Phelan Gibb

Born 8 April 1870

Died 25 October 1948

Phelan Gibb would probably have passed unnoticed as a painter but for the intervention of Lucy Wertheim, the remarkable London dealer who fostered the careers of the two White Stag artists, Kenneth Hall and Basil Rakoczi. Many others benefited from her kindness including Norah McGuinness but they were special to her and she fostered their youthful careers.  Phelan Gibb was rather different, first coming to her attention when he was over 60 years old, in 1931, when he came in to her gallery in Burlington Gardens off Piccadilly.  She remembered this tall man of slight build; he was wearing a check plus-fours countryman’s suit, looking every bit the hunting and fishing gentleman happier riding to hounds or fishing for trout.   He had a fresh complexion, bright blue eyes, and glossy white hair beginning to recede from the temples.  His purpose was clear and determined. He wanted her to go to his studio in Chelsea, there and then, and look at his paintings.  She had a busy afternoon with an appointment an hour later, but her assistant in the gallery, also compelled by his commanding presence, said she could be there and back within the hour so she conceded to this impetuous, self-willed, dynamic stranger who waved aside all her objections and together they left in a taxi, racing away to the Fulham Road.

Her experience of most artists had led her to anticipate paying the fare but there was such an air of the grand seigneur about Phelan Gibb she thought he would be offended. The taxi-man was paid with an air of considerable financial resource and a tip added.  They later laughed together when she learned that Phelan Gibb had been left with exactly two pence halfpenny in the world.  He led her along a garden pathway to a ground-floor studio. The room was large and lofty and a welcoming fire burned on the open hearth. There was an air of well-being about the place. A few good pieces of furniture, some pleasant hangings, and soft Persian rugs imparted to the room a look almost of opulence.

She wrote later of her wonder at how amazingly an artist reveals himself by his paintings. At the end of a very short time she realized that she was in the presence of a painter of no mean stature. There were good and bad canvases on the walls. She came to the view later that no other great painter was as uneven as Phelan Gibb.  But she saw straight away there was a quality in the finer ones that was extraordinarily arresting. Here evidently was a real personality, a man with something to say who said it in no uncertain fashion.

She forgot her gallery engagement, met his wife Marjory and stayed to eat with them.  She remembered later his own lovely hand-made pots. He fashioned the dishes and bowls without ‘throwing’ them and some appear in his still life paintings.  She was too excited by the dealer’s discovery of a new artist and was not surprised when Phelan Gibb broached the subject of her buying a quantity of his work.  She had already made a success of fostering other artists and was well-known for the success of this, both for her gallery and for them. She agreed on the understanding that she paid him in installments spread over a couple of years.

As with Hall and Rakoczi, Christopher Wood (though by then her most famous artist had committed suicide), Kolle and many others, her appreciation of their work was the foundation of lasting friendships.  Lucy Wertheim later said that when Phelan Gibb moved with his wife Marjorie to the countryside, in Buckinghamshire, she spent some of the happiest weekends of her life in their tiny cottage.

She had found and rescued from neglect and a period of depression a gifted artist who had moved in a magical circle in Paris, where he trained, numbering among his friends gifted contemporaries in the art world of Paris.  He had been the friend and fellow student of Henri Matisse and later Georges Braque, joining them and other painters of the Fauve School in the south of France during the brief but fruitful celebration of what has been called ‘the Triumph of Colour’.  The influential Fauve Movement was started in June 1905, when Matisse invited André Derain to join him at the beginning of three momentous years in the history of art.   Matisse had been impressed by the work Derain and Vlaminck had been producing in Paris. He told Derain that he ‘would reap some benefit here’ on account of the wonderful light.  Ther results were prodigious.  At the end of the first summer Matisse had produced fifteen oils, 100 drawings and some forty watercolours.  Derain returned to Paris with thirty canvases, twenty drawings and fifty sketches.

Phelan Gibb was invited to join the group the following year and produced a number of works including Paysage, his early masterpiece.  Other paintings were done in 1906, and possibly in 1907. They stayed in Collioure, the Catalan village in the south of France where the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean.  They mainly in the town and along the coast.   His is the only Fauve work by an Irish artist.

Gibb returned to Paris and painted there in those early and fruitful years of the twentieth century. In 1909 he was sharing a studio with Matisse and Braque. Gibb was elected a societaire of the Salon d'Automne and then had a studio off the Boulevard Raspail. The three artists were all friends of Gertrude Stein.  She was an admirer of Phelan Gibb’s work and he claimed she played a vital part in his artistic life.  He had a high opinion of her judgment.  As a result Lucy met Gertrude, found her ‘more entertaining than sympathique’, was thrilled by her very beautiful early Picassos, but the afternoon was not a great success. She said of this, ‘I am often at a disadvantage with very brainy people’.

 Through this connection Gibb came to know Picasso, Juan Gris, the Douanier Rousseau, Katherine Mansfield, and the dealers Ambrose Vollard and Sagot.  He told Lucy Wertheim of how Matisse shook him warmly by the hand and thanked him for introducing to him a client who paid him one hundred francs for a drawing.  Roger Fry acquired an abstract work from Phelan Gibb for the Contemporary Art Society. This caused such a row that Fry bought it back for himself.  

One of his patrons was Sir William van Horne of the Canadian Pacific Railway who owned a collection of paintings by Murillo, and bought two Gibb paintings, for 175 guineas. 'How, Sir, come you to buy works of mine?’ Gibb asked him.  ‘They carry me into another world’ was the reply.  Robert Ross, art critic of The Morning Post and stalwart defender of Oscar Wilde, was also one of Phelan's early admirers and helped organize a one-man show at the Carfax Gallery.

In 1913, an exhibition of his paintings was held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, in Paris. This show was transferred to Dublin at the invitation of Oliver St. John Gogarty and Count Markiewicz the painter who was married to one of the daughters of the Gore-Booths of Lissadell. The exhibition, which contained paintings of nudes for which Gibb was well-known, was closed down by the Dublin Metropolitan Police under clerical pressure and on grounds of obscenity.  He did not recover the confiscated paintings until 1933.

Lucy Wertheim does not mention the singular honour enjoyed by Phelan Gibb when he was invited to New York, to show in the Armory Show in that same year, 1913, one of only two artists of Irish extraction, the other being Jack Yeats. Both men were almost the same age, both of them painters of natural subjects, including horses, Phelan Gibb at the time much more famous internationally than Jack Yeats.

He went on to exhibit at the Alpine Club Gallery in 1917. Yeats was to exhibit there also, some ten years later.  It was avant garde, showing Monet’s works at a time when Roger Fry was attempting to promote French painting.  The Phelan Gibb exhibition was the object of outspoken hostility.  One visitor tore up the catalogue and threw it across the room, exclaiming : ' An insult to the British Public !'  Another visitor who witnessed this supported Gibb, saying to him: ‘After all, I am an Englishman and I would like a little appreciation from my own countrymen. Wouldn't you?’  Gibb naturally agreed.  After he left the gallery Phelan Gibb discovered his visitor's identity. It was H. G. Wells. The following day Wells turned up with his friend Arnold Bennett and a collection of Art Critics, saying ‘Mr. Gibb, may I present you with your enemies!'

Lucy Wertheim arranged an exhibition in her Burlington Gardens Galleries of the paintings by Phelan Gibb. This was a much admired show.  J. B. Manson was then at the Tate Gallery where an example of Phelan Gibb was acquired.  He is also represented in the Victoria and Albert Museum and certain galleries in the north of England, among others the Salford Gallery, and the Laing Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

She promoted her artists throughout England. She held exhibitions in municipal galleries and ran competitions among visitors, who were invited to vote for one or more paintings for the permanent collection. She often presented the ‘winners’ to the galleries. Her artists included Christopher Wood, Matthew Smith, Walter Sickert, Alfred Wallis, Kolle, Frances Hodgkins, Ronald Ossory Dunlop, Tchelitchew

and of course Phelan Gibb.  She favoured galleries in Salford, Bradford, York, Manchester, the Astley Cheetham Art Gallery in Stalybridge, in restaurants, print shops, schools and theatres.

She had come from Manchester and had a special liking for the pretty little art gallery adjoining the Public Library, at Altrincham. Phelan Gibb was in a show she held there that she felt could have gone to any city in the world enhancing the reputation of the living English painter.

The Curator insisted on a short lecture.  To her, speaking in public has always been an ordeal. 

On this occasion I felt such an atmosphere of hostility emanating from the gathering that until I had got over the impact (for only by such a word can I describe it), I was powerless to speak.  Some kind person, thinking I was going to faint, brought me sal volatile and perhaps this did help me to pull myself together. Anyhow, I realized that the only way to combat it was to take the bull by the horns and I began my lecture by announcing that I was well aware that my audience consisted of three groups: those who had come out of friendliness, those animated by curiosity and those who were filled with antagonism towards the paintings that surrounded them. I asked for a show of hands. The third group decidedly had it.My lecture took the form of proving that almost everything worth while throughout the ages, especially in the world of art (Rembrandt a classic example) had met with the same hostility, and most often it was the work that provoked this antagonism that in the end won through.

17,000 people visited the exhibition!  Their vote on individual paintings meant that five were retained for the suburban Manchester Gallery. 

Phelan Gibb exhibited with the White Stag Group in London and painted a fine portrait of Jacqueline Robinson, the dancer and friend of Mainie Jellett.  For many years she was Basil Rakoczi’s companion and helped with his estate after his death.

Gibb was a shy man, troubled in his artistic career by setbacks and prone to depression. There were periods when he did not paint at all. In the context of British art in his time this was not altogether surprising and though he held three shows with Lucy Wertheim in the 1930s it was at the Galerie Apollinaire in Paris that his posthumous retrospective was held in 1949. 

Phelan Gibb works have recently come on the market, following the death, some years ago, of Lucy Wertheim and then of her daughter.