Books: The Story of Irish Museums 1790-2000: Culture, Identity and Education

The past few years have seen a steady flow of museum biographies, many of which have been the subject of reviews in these pages. These have included the National Gallery of Ireland, which marked its 150th birthday with the publication of 1854-2004: The Story of the National Gallery of Ireland (Museums Journal May 2005, p52).

Now, with Marie Bourke’s The Story of Irish Museums 1790-2000, it’s the turn of Irish museums as a whole to step into the limelight.

They breed these books big in the Republic – Peter Somerville-Large’s history of the National Gallery weighed in at 1.7 kg. Not to be outdone, Bourke’s Story is a tad over 1.8 kg and makes similar demands on the reader’s pocket, strength and stamina.

It’s an ambitious topic and Bourke has little chance of providing, in one volume, “the comprehensive account of the stories, histories and the evolution of Irish museums and galleries over the past three centuries” that the dust jacket promises. Indeed, she does well to limit herself to 562 pages.

This is another book for dipping into rather than a cover-to-cover read but don’t let that put you off. The pond-dipping approach can produce surprising rewards, not least right at the start in a chronological table that sets developments and initiatives in Ireland against what was happening elsewhere in Europe and in North America.

The Dublin Society’s Agricultural Repository began collecting in 1733, forming what is claimed to be the earliest example of the formation of an agricultural museum in Great Britain or Ireland.

And Bourke wastes no time in reminding us, in an almost throwaway aside, that Hans Sloane, whose collections were to form the basis of the British Museum, was born in Killyleagh, County Down. What if he had bequeathed that cabinet of curiosities nearer home?

As is so often the case it’s the people who fascinate – John Ellis, for example, a landscape painter and pioneer thinker, who in 1789 proposed a permanent museum for “displaying and encouraging productions in the fine arts, mechanics and manufactures of Ireland”.

Ahead of his time, Ellis’s words and ideas anticipated those of Henry Cole in South Kensington by more than half a century but Ellis lacked access to either wealth or princes. Only a year later it was reported that this “excellent plan, wanting the lustre of a high name, failed of attracting notice and died almost in the moment of its birth”.

In her meticulous book, Bourke picks her way through a history of steady development from 1790 (the date seems slightly arbitrary) to the present day.

It’s not a riveting page-turner of a tale but Bourke manages to give drive and shape to a history that often developed across a broad geographical front, less the result of policy and planning but rather the product of people, objects, opportunity – and opportunism.

Bourke is keeper and head of education at the National Gallery of Ireland and understandably finds herself drawn to the 40-year struggle to achieve a full-time education post in the National Gallery and the introduction of educational initiatives.

There is a danger, not quite avoided, that this particular focus slightly unbalances the book but not as much as the sections looking at developments in Europe and the United States.

For me, these add little to the central narrative and on occasion appear to be drawn from roughly edited contributions to a conference on museums in the 21st century.

It is perhaps inevitable that a book of this kind will have gaps. Sometimes the dipped net comes up surprisingly empty. In what purports to be a history of Irish museums, there is the barest mention of the Tower Museum in Derry or Londonderry (in the context of this museum and this town both names are important), with its imaginative, and for their time, even daring, displays; or Lisburn’s evocative Linen Centre.

The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Holywood, is dealt with in a sentence, and the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh gets no mention at all.

This is a well-illustrated book (I loved the reproduction of FW Burton’s yearning Hellelil and Hildebrand) but here too there are surprises and disappointments.

Why, for example, is there an illustration of Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection, but nothing to show the enthusiastically described revelations which resulted from the 1967/68 cleaning of Uccello’s Madonna and Child, part of the National Gallery of Ireland’s collection?

Museums, writes Bourke in the conclusion to her book, matter to society not only because “they provide ‘windows to the past’ but because they help the country develop a fresh sense of identity”. In the turbulent years ahead for the muted Celtic tiger, these roles may be needed and challenged as never before.

Timothy Mason is museum consultant