Erskine Nicol RSA ARA (1825-1904) A Shebeen at Donnybrook Oil on canvas, 61 x 87 cm (24 x 34½'') Signed and dated 1851, old label verso Exhibited: Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1852, no. 74;...

Erskine Nicol RSA ARA (1825-1904) A Shebeen at Donnybrook Oil on canvas, 61 x 87 cm (24 x 34½'') Signed and dated 1851, old label verso Exhibited: Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1852, no. 74; Cork, Crawford Gallery, Whipping The Herring, May-August 2006 The Ava Gallery, Clandeboye, ''Ireland, Her People and Landscape'', June-September 2013, Cat. No. 37 Literature: ''Whipping the Herring'' 2006, p116, illustrated p117 ''Ireland, Her People and Landscape'', illustrated p. 44 Erskine Nicol first visited Ireland from his native Scotland in 1846, the beginning of a longstanding relationship with the country. Travelling through Ireland and especially Connemara, Nicol witnessed the outbreak of the great potato famine which devastated the over-populated West of Ireland causing the death of more than a million people within ten years, with another million forced to emigrate. The artist stayed in Ireland until 1851 when he returned to Scotland, the same year that he painted the present work. Between 1850 and 1869 Nicol exhibited over ninety Irish subjects at the Royal Scottish Academy and over twenty at the Academy in London. After his fourth visit the artist returned for some months every year until ill health prevented him from travelling.. He is better remembered as a genre painter, but as a recorder of an Irish way of life he becomes historically important because there were few artists working in Ireland at that time, a country devastated initially by famine and later by mass evictions forcing mass emigration. Donnybrook Fair attracted numerous artists, including Edward Glew, George Du Noyer, William Brocas and Samuel Watson, who together with Nicol left a legacy of detailed panoramas. The fair was held near Dublin ( now subsumed with in the city), and attracted farmers from all over Ireland to buy and sell livestock. The huge, centuries-old annual gathering incorporated drinking booths, carousels and popular entertainments, and lasted up to two weeks. In the 1860's the authorities finally succeeded in closing the event because of 'revolting scenes of drunkenness and degrading immorality which were enacted every August at Donnybrook. The festival was the site of such predictable drunken violence that the word ' donnybrook' subsequently became synonymous with a 'riotous assembly'. A Shebeen at Donnybrook (shebeen meaning an illegal drinking house) shows more than twenty people in a triangular composition surmounted by a piper. Allusions to fighting are absent; instead there is the type of easy intimacy which authorities equally disliked. The emphasis is on drunkenness, and stereotypically stage Irishmen with red noses loll in the corners. The one on the left adjusts a fiddle, another slouches on the table in the centre, while behind someone shirls a shillelagh to dance, and an old woman smokes a pipe. The image is full of details of farmhouse paraphernalia, the press in the background with its door ajar displaying its contents, as shown previously by Grogan. The raggedness of people's clothes and the way the boy is dressed in tucked- -up skirts reflects Nicols's attention to detail and his familiarity with his subject. The artist was made an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1855 and an Academician in 1859. Nicol exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Royal Academy and was made an Associate there in 1866. Claudia Kinmonth

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