well’. As an art history qualification was offered by very few universities at this time, I must have been relatively rare among applicants in that I already had a degree in the subject. So, if that was not an acceptable background, I did not know what could have been. In stating in my application (as one was asked to do) the two fields of study that interested me, I had plumped for ‘seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting and architecture’ and ‘German Expressionist painting’.
When we were seated around a table, Sir Anthony opened the interview. ‘Perhaps we could show you some photographs,’ he said, glancing towards his colleague, ‘and ask you to identify them.’
The colleague passed a small black-and-white photograph across the table. In most cases, German Expressionist painters are recognised by their colour, although there are some artists – Kandinsky, Klee and Franz Marc, with his horses, for example – that are more obvious by their style. A small black-and-white photograph is by no means the easiest means of identifying an artist of this school. As I tentatively assessed the photographs, Sir Anthony – noisily drawing in his breath through his teeth – made me aware of how little I knew. But at the same time, I got some artists right. Wearily, Sir A moved the interview on to the eighteenth century, and more photographs were produced. Throwing one across at me (and this I recall as though it were yesterday), he said, ‘You won’t recognise this, but look at the photograph and let us hear your reasoning.’ As it happened, I did recognise the image (I don’t know how).
‘It’s the Double Cube Room at Wilton,’ I said. ‘Inigo Jones, about 1650.’
The interview was soon over. I was very shocked by the experience and, not surprisingly, I was turned down.
Within five years I was an assistant keeper at the London National Gallery, having beaten several of Blunt’s graduates in the selection process for the post. Naturally, I met Sir Anthony at events in the gallery and I would also meet him socially, in particular at the house of my friend John Kenworthy-Browne. I always wanted to tell Blunt that he had once interviewed me, and I wanted to tell him how uncalled for it had been to treat any young person the way he had treated me. But I never had the nerve to do so. When, a few years later, he was unmasked as the despicable traitor he was, there was no one who was more pleased than me. Turned down by Sir Anthony, my path was directed towards Edinburgh, where I was interviewed for a place on the post-graduate course by Professor Talbot Rice. David Talbot Rice was a distinguished scholar of Byzantine art and a gentleman and his interviewing technique was in marked contrast to Sir Anthony’s cruelty. I was accepted by him and that, as it turned out, was a fortunate and very happy turn of events.
As Elliott’s generosity in funding my education had (understandably) come to an end with my graduation from Trinity, I had to find the means of supporting myself through two years’ study in Edinburgh. An odd little legacy from Old Elliott Potterton (see Rathcormick), which had accumulated since his death in 1929, was in my name and, now that I was over twenty-one, it became available to me. I used it, and I also looked for whatever grants I might find. A Carnegie Trust in Scotland gave bursaries to anyone of Scottish descent who wanted to study in Scotland and, when my mother told me that her grandmother was Scots (which was true), I successfully applied. I also obtained funds from the Arts Council in Ireland: Mervyn Wall4 the novelist, who was secretary of the Council, told me many years later that he had looked at my application sympathetically as he knew of me through Speer Ogle. Then there was the Purser–Griffith Scholarship and Prize. This was based upon an exam that was set in alternate years by Trinity and University College Dublin (UCD). From Edinburgh I enrolled for the exam – which was to be held in UCD that year – but my application was met by the History of Art Department in UCD, then under the formidable Françoise Henry,5 with extreme resistance. Although I had given details of my birth and education in Ireland, including a degree from Trinity it was not enough to confirm that I was Irish and, therefore, eligible to sit the exam. A copy of my passport and an affidavit – yes, an affidavit – from a solicitor was demanded to confirm my Irish credentials. The exam consisted of two papers: one, a general history of European painting, and another on a special subject chosen by candidates in advance. I selected ‘Eighteenth-century British Portrait Painting’. On the day of the exam, when the special subject paper was put in front of me, I saw immediately that the questions were not confined to British painting but ranged over the full canvas of European portraiture. I answered the required number of questions as best I could, but I did write a letter of protest afterwards. I was informed that I had passed the exam but, if I wanted, I could re-sit the special paper. Passing the exam was no good to me: I needed the scholarship, or at very least the prize, and so I sat the exam again. I won the prize; the scholarship went to a diligent nun from UCD.
The fact of the matter was that Françoise Henry could not abide Anne Crookshank. Françoise was the grande dame of Irish art studies – albeit Celtic ones – and had been teaching at UCD since 1932. She had very little interest in post-Renaissance Irish art – which was Anne’s field – and she resented Trinity setting up a history of art department. Matters were not helped by the fact that they were both very formidable and domineering women and both grazed the same field when, in actual fact, the Prairie would not have been extensive enough to contain them. It should be stated, though, that Anne had nothing but admiration for Françoise.
At Edinburgh, I chose to specialise in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art and architecture, and my tutor was Alistair Rowan.6 He was (and still is) a very good lecturer, although less electrifying than Anne. As a tutor he was exacting and, because there was only one other student, Neil Burton,7 studying the same subject as me (the entire class of postgraduates numbered only about ten or twelve), Alistair gave us a lot of his time. Neil and I got on very well and I liked his lovely Oxford girlfriend, Andrea, very much. The course was a two-year one, culminating in exams and the submission of a 10,000-word thesis. When it came to choosing a topic for my thesis, it was Anne who suggested Irish sculpture and, specifically, Irish church monuments.
‘They are there to be discovered,’ she said, ‘it’s only a matter of getting into the churches and that’s much easier than getting into private houses to look at pictures. But do prepare! You must go through the Journals of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland. They are in the library here. They document some monuments but not the sculptors, of course. It’s for you to identify the sculptors.’
And so I spent the Christmas and Easter vacations combing through these turgid journals (and other sources) and compiling lists of what I had to find. In the dishevelled Volkswagen Beetle – left-hand drive, convertible, with a tattered roof, and an uncertain temperament – that I had brought home from Munich, I had a merry time driving the length and breadth of Ireland that summer in pursuit of sculptors, and photographing and recording all that I found. I had many interesting encounters. Finding Helen Roe8 and Nora O’Sullivan deep in the undergrowth of a churchyard in County Laois was one. Helen, who was a medievalist (and delightful), asked me what I was doing.
‘Looking for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century monuments,’ I explained.
‘But those are not monuments,’ she objected, ‘they’re modern.’
On a sunny Sunday afternoon, battling my way to see the sculptor Joseph Wilton’s beautiful – but vandalised – Dawson monument at Dartrey County Monaghan, I came across the architect Jeremy Williams9 encamped with a detachment of other enthusiasts in the stables at Dartrey, which they were supposedly restoring. It was my first time meeting Jeremy, who was to become a friend for life.
I found lots of monuments, far too many to incorporate coherently into a shortish thesis, and so I picked a single sculptor – an Englishman who had settled in Ireland in the early eighteenth century, William Kidwell – and I investigated him and wrote him up. Kidwell was hardly a ‘name’, in fact he wasn’t a name at all and, as a sculptor, he was very minor indeed; but my thesis appealed to the external examiner,
