Irish Arts Review

Apprentice to Master: Three Generations of the Gorry FamilyAuthor(s): Mic MoroneySource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 98-101Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25503545 .

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t0

Masten Three Generations of the Gorry Family

MIC MORONEY examines the quiet contribution made to Irish art

scholarship by the Gorry family business in Dublin

98 IRISH ARTS REVIEW SPRING 2007

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APPRENTICE TO MASTER: THREE GENERATIONS OF THE GORRY FAMILY

GALLERIES

At number 20 Molesworth Street in Dublin - in the

somewhat ramshackle ISPCC building - resides

one of the best-kept secrets of Irish art: the third

generation picture restoration and art dealing

business of the Gorry gallery, a family institution which spe

cialises in 18th- and 19th-century Irish painting. It is a perfect

address. The surrounding streetscapes hum with power, money

and arcane knowledge: government ministries, national institu

tions, ancient Royal Colleges and Academies. The Gorrys are

perched between Leinster House and, two doors down, the sec

ond oldest Freemasonic Grand Lodge in the world.

The Gorrys have no on-street presence: you have to press the

buzzer to be admitted to their gleaming little green gallery. There,

James (Jimmy) Gorry and his wife Th?r?se (n?e Butler, a Dubliner

going back many generations) welcome all who enter. Advice is

free; consultancy fees unheard of- as are, for that matter, com

puters. The atmosphere is old-worldly, warm and often hilarious.

Jimmy is an earnest man who wears his considerable knowl

edge lightly. Th?r?se, a vital front-of-house presence, has her own

views and takes care of business. Meanwhile, Jimmy works down

the back under the immense window of Sean O'Sullivan's former

studio; sitting at his father's old easel and chair. High in the cor

ner, a 1923 oil painting by Jimmy's father of the grandfather (Fig 4 ) stares out with authority and rueful wisdom; the rough, inci

sive brushstrokes reminiscent of his mentor, Sean Keating.

Jimmy's grandfather, James Joseph Gorry (1870-1943) began the business in the early 1900s (Fig 1). He trained as a British

Army engineer, but was bought out by his wife, a wealthy widow,

mother of two and fervent nationalist, with whom he had two

more children. He set up shop on Upper Ormond Quay restor

ing paintings and dealing in art and antiquarian books, and

became a member of the Hibernian Rifles, the left-leaning mili

tary wing of the AOH (the Irish-American Alliance side) -

although he didn't fight with them in the GPO in 1916.

Jimmy's father, James Aloysius (1900-67) attended the

Dublin Metropolitan Art School alongside O'Sullivan, and

under Keating. He emigrated to London in 1920, where he

trained in restoration with Ralph and Sid Warner, specialists in

3

4&~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~T : E ---

2|li

17th-century Dutch, Flemish and Italian paintings. Nevertheless

he took the mailboat home frequently, bringing pictures back to

his father. He also exhibited twice in the RHA, including, in

1930, an oil painting, Head of a Negro, a sensitive portrait of a

tea-seller he knew in London. To avoid conscription for World

War II, he returned permanently in 1939 with his English wife,

Jimmy's mother and took over the premises on Molesworth

Street, O'Sullivan's former studio.

There is a photo of him and Jimmy in the gallery in 1964 (Fig

7). Although he was a soft-spoken man, James Aloysius, senior

held strongly Republican views. Note behind his head, the lith

ograph of Roger Casement, drawn from life in 1916 by Professor

L Fanto, Art Director of the Saxony State Theatre during Casement's doomed mission to Berlin

- as Jimmy says, 'just to

give people an idea of his leanings.'

The family flat was on Grafton Street, the side-kitchen over

looking the back of Jammet's restaurant, where the father fre

quented the bar with O'Sullivan, Harry Kernoff, writers like

Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, journalists and even politicians.

The landed and titled also numbered among his many clients.

Jimmy - or James Alphonsus Gorry (1948-)

- or James III, as

he styles himself, studied painting in NCAD whilst apprenticed to his father. When the latter died in 1967 (in Buswell's across

the road, where he had lived for four years), Jimmy had a diffi

cult few years, sorting out rackloads of undocumented paintings.

However, he eventually wrested control, and steered the gallery

to the extraordinary little niche it occupies today.

At a time when the historical study of Irish fine art in its own

right has become a fully-fledged academic discipline, one easily

forgets that, up to the 1970s, there was little systematic cata

loguing or historiography of it. Yet the Gorrys' connoisseurship

has long made the gallery a place of pilgrimage for scholars and

museum curators. Many have written for the extraordinary

1 The founder of the

Gorry Gallery, James

Joseph Gorry (1870

1943)engaged in the process

of restoring a

painting c.1940

2 James Arthur

O'Connor (c.1792

1841M Wooded

Landscape with

Figure on a Path

oil on canvas

45.5 x 61cm

signed and

dated 1828

3 James Alphonsus

Gorry at work

reviving a portrait of Patrick Sarsfield in

the Molesworth

Street studio 1982

SPRING 2007 IRISH ARTS REVIEW | 9 9

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U i stream of Gorry exhibition catalogues

- Kenneth McConkey,

Peter Murray, Peter Harbison, John Hutchinson, Claudia

Kinmonth, Roy Johnston, Brendan Rooney, Niamh O'Sullivan, Nicola Gordon Bowe, S B Kennedy, Kevin Rutledge, Julian

Campbell1, Paul Caffrey, Anne Crookshank, Desmond

FitzGerald and William Laffan.

The catalogues seem to distill a history of great Irish painting from early/mid 20th-century works; back through a plethora of

19th-century genre and landscape paintings (some extraordi

nary Realist and Romantic examples), to 18th-century giants

like Willem van der Hagen. You will find many high-profile Irish

'discoveries': Aloysius O'Kelly's Mass in a Connemara Cabin

(c. 1880), or Henry Jones Thaddeus' momentous Jour de March?, Finist?re2 (1882), which now shares, with the Caravaggio, the

dramatic honour of being hung at the end of a long enfilade of

rooms as you enter the National Gallery. Jimmy says, These are

our old masters, and I for one think they're undervalued.'

Jimmy's restoration skills give him an edge on many dealers,

particularly with regard to the authenticity of pictures (Fig 3).

Working closely on paintings for hours, he knows intimately the

palettes and habits of many artists, having long inhaled their

subjects and atmospheres. He also has a strong eye for the qual

ity, beauty, power and importance of a picture; and has an

extraordinary visual memory.

As such, he has earned a deep-seated trust and reputation

among collectors, partly by consulting scholars as he trawls,

Jimmy's restoration skills give him an

edge on many dealers, particularly with

regard to the authenticity of pictures

through a global network, for treasures of Irish interest. For his

exhibitions of'early Irish paintings', he cleans and restores all pic

tures, if they need it - or farms out works on paper to colleagues

like Christopher Ashe. He then matches early gilt frames to the

exact period and style of a painting. Queues tend to form long before the 6 o'clock opening, as the paintings are sold on a first

come, first served basis. There are no special favours for the

superrich; and there are no 'Chinese auctions'. The Gorrys get

the price they name; and they usually sell the lot.

Mind you, they give public art institutions first perference and have placed work in the National Gallery, the Hugh Lane,

IMMA, the Crawford, the National Self-Portrait Collection,

OPW, the Ulster Museum, Imperial War Museum; Jewish Museum and the John J Burns Library in Boston College.

For all that, the Gorrys are intensely private people, and

rarely socialise outside the gallery. They do exhibit 'living artists'

such as, last year, Robert Ballagh, but the contemporary art

world is hardly aware of them. For example, Jimmy has handled

paintings by Louis le Brocquy, but has never met him.

Yet the Gorrys have acted as executors of many artistic

estates - Sophie Mallin (the Walter Osborne estate); Bea

Orpen; Elizabeth Rivers; Basil R?k?czi; Stella Steyn; Helen

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APPRENTICE TO MASTER: THREE GENERATIONS OF THE GORRY FAMILY

GALLERIES

Colvill; Nathaniel Hone and Jeremiah Hoad - again a tradition

going back to the grandfather, who mounted Darius J MacEgan's

memorial exhibition in 1940.

The Gorrys can also stand their ground. Most famously, Jimmy

went to law against the Sunday Independent, when Bruce Arnold

declared works provided by Jimmy to the National Gallery's James Arthur O'Connor exhibition to be fakes. Jimmy wrote a bludgeon

ing, half-page rebuttal in the paper.3 The following morning,

Taoiseach Charles Haughey phoned to congratulate Jimmy with

an unprintable phrase.

The exhibition this March has, as usual, no theme, other

than paintings with significant Irish connections. The curiously

infectious Irish Romantic painter James Arthur O'Connor is a

Gorry signature tune (Jimmy named his son after him), and

there are three good-quality O'Connors. The 1828 painting

illustrated is typical: a tone poem of soughing spinneys and sky;

all dwarfing the evocative and somewhat entranced little char

acters, executed with just a few wry squiggles of pigment. In the

foreground, a man seems about to deliver an address to his dog.

Jimmy recognises this mongrel from a number of other

O'Connors: 'Probably the artist's pet'.

I also watched Jimmy remove - with cottonbuds and his own

solvent-mix - a haze of queasy brown grime ('peat smoke gives

it that warm discoloration', said Jimmy) from an epic coastal

scene, Mont Orgueil, Jersey by James Francis Danby, son of

O'Connor's lifelong friend Francis Danby. Within hours, its

smouldering Romanticism had been transformed into crisp

focus, with the minimum of intervention - or Cavendo Tutus

(safety through caution), Jimmy's watchword.

Of the 18th-century pieces in the show, there are three sig

nificant Nathaniel Hones: two exquisite enamel miniatures:

one of a dyspeptic-looking John Gray of Dalmarnock; the

other, the newly-discovered, early Hone self-portrait (see Paul

Caffrey on Nathaniel Hone, page 102). There is also a large Hone canvas of the rose-lipped Spartan Boy. Hone painted at

least five versions, and this image was often engraved4 before

being retranslated into oils by Strickland Lowry's trompe Voeil, now in the National Gallery.

There are also significant portraits of Irish notables: one fine

pastel by Hugh Douglas Hamilton of John Monk Mason (1725

1809), the Grattan era MP for Blessington; and Sir George

Hayter's study of Frederick Shaw (MP for Dublin and Trinity

College, 1830-1848) - a sketch for Hayter's painting, The House

of Commons 1833 which marked the limited democratic

improvment, in Irish terms, of the Reform Bill, which granted franchise to property-owning men.

The rest are predominantly 19th century. A perfectly pre

served watercolour Fahionable Group at the Palace Gate of Dublin

Castle C.1850 by Michael Angelo Hayes, no doubt commis

sioned by its subjects - a mounted, physiognomically classical

couple en route to the Phoenix Park -

includes a rakish young

officer in military dress, mortifying the lady with his how-are-ye

swagger, while her horse peers round at us in comic alarm (Fig 6).

There are a range of exoticised Irish subjects, often painted

elsewhere, which reflect a spectrum of sentiment and prejudice:

Ohio-born Howard Helmick's pictures of coyly adorable, barefoot

girl-urchins; or the noble features of the red-shawled colleen of

Samuel Godbold's The Forester's Daughter (1860) against a

tremendous Kerry mountainscape. Another melodramatic discov

ery is a 1861 pair of narrative oil paintings by Dennis Malone

Carter (born Ireland 1819, emigrated to US 1839; lived mostly

NYC, d.1881).5 Departure for the New World sees a well-to-do fam

ily group about to set sail (perhaps imperfectly remembered -

the

women's bonnets seem rather American) from their ancestral

home (Fig 5). The mother's left hand points providentially to

Heaven, perhaps in chiliastic prophecy. The second panel, Arrival

in the New World sees the same family, now besieged in the wild

woods by another native people (perhaps Mohicans) who appear as indistinct fire-devils in a new Sublime. Carter is often regarded

as an American history painter, but here is a distinctly Irish story.

There's plenty more: a powerful Edwin Hayes maritime

painting off Killiney Hill; a beautfiul little Aloysius O'Kelly

(1853-1941) Inn Scene, from his 1876 visit to Brittany; even a

confident little early Lavery, from 1882 of a friar reading his

breviary on the steps of an Italianate villa.

Although only a little family shop, the Gorrys deserve seri

ous credit for their contribution to public awareness of early

4 James Alphonsus

Gorry (1900-1967) James Joseph

Gorry (1870-1943) oil on canvas

60 x 50cm

signed and

dated 1923

5 Denis Malone

Carter (1819-1881)

Departure for the

New World

oil on canvas

74 x 109.5cm

signed and

dated 1861

6 Michael Angelo

Hayes RHA (1820

1877) Fashionable

Group at the Palace

Gate of Dublin

Castle watercolour on paper heightened with white

74 x 109.5cm

7 Jimmy with

his father in the

gallery, 1964

Irish art. Although they are comfortable at last, the question of

who will carry the torch has been raised. Meanwhile, James IV, the natural issue, lives in Australia and like his grandfather before him, sources art for his father...

MIC M0R0NEY is a writer and a critic.

Exhibition of 18th-21st century paintings, Gorry Gallery, Dublin, 14-31 March.

1 Campbell worked closely with the Gorrys whilst

preparing his seminal National Gallery show in

1984, The Irish Impressionists'. 2 Julian Campbell, Irish Arts Review, vol. 3, no. 3,

Autumn 1986, pp 16-8; Brendan Rooney, Thaddeus, Four Courts Press, 2003, pp 74-86.

3 Sunday Independent, 1 December 1985, pl5. 4 I am indebted to Paul Caffrey for allowing me a pre

view of his essays in the March Gorry Catalogue. 5 I am grateful to Peter Murray, who sent me his

entry on Carter in his as yet unpublished

Dictionary of Irish Artists in America.

SPRING 2007 IRISH ARTS REVIEW |l01

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