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CHAPTER 7

A PROPER JOB

I have a recurring dream in which I am about to sit university finals. In the dream, I have not revised and am convinced that I am going to fail, and I haven’t a clue what I want to do in life or where to go. As a result, I decide to stay on at university. On the assumption that this must be a dream that other people have as well, and wondering what it can mean, I looked it up.

Oh dear! It’s all to do with my realising through my experience of later life that, basically, I made a mess of my university years. ‘Most dreams taking us back to earlier school experiences have to do with a nagging recollection of not having done all that we might have at that time.’ Sadly, I cannot argue with that. For one reason or another, I did not take advantage of all that Trinity had to offer. I did not enjoy my time there; I do not have nice memories of the place; I did not make many friends; in fact, the only saving grace was my introduction to the world of art history by means of the stupendous teaching of Anne Crookshank.

When I did graduate, although I knew I wanted more than Anne had managed to impart in two years, I was not at all sure about a future career. It was by no means clear in those days – at least it was not clear to me – that one could make a career in art history, and so I considered other options. The Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank (which was not then the HSBC that it is today) was a popular choice for graduates wanting to work abroad (and that included me); the world of advertising attracted arts graduates who sought something creative and I did apply to a firm called Benton & Bowles in Knightsbridge but the experience of the interview convinced me that advertising was not for me. Because of my working in Claridge’s, hotel management strayed into my mind, although it soon strayed out again. I felt I was too Irish to even think of Sotheby’s or Christie’s. But if I really wanted to learn more than Anne had taught me, then I could: there was the Courtauld Institute in London, and I could do another art history degree there.

It was all too confusing and, to solve my dilemma, I decided I needed a year abroad to think. I would go to Germany. I had never been there, and did not know a word of German; it would be a new experience. I enrolled in a language school in Cologne for three months in the autumn and found accommodation (through the school) with a widow and her unpleasant adult son. I wrote to my mother (on 6 October 1968):

I have meals with the family. She is very rough, and a war widow. The son, who is about thirty, speaks good English and thinks he knows just about everything. All the time it is how great the Germans are, etc, etc. I just told him the other night what everyone thought about the Germans, and that shut him up.

When I came home in December (for my Trinity Commencements), I went to see Anne Crookshank and asked her about the Courtauld.

‘By all means apply,’ she said, ‘and I’ll give you a good reference. It’s fiercely competitive but my pupil Margaret Mitchell got in last year.’

But although Anne and I were still very much teacher and pupil at this stage, she had observed something of my character over the two years of my sitting at the back of her seminar room.

‘But there are other options,’ she said. ‘Have you thought of Edinburgh, which has a very good reputation under David Talbot Rice? Or the University of East Anglia: that’s a new department? They might suit you better than the more hothouse atmosphere of the Courtauld.’

The way she said ‘hothouse’ alerted me.

‘And Edinburgh would be a friendlier environment than London can be,’ she added.

After Christmas, I returned to Germany but this time I went to Munich. There was a reason for my choice: Penny was there. But our nine months in the city is a story that must – in the interests of discretion – wait to be told in full another day. Sufficient to say that we had a fabulous time. I taught English at the Berlitz School and we travelled a lot, to Salzburg, to Prague, and we drove to Greece. Penny was very musical and had a beautiful singing voice. Her rendering to her own accompaniment on the piano of Schubert’s Die Forelle with beautiful German diction could and did (on one occasion) bring tears to the eyes of even a German. We went very often – gaining a substantial discount on last-minute tickets with our student-cards – to the best of opera and to wonderful concerts. Afterwards, walking through the night streets in the snow, Penny would burst into loud song, paraphrasing musically much of what we had just heard. My pocket diary from the time records that we heard Daniel Barenboim, Hans Hotter, David and Igor Oistrakh, Michelangelo Benedetti (drunk at the keyboard, as I recall), Rita Streich, Birgit Nilsson, Otto Klemperer, Herman Prey and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the concert hall, and, at the opera, a complete Ring Cycle, Arabella, The Sicilian Vespers, Tristan, Rosenkavalier, Faust, Orpheo, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly and Die Freischütz. Penny remembers a conductor dropping dead on the podium during a performance at the opera but I have no recollection of that.

I bought an ancient Volkswagen Beetle convertible, and we toured the castles of King Ludwig, and learned a lot about Bavarian Rococo. We lived in the student quarter of Schwabing, near the English Garden. I learned very little German. My only regret is that I did not learn to ski. The snow lasts in Munich until well into March, and skiing is possible almost on one’s doorstep; but, foolishly, I did not take it up.

I soon found employment. ‘Now I have got all sorts of good news for you,’ I wrote to my mother (1 February 1969).

‘The most important thing is that I have landed the most marvellous job. I got it through one of the schools I applied to teach in. It is giving an intensive course in English to two ladies. The director of the school, who is awfully nice and has given me all sorts of help, tells me that they are both immensely rich and also very snobby.¹ This is just a sudden sort of whim that they have got, that they want to learn English, and is an excuse to spend some of their husbands’ money. I have to teach them from 9 to 1, then go to lunch with them until 2 (talking English). I get an allowance to cover the cost of the lunch and get paid £12 10s per week. The unfortunate thing is that these women will, I am sure, get tired of English after about three weeks. No, I no longer teach the two ladies,’ I informed my mother (on 5 March 1969). They have gone to France to buy clothes and won’t be back for a while. Anyway, they had got fed up of the classes, as their English was nearly as good as mine.

But my carefree Munich existence was not without some clouds. Reminding me that Elliott did feel a responsibility for me, my mother wrote to say he had said she should ‘take me home’. I replied (7 April 1969):

Elliott is talking nonsense telling you to take me home and I am glad that you and Alice have the good sense to see that. I just want you to see and remember that I am, and always have been, completely different in temperament to any of the others, so to try and make me lead the same sort of lives they do, would be absolute madness, and were I to come home and work in Dublin, which is what Elliott wants, I would be very, very unhappy. You must know that I am not wasting my time here or anywhere else, and you may rest assured that I will turn out alright, so don’t worry.

The paragraph which followed contained the sort of news that could only have worried my mother more and added fuel to Elliott’s fire:

I went to High Mass with this family that I have got to know. There was one Cardinal and four bishops – all very colourful. There was an enormous crowd of people, all waiting to get communion from the old Cardinal. Ordinary old bloke he was too: just as bad as they are at home.

But all the time, I knew that this happy, carefree and very irresponsible life had to end and that I must not stay on in Munich for more than a year or I might be trapped, with no qualifications and no career, in an expatriate existence for life. Furthermore, Penny and I had influenced each other too much and we had become too alike to make a success of any longer-term partnership and, with sadness, we both knew it. I applied to the Courtauld and to Edinburgh University, and I was interviewed for a place on their courses by both. The interview at the Courtauld was in February or March. My friend Peter Feuchtwanger wrote to me (on 24 January 1969): ‘Was pleased to receive your letter this morning and to learn that you are planning to come to London for the interview. When will it be? I shall write to Prof Gombrich² the moment you have a definite date. I hope you will stay with me.’

My Courtauld interview, by Anthony Blunt³ and one of his lecturers (I don’t recall who), was one of the cruellest experiences I ever endured, and I have never forgotten it. Blunt started the interview by telling me that they did not normally accept someone with my background but that they had had one of Anne Crookshank’s pupils the previous year and ‘she had done rather well’. As an art history qualification was offered by very few universities at this time, I must have been relatively rare among applicants in that I already had a degree in the subject. So, if that was not an acceptable background, I did not know what could have been. In stating in my application (as one was asked to do) the two fields of study that interested me, I had plumped for ‘seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting and architecture’ and ‘German Expressionist painting’.

When we were seated around a table, Sir Anthony opened the interview. ‘Perhaps we could show you some photographs,’ he said, glancing towards his colleague, ‘and ask you to identify them.’

The colleague passed a small black-and-white photograph across the table. In most cases, German Expressionist painters are recognised by their colour, although there are some artists – Kandinsky, Klee and Franz Marc, with his horses, for example – that are more obvious by their style. A small black-and-white photograph is by no means the easiest means of identifying an artist of this school. As I tentatively assessed the photographs, Sir Anthony – noisily drawing in his breath through his teeth – made me aware of how little I knew. But at the same time, I got some artists right. Wearily, Sir A moved the interview on to the eighteenth century, and more photographs were produced. Throwing one across at me (and this I recall as though it were yesterday), he said, ‘You won’t recognise this, but look at the photograph and let us hear your reasoning.’ As it happened, I did recognise the image (I don’t know how).

‘It’s the Double Cube Room at Wilton,’ I said. ‘Inigo Jones, about 1650.’

The interview was soon over. I was very shocked by the experience and, not surprisingly, I was turned down.

Within five years I was an assistant keeper at the London National Gallery, having beaten several of Blunt’s graduates in the selection process for the post. Naturally, I met Sir Anthony at events in the gallery and I would also meet him socially, in particular at the house of my friend John Kenworthy-Browne. I always wanted to tell Blunt that he had once interviewed me, and I wanted to tell him how uncalled for it had been to treat any young person the way he had treated me. But I never had the nerve to do so. When, a few years later, he was unmasked as the despicable traitor he was, there was no one who was more pleased than me. Turned down by Sir Anthony, my path was directed towards Edinburgh, where I was interviewed for a place on the post-graduate course by Professor Talbot Rice. David Talbot Rice was a distinguished scholar of Byzantine art and a gentleman and his interviewing technique was in marked contrast to Sir Anthony’s cruelty. I was accepted by him and that, as it turned out, was a fortunate and very happy turn of events.

As Elliott’s generosity in funding my education had (understandably) come to an end with my graduation from Trinity, I had to find the means of supporting myself through two years’ study in Edinburgh. An odd little legacy from Old Elliott Potterton (see Rathcormick), which had accumulated since his death in 1929, was in my name and, now that I was over twenty-one, it became available to me. I used it, and I also looked for whatever grants I might find. A Carnegie Trust in Scotland gave bursaries to anyone of Scottish descent who wanted to study in Scotland and, when my mother told me that her grandmother was Scots (which was true), I successfully applied. I also obtained funds from the Arts Council in Ireland: Mervyn Wall⁴ the novelist, who was secretary of the Council, told me many years later that he had looked at my application sympathetically as he knew of me through Speer Ogle. Then there was the Purser–Griffith Scholarship and Prize. This was based upon an exam that was set in alternate years by Trinity and University College Dublin (UCD). From Edinburgh I enrolled for the exam – which was to be held in UCD that year – but my application was met by the History of Art Department in UCD, then under the formidable Françoise Henry,⁵ with extreme resistance. Although I had given details of my birth and education in Ireland, including a degree from Trinity it was not enough to confirm that I was Irish and, therefore, eligible to sit the exam. A copy of my passport and an affidavit – yes, an affidavit – from a solicitor was demanded to confirm my Irish credentials. The exam consisted of two papers: one, a general history of European painting, and another on a special subject chosen by candidates in advance. I selected ‘Eighteenth-century British Portrait Painting’. On the day of the exam, when the special subject paper was put in front of me, I saw immediately that the questions were not confined to British painting but ranged over the full canvas of European portraiture. I answered the required number of questions as best I could, but I did write a letter of protest afterwards. I was informed that I had passed the exam but, if I wanted, I could re-sit the special paper. Passing the exam was no good to me: I needed the scholarship, or at very least the prize, and so I sat the exam again. I won the prize; the scholarship went to a diligent nun from UCD.

The fact of the matter was that Françoise Henry could not abide Anne Crookshank. Françoise was the grande dame of Irish art studies – albeit Celtic ones – and had been teaching at UCD since 1932. She had very little interest in post-Renaissance Irish art – which was Anne’s field – and she resented Trinity setting up a history of art department. Matters were not helped by the fact that they were both very formidable and domineering women and both grazed the same field when, in actual fact, the Prairie would not have been extensive enough to contain them. It should be stated, though, that Anne had nothing but admiration for Françoise.

At Edinburgh, I chose to specialise in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art and architecture, and my tutor was Alistair Rowan.⁶ He was (and still is) a very good lecturer, although less electrifying than Anne. As a tutor he was exacting and, because there was only one other student, Neil Burton,⁷ studying the same subject as me (the entire class of postgraduates numbered only about ten or twelve), Alistair gave us a lot of his time. Neil and I got on very well and I liked his lovely Oxford girlfriend, Andrea, very much. The course was a two-year one, culminating in exams and the submission of a 10,000-word thesis. When it came to choosing a topic for my thesis, it was Anne who suggested Irish sculpture and, specifically, Irish church monuments.

‘They are there to be discovered,’ she said, ‘it’s only a matter of getting into the churches and that’s much easier than getting into private houses to look at pictures. But do prepare! You must go through the Journals of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland. They are in the library here. They document some monuments but not the sculptors, of course. It’s for you to identify the sculptors.’

And so I spent the Christmas and Easter vacations combing through these turgid journals (and other sources) and compiling lists of what I had to find. In the dishevelled Volkswagen Beetle – left-hand drive, convertible, with a tattered roof, and an uncertain temperament – that I had brought home from Munich, I had a merry time driving the length and breadth of Ireland that summer in pursuit of sculptors, and photographing and recording all that I found. I had many interesting encounters. Finding Helen Roe⁸ and Nora O’Sullivan deep in the undergrowth of a churchyard in County Laois was one. Helen, who was a medievalist (and delightful), asked me what I was doing.

‘Looking for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century monuments,’ I explained.

‘But those are not monuments,’ she objected, ‘they’re modern.’

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, battling my way to see the sculptor Joseph Wilton’s beautiful – but vandalised – Dawson monument at Dartrey County Monaghan, I came across the architect Jeremy Williams⁹ encamped with a detachment of other enthusiasts in the stables at Dartrey, which they were supposedly restoring. It was my first time meeting Jeremy, who was to become a friend for life.

I found lots of monuments, far too many to incorporate coherently into a shortish thesis, and so I picked a single sculptor – an Englishman who had settled in Ireland in the early eighteenth century, William Kidwell – and I investigated him and wrote him up. Kidwell was hardly a ‘name’, in fact he wasn’t a name at all and, as a sculptor, he was very minor indeed; but my thesis appealed to the external examiner, Professor John Steer. Depressed by the annual task of reading theses on the usual subjects, such as Robert Adam, Alexander Runciman, David Wilkie or Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Steer was taken by the nonsensical novelty of Kidwell and insisted on giving me a high mark. Alistair Rowan suggested I turn the thesis into a ‘Shorter Notice’ for the Burlington Magazine and he sent it to the editor, Benedict Nicolson, who published it. The dottiness of all of this did not stop there. Charles Brett¹⁰ of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society asked me to put together all my monuments in a dictionary format and he published my text under the auspices of his society in an ugly little typewritten book.

Finishing in Edinburgh, I was, like all new graduates, in the dire position of having to find a job. I applied for whatever was on offer in the provincial museums of England, but without success. Then one Sunday morning, Desmond Guinness – whom I did not know – telephoned me at home in Trim.

‘It’s Desmond, Desmond Guinness,’ he said in his whispering voice. ‘Is that Homan?’ It was as though we were old friends. ‘Miss Crookshank tells me that you have written the most marvellous thesis, and I so long to read it.’

He invited me to Leixlip that afternoon, asking me to bring my thesis with me and, at the end of about an hour’s chat, he said that if I had no better offer, he could give me work at Leixlip for a month or two sorting photographs and Georgian Society files.

‘Could I start tomorrow morning?’

I was delighted: it was a break, and I have never forgotten Desmond’s kindness.

The couple of months I spent at Leixlip that summer were just wonderful. Desmond’s wife Mariga was not there, although she appeared for a week or so, making her presence felt by the rustling of her petticoat under a long tartan skirt as she descended the stairs. Patricia McSweeney, an American, was Desmond’s secretary: ‘raven-haired Miss McSweeney’ as she was referred to in a newspaper interview. She was the greatest of fun. We worked from an office upstairs, which Desmond also sometimes shared, and Patricia and I had many hilarious moments together. I was still quite timid and shy – and, frankly, in awe of the circumstances in which I found myself – but I was treated by Desmond rather in the manner of an eighteenth-century tutor in an aristocratic household. I was included in the dining room at lunch every day, with Desmond and whatever guests there were, and in that way I encountered a host of exotic (to me) individuals. His brother Jonathan; the legendary wealthy aesthete Rory Cameron¹¹ and his handsome boyfriend (and gardener), Gilbert; Desmond and Helen Leslie; sundry rich (and confused by Leixlip) Americans; Mark Bence-Jones¹² and his wife, who asked for a glass of milk with her lunch rather than wine; and many more. I was invited to the Leixlip ‘Dinner and Dancing’ in Horse Show Week. It was all terrific. I observed and took things in: Desmond’s sense of fun and style, his ease, his kindness and thoughtfulness, his lack of snobbery.

One afternoon, I was in Dublin and walking through Trinity when I was hailed by Anne Crookshank.

‘You must go immediately and ring James White,’¹³ she said. ‘John Gilmartin¹⁴ has got a good job in the Birmingham Museum and is leaving the National Gallery. I’ve told James that you are the man to take John’s place.’

I did as I was bidden. James invited me to come to the gallery. We had a brief talk and he asked me when I could start. The post was a menial one, with a desk at the end of the library, but as Michael Wynne was James’s only curatorial assistant, there would be lots of interesting work to do. I would be the ‘temporary cataloguer’. When my mother rang my brother Elliott to boast that I had now got a proper job, he asked what sort of job.

‘As a temporary cataloguer in the National Gallery,’ she said proudly.

‘Temporary?’ said Elliott. ‘The postman who brings the letters to Rathcormick has been temporary for thirty-five years.’

But my mother’s satisfaction was undimmed. She had been indulgent of my migration from incipient solicitor to the unfamiliar territory of art historian and, although never without some strictures, she had always tolerated all my other nonsense as well – such as my enthusiasm for foreign travel.

‘But I always knew you wouldn’t let me down,’ is what she said in reporting Elliott’s reaction.

In the diary pages that follow, written at the time I worked under James White in the National Gallery, I seem to denigrate James. But this is a callow youth who is writing. Yes, there were things about James that could be denigrated: his lack of academic credentials, for a start. And his eye for a picture could sometimes be shaky. His writing on art tended towards the haphazard. But James had many other qualities that elevated him above the ordinary as a director and which accounted for his success. He was a superb communicator, both as a lecturer on art and in handling public relations. The gallery (and James) was always in the news. He could get on with people – from the man in the street to the highest in the land, be they politicians, business tycoons, foreign ambassadors or the old Anglo-Irish gentry. Had I been endowed with even a fraction of his political acumen, I would, in later years, have been a great deal more successful as director of the gallery than I ever was. James liked to be liked but did not bear grudges if he was not. Working under him could be something of a roller coaster, as some of my diary entries imply. He himself worked at speed; he got things done; all was possible; and he expected those who worked with him to be of the same frame of mind. Maddening he might have been on occasion, but he was also endearing, and by the time I left the gallery after just over two years, I was very fond of him. He too liked me (as later chapters here will show) and, after I went to London, he would sometimes look me up and ask me to dine with him and over dinner indulge his penchant for naughty chat. His wife, Aggie, was someone I came to admire greatly too. She was stylish and dignified, and always forthright in her views. James seemed to keep her in the background, but she was very sound and sensible and gave James a very contented family life.

James was the instigator in establishing at this time the Association of Irish Art Historians – a novel concept, as there were hardly any Irish art historians to speak of. His principal challenge was to get Françoise Henry to sit round a table with Anne Crookshank; and in this he eventually succeeded. Notwithstanding there being such a very small pool in which to fish, discussions as to who counted as an art historian were protracted. Were the scholars of early Irish art really art historians in the strict sense of the word? There were those who would want to be included – was it enough to have passed the Purser–Griffith exam? – but were not considered sufficiently academic; and there were those who were desirable as members, such as John Teahan¹⁵ and Catriona MacLeod¹⁶ in the National Museum, but would they join? No question mark hung over the eligibility of the tiny terrier that was Mrs Leask¹⁷: she would almost be accepted honoris causa. And what about architectural historians?

Eventually, things got under way, and I was made assistant honorary secretary. James came up with a project for members to update the Irish biographies in the multi-volume Thieme-Becker Künsterlexikon, and lists of suitable entries were solicited. As to whether Thieme-Becker wanted their Irish biographies updated, no one actually knew. But in the event, it did not matter one way or another, as nothing ever happened. I did not know Françoise Henry, but once or twice, following a meeting, she came to the gallery and, on finding me at my desk in the library, sat down opposite me. She was terrifically large (and was to become even larger) and I found her acutely fearsome. She would come to correct some details in the minutes that I had sent out. She did not do this in an unkind or bullying way but more to inculcate in me an appreciation that accuracy was important. It dawned on me after a couple of these sessions that she was actually trying to reach out and befriend me. But as I left the gallery before too long, it was a friendship that had no time to blossom. In spite of that, Françoise was to play a pivotal role at a later – and crucial – stage of my career.

It is difficult to imagine today, when art history is such a firmly established discipline being taught in colleges all over Ireland (and England), and when there are so many people doing research over a very broad spectrum, that in the 1960s the subject was new, with degree courses in Britain limited in the main to the Courtauld Institute, Edinburgh University and the University of East Anglia. Françoise had, from as early as 1934, been giving lectures on European painting in UCD when she was attached to the French Department and, from 1948, to the Department of Archeology. It was only in 1965 that she established the History of Art Department: that was the same year that Anne appeared in Trinity, setting up the Art History Department there. Insofar as post-Renaissance Irish art was concerned, very few people had engaged in research, and publishing outlets had been few. One must rummage through the pages of the Capuchin Annual, the Father Mathew Record and Studies to find what articles on Irish artists there were. There one will come across, among the very few, Máirin Allen (who, I think, was a pupil of Françoise) writing about Evie Hone and other Irish artists as early as the 1940s, and Con Curran (C.P. Curran),¹⁸ Tom McGreevy¹⁹ and Eithne Waldron²⁰ contributing slightly later. But from the late 1960s things began to change, and it was Anne, more than Françoise, who encouraged research on topics that would hardly have been considered worthy of study a decade earlier. Jeanne Sheehy²¹ was the first of Anne’s hens who was set to hatch, with an M.Litt thesis on Walter Osborne, and others quickly followed: Michael Wynne²² (Irish stained glass), John Hutchinson²³ (James Arthur O’Connor) and Julian Campbell²⁴ (Irish artists in early-twentieth-century France), to cite but three. The Irish Georgian Society Bulletin was an outlet for articles on (mainly) eighteenth-century art and architecture, Studies was still in circulation and, in the North, Charlie Brett was publishing madly under the auspices of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.

From the pages of my 1973 diary, it seems that those of us who were interested in Irish art research formed a very small clique: the names are few, and oft repeated. Anne, the Knight of Glin²⁵ Desmond Guinness, Maurice Craig, Eddie McParland²⁶ Jeanne Sheehy, Hugh Dixon,²⁷ Rolf Loeber,²⁸ Charlie Brett and myself. We were a small clique – and a very Trinity–Georgian Society clique at that. If there were others, in UCD or elsewhere, who were equally active, they mainly eluded us: Michael Wynne (researching Thomas Frye) and Hilary Pyle (Jack B. Yeats) in the National Gallery we knew about, and John Gilmartin had written about the Dublin sculptor Peter Turnerelli; John Turpin²⁹ was working on Daniel Maclise and John O’Grady³⁰ on Sarah Purser; but that was more or less it. The National Museum kept itself out of bounds, with virtually all of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collections unavailable, and it was only with the advent years later of Mairead Dunlevy³¹ there that things (and the curators) became more accessible.

Being now in ‘a proper job’, I was faced with finding a place to live in Dublin. I saw no reason – except for the fact that I had no money – why I should not buy a house.

‘I can borrow the money from the bank and take lodgers to pay it off,’ I said to my mother when she enquired as to how I intended to proceed.

‘I see,’ she said.

But as I looked for houses, and she saw that I was serious, she offered to help me.

‘There is no use in my leaving you money after my death,’ she said. ‘You won’t need it then. Besides, I don’t intend dying for some years yet.’

She was in her late sixties at the time. I found a house – a beautiful house, 169 Rathgar Road – and bought it at auction for £11,000. My mother gave me £5,000 – ‘That’s your inheritance,’ she said, ‘don’t expect anything more’ – and I got a loan from the bank for the balance. My meagre salary as a temporary cataloguer rendered me ineligible for a proper mortgage.

The house, in brick, was a typical Dublin house of its time (I suppose about 1840) and was, therefore, elegantly planned. Three storeys, with high steps leading up to the hall door, and two beautiful reception rooms linked by a double opening, the detailing of which was Greek Revival. There was a long back garden with a tumbledown mews at the end. Although not divided, it had been in three fairly simple flats, so there were basic kitchens and bathrooms on each floor.

‘It’s all ready for lodgers,’ I said to my mother in my attempts to persuade her that it was an ideal buy.

I moved in the day I bought it, and then went out and bought seven beds: one for me and one for any guest I might have in the reception rooms, three for upstairs, and two for the basement. I put a placard in the upstairs window facing the road: ‘Rooms to Rent’, it read.

There then unfolded a most extraordinary set of circumstances.

Almost immediately, along came three young men. They inspected the upstairs flat, came down, asked what the rent was, and said they would take it. I enquired if any or all of them were gainfully employed.

‘We’re actors,’ they said, with that assurance which actors have, and without actually assuring me that they were employed.

One of them spoke with an English accent, another was Northern Irish, and the third was American. None of this, by my reckoning, augured well, and I had the sense to realise that I would be taking a risk by letting them have the flat. I knew that actors kept very irregular hours and that they also led very irregular (and unconventional) lives, but I liked the look of this trio and felt that they would be more congenial to have upstairs than some more steady lodgers. I delved further.

‘And are any of you actually acting at the moment?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ came the reply. ‘We’re in the Project.’

It was as though they were stating that they were members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Project, which had only recently been set up, was (to me) a sort of louche arts centre which staged alternative theatre and alternative art exhibitions, poetry readings and the like. It never lasted very long in any one venue and, whenever it was in the news (which was often), it was on account of its irregular finances rather than its artistic programme. Still, very much against my better judgement, I offered them the flat and they moved in.

The three young men who by this means came to live upstairs were Alan Stanford, Gerard McSorley and the American, whose name escapes me.

‘I’m not an actor,’ he corrected me, ‘I’m a playwright.’

‘And have some of your plays been performed here?’ I asked.

‘Not yet, but I’ve several things in the pipeline.’

But Tennessee Williams he was not and (as I learned from Gerard many years later) his plays remained in the pipeline and he was destined for oblivion. But oblivion was not for Alan or Gerard. Alan Stanford remained in Ireland, and was to become one of the most celebrated actors in the land and a mainstay of the Gate Theatre; Gerard McSorley’s career took him to the Abbey, where he too was a success. Decades later, when I was living in New York, he came to Broadway playing the priest in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. He was no longer the cute little black-haired youth who had lived at Number 169 but stocky and greying. While in New York, he was lodging with my friend, the dress designer Mary O’Donnell, and through her I met him. I had them to a party at my flat and we talked of Rathgar Road. They had all loved being there, he said, and he remembered it well.

Next, I had to let the basement rooms. Along came another Englishman. Young, elegant, with well-groomed, long black hair, and a pink shirt.

‘A bit fancy,’ I thought.

But as it turned out he was not fancy at all. He liked the flat.

‘And do you intend living here alone?’ I asked. ‘It’s really meant for two.’

‘Oh no!’ he said. ‘I’ll be sharing it with a friend.’

‘I would have to meet your friend before deciding,’ I said.

The following evening there arrived on my doorstep a face that was vaguely familiar: a good-looking – in a sexy way – young man in jeans and a leather blouson. This was the potential flat-sharer.

‘I know your face,’ I said, ‘but I can’t think how.’

‘I’m Jim Bartley,’ he said with some diffidence. ‘Perhaps you’ve seen me on Telefís.’

Indeed I had. He was Sean Nolan, the heart-throb in a long-running soap, Tolka Row.

‘What is this?’ I thought. ‘All these actors. Am I to become, inadvertently, a theatrical landlord?’

The Englishman was a photographer, but no ordinary photographer: he was Mike Bunn, who was to make his career in Ireland and become its most celebrated and best-known fashion photographer.

And there I was, landlord to all these celebrities-in-waiting, paying my bank loan, and living a life of elegance in my own two rooms. But it came to an end before all that long when I moved to London, to take up a job in the National Gallery. I decanted my lodgers (all of whom had proved to be excellent tenants) and sold the house on my departure.

Endnotes

1.I recall that one of the ladies was a Frau Springer, married to one of the sons of the Axel Springer publishing empire.

2.Ernst Gombrich (1901–2001) the doyen of British art historians and hugely influential, he was a Professor at the Warburg Institute. A friend of Peter Feuchtwanger and a German Jewish emigre. Peter thought he might be able to help me get into the Courtauld.

3.(1907–83) Director of the Courtauld Institute, 1947–74; Surveyor of the King’s (and later the Queen’s) Pictures, 1945–72. Authority on the artist Poussin. Exposed in 1979 as a Soviet spy.

4.(z`z1908–97) He was Secretary of the Arts Council from 1957–75. His comic fantasy novels (published in the 1940s), The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey are his best known.

5.(1902–82). Renowned scholar of Irish art in the early-Christian period. Born in France, she graduated from the Sorbonne and first came to Ireland in 1926 and was moved to focus on early Irish medieval sculpture as a subject of research. Appointed to the French Department of UCD in 1932, she later moved to the Department of Archaeology while teaching a course on the History of European Painting; and established the History of Art Department in 1965. She first published her Irish Art in 1940 and this was expanded to a three-volume L’Art Irandais in 1963. Subsequently published in English, it remains the standard text on early Irish Art.

6.Architectural historian, b.1938. Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, later Professor of History of Art at UCD, Principal of Edinburgh College of Art, Professor of History of Art at University College Cork (UCC). Editor of The Buildings of Ireland series and author of the North-West Ulster volume.

7.Neil had read history at Oxford and has had a distinguished career as an architectural historian, first with the Council for Places of Worship, then with GLC Historic Buildings, next with English Heritage and, later, as Secretary of the Georgian Group. Now a private architectural historian.

8.An early woman graduate of Trinity College, she taught at Alexandra College and became an authority on the art of Early Christian Ireland. The first woman President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

9.Architect, artist, writer, conservationist and conversationalist, and polymath (1943–2015). Author of Architecture in Ireland, 1837–1921 (1994). (d. 24 December 2015). Obituary by Charles Lysaght Irish Independent, 10 January 2016.

10.(1928–2005). Belfast solicitor, journalist, author and founder (and chairman) of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.

11.Decorator, socialite host, author (d.1985) and son of the scandalous Lady Kenmare. His villa, La Fiorentina at St Jean Cap Ferrat, was a mecca for the international beau monde.

12.(1930-2010). ‘An elegant writer on architecture, Roman Catholicism, Ireland and the Raj with an admiration for the upper classes and grand houses.’ Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 30 April 2010.

13.Lecturer in the history of art, appointed curator of the Dublin Municipal Gallery (now the Hugh Lane) in 1960 and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, 1964–80. My obituary of James, Burlington Magazine (September 2013).

14.Dr John Maiben Gilmartin, my predecessor as temporary cataloguer in the National Gallery of Ireland and later deputy keeper of art in the City Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham. Subsequently, long-time art history lecturer in the College of Marketing and Design (later the Dublin Institute of Technology). President of the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland (FNCI).

15.Keeper of the Art and Industry Department of the National Museum of Ireland who wrote extensively on Irish furniture and decorative arts.

16.A curator at the National Museum of Ireland, she was a specialist on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century decorative arts. She published on Irish eighteenth-century glass and other topics.

17.Ada Longfield Leask (1899–1987), widow of Harold Leask, Inspector of National Monuments in Ireland and author of Irish Churches & Monastic Buildings. She was a graduate in law from Trinity who researched and published widely (long before many people were interested) on Irish decorative arts of the eighteenth century.

18.C.P. Curran (1880–1972) was a lawyer and historian of eighteenth-century Dublin architecture. Author of Dublin Decorative Plasterwork (1967).

19.Poet, friend in Paris of Samuel Beckett, and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, 1950–63.

20.Assistant to Tom McGreevy at the National Gallery and curator of the Dublin Municipal Gallery (the Hugh Lane), 1964–90.

21.(1939–99). Authority on Walter Osborne and the Celtic Revival in art, she was virtually the first of the modern generation of Irish art historians to study (at the beginning, largely under the aegis of Anne Crookshank) Irish art from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. From an artistic (and slightly bohemian) background, she had studied something or other in Paris. Her Walter Osborne thesis was published in a book (1974) and further in the catalogue of the Osborne exhibition in the National Gallery (1983). Her book on The Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (1980), although by her account only a general survey, is still regarded as a landmark of research. In the mid-1970s she took up a post as lecturer in the history of art in what became Oxford Brooks University, and remained there until her death.

22.(1937–2003). A curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, 1965–97. He was assistant director to James White. Deeply religious (he had studied for the priesthood in Rome for six years), his degree was in archaeology from UCD. He later researched and published on Irish stained glass and Irish painting in the eighteenth century and was widely regarded as an authority. He suffered ill-health for much of his life.

23.Director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin from 1991. Author of James Arthur O’Connor (1985).

24.b. 1949. Artist and art historian, and the leading authority on Irish artists of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Author of The Irish Impressionists (1984). Lecturer in the National College of Art and, since 1986, tutor in art history at the Crawford College of Art.

25.Desmond FitzGerald (1937–2011), the twenty-ninth and last Knight of Glin. He worked in the furniture department of the Victoria & Albert Museum and returned to Ireland in the 1980s, when he became Christie’s Irish representative. Later President of the Irish Georgian Society.

26.Graduate of UCD and Cambridge, he became a lecturer in the Trinity History of Art Department in 1973. Author of James Gandon (1985) and Public Architecture in Ireland, 1680–1760 (2001).

27.An English architectural historian who came to Belfast in 1970 as a research assistant to Alistair Rowan on the Buildings of Ireland project. Later attached to the Institute of Irish Studies in Belfast and active in the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society. He published widely on Belfast architecture in the Victorian period. From the mid-1980s, National Trust curator for north-east England.

28.A Dutch psychiatrist, graduate of the Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. He came to Ireland about this time (1973) and developed a serious interest in seventeenth-century Irish architecture and researched assiduously (and widely), resulting in his Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Ireland, 1600–1720 (1981).

29.Later professor of the history of art at the National College of Art and Design. He has published extensively on the history of Irish sculpture, painting, design and art education.

30.Lecturer in the history of art in UCD, and authority on Sarah Purser.

31.(1941–2008). She joined the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in 1970 and became a leading authority on Irish decorative arts, and Irish dress and costume in particular. Briefly Director of the Hunt Museum, she became Keeper of the NMI Art & Industry Division. Author of Dress in Ireland (1989). Obituary, Irish Independent, 23 March 2008.