Charting 150 years of winners

The Taylor Art Award is 150 this year and, to celebrate, some of the prizewinners feature in a fascinating but perhaps overly selective show, which opens today at the RDS, writes AIDAN DUNNE

WHEN GEORGE Archibald Taylor, who lived on Mespil Parade in Dublin and had been a captain in the 66th (Berkshire) Regiment of Foot, died at a relatively young age in 1854, he left the bulk of his art collection to the Dargan Institute. He also charged his trustees with using some £2,000 of his legacy “for the promotion of art and industry in Ireland”. The result was the establishment, in 1860, of the RDS Taylor Art Award. In essence an art student scholarship, it is, to this day, the jewel in the crown of the annual RDS Student Arts Awards.

It was Taylor’s executors who turned to the RDS to set up an award scheme. As the Metropolitan School of Art came under the umbrella of the RDS at the time, it was decided that the students at the art school would be eligible to compete for the prize. “The first competition in December 1860 . . . attracted just 13 entries,” notes David Horkan in a piece on the establishment of the award. Five scholarships were awarded. The number of entrants quickly grew and, to date, there have been more than 300 award recipients.

The deadline for entering this year’s RDS Student Art Awards, with a total prize fund of more than €18,000, including €5,000 for the Taylor Art Award, is June 17th. There are now many more art schools and students than there were in 1860, and all are eligible.

Dearc 150, an exhibition showing at the RDS until March 20th, marks 150 years of the Taylor.

The composition of the Taylor jury has followed the same pattern from the beginning. It is made up of three judges, one each from the RDS, the Royal Hibernian Academy and the National Gallery of Ireland. At times, it seems fair to say, this has resulted in a certain conservatism, but it can also be argued that the award has contributed to the continuance of classical academic values in Irish art. To be fair, though, one of our leading abstract painters, Ronnie Hughes, features in Dearcand, particularly in recent years, there have been prizewinners who work outside the traditional disciplines and in new media.

The inclusion of all the winners in the show, apart from being impracticable (as the curator Patrick J Murphy observes in his catalogue introduction), would have resulted in a fairly dull exhibition. Many recipients have faded into obscurity. Others, and quite an impressive number of them, are recognised as significant figures in Irish art history and in contemporary Irish art. All the same, the list of 25 artists whose work features in Dearcis perhaps overly selective. Doubling that figure, or even bringing it up to 40, would have allowed for a more richly textured historic overview.

For example, while Walter Osborne and Roderic O’Conor are included, Nathaniel Hill, Richard Thomas Moynan and Harry Thaddeus Jones are not. While William Orpen, William Leech and Mary Swanzy are there, Beatrice Elvery (later Lady Glenavy), sculptor Albert G Power (whose portrait bust of Sir Hugh Lane is in the Hugh Lane Gallery) and George Collie are not. Continuing in this vein, we get Patrick Tuohy but not Leo Whelan, Mainie Jellett and Norah McGuinness but not Kathleen Bridle or Stella Steyn. The same holds true for the contemporary as well as the historical strand of the exhibition.

Still, given the time span and the quality of the artists, Dearcdoes provide visitors with a potted history of 150 years of Irish art in one compact venue, and it includes some fine works. You can see why Osborne is such a sought-after artist from the sunny cheerfulness of his By the Sea, Portmarnock, a painting that, as with many of the pictures in the show, is in private ownership and hence not usually on view. This also applies to Leech's Daisies, to Tuohy's fascinating figure composition, Self-Portrait with Two Women (both Tuohys on view are from the collection of Seán and Rosemarie Mulcahy), to Seán Keating's strong study, The Artist's Wife in an Interior, and to several other outstanding pieces by Mainie Jellett, Harry Kernoff, Louis le Brocquy and others.

Melanie le Brocquy's quiet resilience as an artist comes through in her impressive bronze self-portrait, and one of her psychologically charged figure studies, Father and Son, is also included. Two other sculptural highlights are works by Dorothy Cross, including her mordantly witty Saddle, with its seat of cow's teats, and by Co Donegal-born Maria McKinney, a relatively young artist with intriguing ideas and a promising track record.

Among the present generation it is no big surprise to see James Hanley feature. Having won an award in 1991 he is now a member of the RHA and one of the leading portrait painters in Ireland. What is significant about him is that he is probably an ideal Taylor Art Award winner because his work manages to reconcile representational tradition with a contemporary sensibility. He and a number of his peers have helped the academic tradition move on. Rather than working nostalgically within a received set of conventions he has devised a representational idiom that addresses the world we now live in. In a sense Hanley has come full circle, in that he’s been secretary of the RHA and has served on the Taylor Art Award judging panel. In the current economic climate his story underlines the practical as well as the symbolic importance of the awards. He didn’t come from a family with artistic involvement, and realised relatively late that art was what he truly wanted to do. When he won the award, he says, “the economic situation in Ireland was dire. To win this prestigious prize, with its meaningful historical links and its generous financial help, meant that my debts were cleared, my confidence was boosted”.

Dearc: Celebrating 150 Years of the RDS Taylor Art Awardis in the RDS Concert Hall, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, on Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10am-5pm (until 7pm on Thursdays), and Sundays, 12noon-5pm, until March 20th