more than ten times that sum twenty-five years later. The gallery also picked up a wrongly attributed painting of a sleeping girl, a subtle exploration of virtually one colour, later confirmed as a Goya.
The plan appears to have been to buy Renaissance and Baroque sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s when, as compared with Old Master paintings, this sculpture was inexpensive. The two works by Richier, the sixteenth-century French Renaissance sculptor, are remarkable purchases, the Duquesnoy’s Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio is the bust of a distinguished art patron (who discovered Claude Lorrain) by a comparatively unknown and wonderful sculptor.
The Irish school has been reinforced with some beautiful eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landscapes, notably two beautiful paintings by Nathaniel Grogan, three pictures by the idiosyncratic Jack Yeats and Nathaniel Hone’s satire on Reynolds as an eclectic artist, a masterpiece which provides a commentary on eighteenth-century art theory and, possibly better than any other single work, sums up the feeling of these Shaw Fund purchases.
Perhaps there is the odd picture from which Shaw himself would have recoiled (though his art criticism does not reveal him as being irredeemably hostile to religious paintings). He would see, however, that the collection he had got to know as a boy as he wandered through the gallery rooms catching sight of a larger imaginative world and dreaming of being an artist himself, has been remarkably enhanced through his bequest.
*
There are two further threads in the financial tapestry of Shaw’s estate. When his seagoing uncle, the Rabelaisian doctor Walter John Gurly, had died at the end of the nineteenth century, G.B.S. found himself the owner of ‘his cursed property and debts’ in Carlow. He had little power to control or direct the management of these Irish properties, and instead of title deeds had received a bundle of mortgages and a packet of worthless pawn tickets. The principal site was known as the Old Assembly Rooms in the centre of Carlow. It was a fair-sized building, measuring some ninety feet in depth and commanding a fifty-foot frontage described by the Carlow Nationalist as being ‘inspiringly designed in the style of the classic revival of the eighteenth century, characteristic of Irish Public buildings of that date’. For many years it functioned as some class of a country club and was used for public entertainments, though according to Shaw’s uncle it would have made a better observatory as you ‘could watch the movements of the heavenly bodies through the holes in the roof.
In 1915 Shaw received a petition inviting him to present this property to the town of Carlow for use as a Technical School. As the consideration for this deal he was promised that his ‘honoured name will be revered in perpetuity’. There was a good deal to be said for complying with this request. ‘Unfortunately the place is leased and subleased,’ he replied. ‘...Lately I had all but succeeded in buying out the lessor when he fell into the Barrow and was drowned; and I have not yet succeeded in discovering who his successor is.’ It took Shaw until the autumn of 1919 finally to disencumber the Assembly Rooms and sign the deed transferring them to Carlow ‘in consideration of the place being used for public purposes and (if possible) the old front of the building being retained for the sake of its decorative effect’. The property was later turned into a Vocational School and after Shaw’s death, its façade still intact, has become the County Library Headquarters.
The remaining seventeen parcels of Gurly property (including a burial ground called ‘The Graves’) Shaw retained for another twenty-five years. To assist matters he employed a local man, Major Fitzmaurice, as his business agent. ‘Many people who dont know me (and perhaps some who do),’ he told Fitzmaurice, ‘imagine that I am a difficult man to deal with because my writings rub them up the wrong way.’
Actually most of his tenants soon came to realize that he was peculiarly soft-hearted. Sometimes he would receive bills from Carlow shopkeepers due from his tenants who had pledged his credit by guaranteeing payment from him in London. ‘I wonder would Mrs Aylward take £50 to leave the country and settle in China,’ he wrote of one tenant who regularly calculated at the end of each quarter that he owed her money. His correspondence with Major Fitzmaurice shows him making the roofs good, guarding against vandalism, replacing cisterns, clearing gutters. ‘My attempts to repair houses on my estate have generally begun by the collapse of the whole edifice,’ he admitted. By his eighty-eighth year he decided that ‘if I could live another 88 years I would knock down every house on the property and replace it with a new one, with a garage and a modern kitchen, with all the latest labor saving contrivances and conditioned air, to teach the Carlovians to want such things’.
In his published writings G.B.S. represented himself as a conventional absentee landlord. ‘There is no alternative open to me,’ he wrote. ‘I am strongly in favor of this little estate of mine being municipalized.’ With this in mind he wrote asking the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera in May 1945 to introduce into the Dáil a new law enabling local authorities to accept, hold and administer gifts of property provided they adopt a ‘Civic Improvement Scheme’. To his delight, this Local Authorities (Acceptance of Gifts) Bill was quickly drafted and passed that summer. ‘Splendid!’ Shaw congratulated de Valera. ‘It would have taken thirty years in this unhappy country.’ On 13 August 1945 all Shaw’s Carlow property was passed to the Urban District Council. According to the Act, civic improvement included anything that tended to ‘improve the amenities’ of the area or was ‘conducive to the welfare of the inhabitants’. A condition of all gifts, and their income, was that they could not be absorbed into general assets for the relief of rates since, drawing on his experience on the St Pancras Vestry, Shaw believed that a reduction in rates merely assisted landlords ‘on whom the rates finally fall, without benefiting the country or improving the town’.
‘I am far too good a Socialist to believe that Socialism can be established by private enterprise,’ Shaw had written to Major Fitzmaurice. Yet by his own private enterprise he had established a modest instalment of socialism in Ireland. For nearly twenty-five years the Carlow Urban District Council made financial help available from its Shaw Fund for cultural and artistic purposes. But subsequent legislation in Ireland, including the Local Gover
nment (Planning and Development) Act 1963, the Housing Act 1966, and the Arts Act 1973, all of which enabled local councils to subsidize a widening range of endeavours out of the rates, brought about a Gilbertian situation in which the Shaw Fund could not be used for any identifiable civic improvement without being in breach of its rates relief condition. For another twenty-five years, while lawyers brooded on this predicament, the funds were frozen at the bank except for one strange payment each December to erect a Christmas Crib at the courthouse. Tiring of this stalemate, the Carlovians eventually came up with a brainwave, and invited the British ambassador to open their own Shaw-funded Shaw Festival in 1991 with its programme of lectures, workshops in the Old Assembly Rooms, school prizes, musical events (including a selection from My Fair Lady), the renaming of the Town Park after G.B.S. and a spirited production of How He Lied to Her Husband.
The last financial thread was spun from Shaw’s Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘I cannot persuade myself to accept the money,’ he had written in November 1926 to the Royal Swedish Academy. Four months later, on 27 March 1927, he signed a Trust Deed creating an Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation for the translation into English of classical Swedish literature. To this he donated all his prize money which amounted to 118,165 Swedish kronor then worth approximately £6,500 (equivalent to £167,000 in 1997).
The objects of the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation were defined in the Trust Deed as ‘the encouragement of cultural intercourse between Sweden and the British Islands through the promotion and diffusion of knowledge and appreciation of the literature and art of Sweden in the British Islands’. The first patron of the Foundation was the King of Sweden and its trustees still include the Swedish ambassador. Though some grants were made to facilitate productions of Strindberg’s plays and to support Swedish music in Britain, most of the money has been spent on the translation of Swedish books. There were translations of Swedish Nobel Prize winners Pär Lagerkvist, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, novels by Hjalmar Bergman (considered by many critics to be the greatest Swedish prose writer of the twentieth century), Strindberg’s plays, anthologies of Swedish poetry and short stories, and some non-fiction including a vivid description of nineteenth-century England by Erik Gustaf Geijer, Ingvar Andersson’s history of Sweden (for many years the only history of Sweden available in English), and biographies of Carl Linnaeus by Knut Hagberg and of the Swedish composer Franz Berwald by Robert Layton.
Bernard Shaw Page 116
