Patrick Tuohy, R.H.A. (1894-1930)

A Machine-Readable Version

Thomas MacGreevy

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[p.5]
By Thomas MacGreevy

"Tis the sincerity of 'em, "he said, "their sincerity." He was searching for words but could not find any others. "Their sincerity." We had been going round the room that in those days housed the Caillebotte Collection at the Luxembourg. I could see how deeply he was stirred before the pictures, some of the loveliest the Impressionists had ever painted. I remember particularly how he lingered over Manet's Balcony and then returned to it from the Monets, the Degas and even the Cézannes, trying quietly, intently, to seize, not so much, I think, its technical secrets, as the attitude of mind, the rare temper, that had conceived it. It was then he had made the remark about "their sincerity". Though I pointed out that bad painters were often sincere too, I knew what he meant, and he knew I knew, for as we came out into the Luxembourg Gardens we were absorbed and happy, discussing our reactions to the wonderful pictures, trying to find out why we should still be so under their spell that we neither argued nor joked each other in friendly understanding as in the normal course of our acquaintance we tended to do.

And that reminds me of his good-humoured fury against me on another occasion — in Dublin that time — because I had written somewhere that Gainsborough was a lesser artist than he might have been had he not been driven by economic necessity to set up as a more or less commercial portrait painter. Tuohy was complaining me to W. B. Yeats. "He's an awful man, Mr. Yeats. If you saw what he wrote about Gainsborough!" And behind the glasses his eyes shone with amused exasperation. For Tuohy was one of the authentic artists himself, and where it was a question of as authentic an artist as Gainsborough he was jealous for his prestige as if it had been his own. The masters were not so much the masters as elder brethren, whom he, as a very young brother, revered and loved, and with whom one day, one wonderful day when he came into the fullness of his powers, he would, at last, be on terms of equality — and then revere and love more than ever.

He agreed, however, with my instinctive dislike of Reynolds and my feeling that if ever we were going to have a native school of Irish painters, we should have to by-pass that portentous eclectic and all he stood for. We should have to study not what South Kensington had been imposing on the Dublin School of Art for half a century, but the European painters themselves, and at the fountain head, in their own countries.

Tuohy was himself the most travelled and, in the good sense, the most scholarly of our painters. In 1916, at twenty-two, he had gone to Spain with his Taylor Prize money and spent a year in Madrid studying the great masterpieces in the Prado. After the war he frequently went to Paris. And when I met him there on my way back from Spain in the early summer of 1924 he was returning from an Italian tour. But the treasures of Italy had not left him satiated. We careered through Paris, seeking out everything in the way of art that we thought might be worth our looking at together. Thus I remember an interesting excursion to the venerable royal abbey church of Saint-Denis, half-an-hour out of the city, in which we were ably piloted by the Dublin girl who was later to be his fiancée, Miss Phyllis Moss, then an art student in Paris.

I say that Tuohy was "in the good sense" the most scholarly of Irish painters, for he was no mere pasticheur. A true artist, he studied the masters of Spanish, French and Italian art, not to borrow directly from them but to sharpen his own perception — his intellectual perception as well as his perception of nature — through contact with their original work. After he left St. Enda's he studied at the Dublin School of Art under Orpen, and in his early work his paint had something of the brilliant glitter that was characteristic of his master. But his studies abroad showed him that brilliant glitter, far from being one of the higher qualities, was rather a characteristic of the men of mere sensational appeal, Ribera, Frans Hals, Caravaggio and Tiepolo. And so, as time went on, his brushwork became at once less and less obtrusive and more and more distinguished, till, at the end of his short life, his "handling" was that of a master.

This technical development went hand in hand with an increasing maturity of mind. Thus we can see in his portrait of Master David Challinor, painted in America shortly before his death, that the initial conception of the picture — as in the pose decided on, which emphasises the endearing youthfulness of the theme — that conception is as masterly as is the control of the technical processes that were to bring it to realisation as a work of art. Already before he left home in 1927 he had shown in such portraits as the James Stephens and above all the rarely impressive John Joyce, that he had already crossed the threshold of mastery.

The tragedy was that those last few days had, for economic reasons, to be spent out of Ireland. He did not feel that his income from teaching and from portrait- painting in Dublin was sufficient to enable him to marry. He was a slow and searching worker and he could never have produced pot-boilers. So he put his work as a pioneer Irish religious painter to one side and went to America, where Irish friends were many and where he felt he could make enough money in a few years to be able to return home with some capital and resume where he had left off. The consequence is that the wonderful promise of such pictures as The Agony in the Garden, The Baptism of Christ and the series of Irish saints was never fulfilled. The Agony in the Garden, now in the Church of Christ the King in Cabra, was executed when the artist was about twenty-five and is the crowning work of his first youth. It has sensibility, pathos and dignity, fine design and beautiful decorative quality. The Baptism of Christ, however, is a much more ambitious undertaking. Here the artist was feeling towards a mature statement on the subject of the greatest drama of human history. It is not wholly successful. The John the Baptist has a true visionary quality but the Christ, though grave and dignified, seems less than ideal an conception of the Incarnate Word. The young artist — he was only twenty-nine at the time — was finding it difficult to rise to the full height of his vision. But the indications that he had great vision are unmistakable. The meditative glance of the beautiful young woman on the left, down at the child who is to grow up under the New Law, is one. The yearning absorption of the second figure on the right in the ceremony itself is another. (I know that that was an expression imposed by the artist, for I was myself the model and I had nothing to yearn over or to be absorbed in, as I posed kneeling, in profile to the painter, except the drab grey-green of a wall in a studio at the School of Art.) The excitement of the youth in the foreground, the intent gaze of the older disciples and the hurrying figures in the distance all convey the same sense of the urgency of the occasion of the inauguration of Our Lord's earthly mission. And the effect is immeasurably heightened by the strange landscape, which is as dramatic as a Velazquez view of the Guadarramas and as studiedly choice in colour as a Puvis de Chavannes, yet more unearthly than the one, more exciting than the other. Surely it is clear that, had he lived, Tuohy would have been a great Irish religious painter.

But it was not to be. The last time I saw him was the first and only occasion in all the six years of our acquaintance on which his habitual sense of tragedy was not illuminated by the extravagantly rueful sense of fun that was one of his most loveable characteristics. It was in 1926, in London, at the editorial offices of The Conniosseur where I worked. Apparently I had once said to him that he was in some ways like that earlier painter of genius, James Barry. Now he read a paragraph on the subject of Barry which I had just written for The Connoisseur. Despondently he recalled my earlier remark and insisted that I must have meant that he was a misfit in society as, in the article, I said Barry was. I made light of the suggestion, for it was not what I had meant. It was his intellectual and artistic integrity that reminded me of Barry. And, anyhow, I had no sad presentiments, for I knew Barry had lived to a good age and enjoyed an occasional triumph. But my friend was discouraged and would not be comforted.

Thus, sadly, he went into exile and we of the Ireland and the Western Europe which had formed him and which he understood, reverenced and mirrored beautifully in his work were never to see him again. Lux perpetua luceat ei.