Mná na hÉireann PART 4

Survival & Celebration

In 19th Century Irish Art&

Poetry & Song

Home After Work 1863Edward Sheil

This artist was devoted to depicting happy family life.

Bearded man in front of fire after day’s work-bag of carpenter’s tools on floor. Pretty wife hands him their blonde child.

Well furnished cozy house suggests comfort and harmony in the craftsman's life.

Feeding Hens, West of Ireland (or The Return of the Fisherman) Aloysius O’Kelly 1879

In Connemara, a spacious, light-filled cottage interior, open to the sea, artist depicts a happy, smiling family group which has been reunited. His creel is filled with fish.

Bantam hens peck on earth floor. Fishing boats seen out door. Artist may have been inspired by Aran Island cottage.

Synge wrote: “He is a skilled fisherman and can manage the Currach with extraordinary skill and dexterity. He can farm simply, burn kelp, cut out pampooties, mend nets, build and thatch a house…His work changes with the seasons in a way that keeps him free from dullness.”

An Aran Fisherman

and his Wife 1916

Keating, Sean (1889-1977) Dublin City

Gallery,

FEEDING THE CHICKENSMartin Driscoll - 20th century

Market Woman 1886Hugh Charde

Young woman carries wicker basket of vegetables on her back to market. There is no sense of the woman’s toil and sweat at a busy market stall (such as in Cork’s English Market).

Depiction of market women and street traders was popular subject for painters in18th century.

19th century artists depicted rather sentimentalized urchins and traders, images designed to play upon the sympathies of middle-class art collectors who delighted in having pictures of the urban poor on their drawing room walls.

The Kelp Gatherers 1835Samuel Lover

One of the earliest paintings of west of Ireland people at work. This painting is a social document of Connemara life in pre-famine years and for the topographical accuracy of the coastal and mountainous landscape depict.

Seaweed-gathering was important as a communal and seasonal activity. Women sort seaweed in wicker baskets; men burn kelp on low cliff. Scene is industrious -dignified. Women are graceful, smartly dressed, in red or maroon dresses, each with different hairstyle. Yet only ten years later, the district around Killary, just north of here, was to be one of worst-hit areas during Famine, which devastated the west.

A valuable description of seaweed by English artist WH Bartlett, 1894

“Seaweed, or ‘wrack’ as it is called, plays important part in Connemara life, both in the form of manure for the land, and burnt for kelp.

A most picturesque scene is after a storm in the spring, when all the available population make their way to the shore with their horses and donkeys and baskets of all sorts and sizes. Into the sea they will go, gathering wrack of every kind, torn up by the rough Atlantic. It is an animated scene, and all appear to enjoy the work, joking and laughing with one another…The making of the kelp during the summer and early autumn employs a good many people….” - Coast Life in Connemara

The Seaweed Girl 1877William Magrath

The subject of fisher girls, shrimp girls and cockle-pickers at work on the beach became a popular and slightly sentimental genre in early 19th century. Artists here conveys romanticized image of a handsome woman with strong arms, graceful ankles—no sign of the tedium or hardship of her work.

Large open basket suggests a beach in Co Cork—Old Head of Kinsale is visible in background.

Molly Malone and her cart on Grafton Street, Dublin ‘the tart with a heart’

‘She was a fishmonger, But sure 'twas no wonder…’

The song tells the fictional tale of a beautiful fishmonger who plied her trade on the streets of Dublin, but who died young, of a fever.

Legend has it that Molly lived in the 17th century and died on 13 June 1699.

The song is first found published in 1883 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is from the music hall style of the period, but "neither melody nor words bear any relationship to the Irish tradition of street ballads.“

>In Dublin's fair city, Where the girls are so pretty, (sung by Danny Kaye 1949 – 3 mins)

I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone, As she wheeled her wheel-barrow,

Through streets broad and narrow, Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!"

Seaweed Gatherers, Connemara 1883Aloysius O’Kelly

Theme of seaweed-gathering along the coast of Ireland preoccupied artists in 19th century.

East coast painters represented men at work with horse and cart on the strand.

West coast artists represented small family groups, sometimes with donkey, transporting seaweed from the beach.

This painting is more ‘realistic’. Traditional costume of barefoot people with patient donkey—wicker work creels- (possibly on Aran Islands.

‘One of finest examples of French Realism applied to a west of Ireland setting, a generation before Jack B Yeats and Paul Henry attempted similar subjects.” Barefooted youth wears a tam-o’-shanter,

waistcoat, home-spun trousers, Woman wears red scarf, rough jacket & skirt.

Potato Gatherers in the West 1902 Charles MacIver Grierson

Two women picking potatoes in a treeless landscape at sunset. A fire blazes on hillside (probably burning of gorse to clear land and enable new grass to grow for summer grazing.). Wicker basket half filled with potatoes.

The Potato Diggers (1912) Paul Henry (1876-1958)

>IRELAND a poem by John Hewitt

Read by Garrison Keillor

THE IRISH SEA composed by

Shaun Davey

3.34 mins.

Mná na hÉireann END of PART I

Survival & Celebration

In 19th Century Irish Art&

Poetry & Song

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Mná na hÉireann PART 2

Survival & Celebration

In 19th Century Irish Art&

Poetry & Song

Women Writers

International Festival of Literature

'The Emigrant Irish’By Evan Boland

recited by Fionnula Flanagan

for Gathering Ireland 2013

Famine, Emigration, Evictions

IRELAND 1845-1851

“The Great Irish Hunger epoch changed

the face and the heart of Ireland.

The Famine--yielded like the ice of

the Northern Seas; it ran like melted

snows in the veins of Ireland for many

years afterwards.” --Edith Somerville, Irish Memories (1917).

Mother IRELAND

Róisín Dubh - My Dark Rosaleen Cathleen Ni Houlihan

And no foreign skies hold beauty like the rainy skies they knew;

Nor any night-wind cool the brow as did the foggy dew.

They are going, going, going and we cannot bid them stay:

Their fields are now the stranger's, where the stranger's cattle stray,

Oh! Kathaleen Ni Houlihan, your way's a thorny way!

- From Ethna Carbery's "The Passing of the Gael” [The Four Winds of Erinn - 1902]

Mother begging - Clonakilty 1846

Famine strikes 1845-1850

Mother IRELAND

Bridget O’Donnell of Cork, Ireland, my great-grandmother, age 14 was sent out to Boston by her father in 1846.”Bridget never regretted leaving – so hungry and poor they were – she had gratitude to have gotten out of Ireland” said Katharine, her

daughter.

Bridget O’Donnell Crossgrove * great-granddaughter Kathy * Close up: the SHAWL

My cousin, Kathy models the flax-wool Shawl which Bridget O’Donnell of Cork, Ireland, my great-grandmother carried over from Cork in 1846.

Her daughter, Katharine Crossgrove, a school teacher married my grandfather, William Lyons in South Dakota

Women Writers

International Festival of Literature

Eavan Boland: Quarantine

Awaiting the Emigrant Ship 1867

Charles Henry Cook Family in front of Anglesea

Bridge, near old Corn Exchange buildings in Cork

Throughout mid-19th century a much higher ratio of female to male emigration.

For women, improvement in their economic condition abroad was modest, BUT for others in fields of education, and nursing, emigration not only brought financial rewards but significantly enhanced personal independence and status.