Adam, Alexander Runciman, David Wilkie or Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Steer was taken by the nonsensical novelty of Kidwell and insisted on giving me a high mark. Alistair Rowan suggested I turn the thesis into a ‘Shorter Notice’ for the Burlington Magazine and he sent it to the editor, Benedict Nicolson, who published it. The dottiness of all of this did not stop there. Charles Brett10 of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society asked me to put together all my monuments in a dictionary format and he published my text under the auspices of his society in an ugly little typewritten book.
Finishing in Edinburgh, I was, like all new graduates, in the dire position of having to find a job. I applied for whatever was on offer in the provincial museums of England, but without success. Then one Sunday morning, Desmond Guinness – whom I did not know – telephoned me at home in Trim.
‘It’s Desmond, Desmond Guinness,’ he said in his whispering voice. ‘Is that Homan?’ It was as though we were old friends. ‘Miss Crookshank tells me that you have written the most marvellous thesis, and I so long to read it.’
He invited me to Leixlip that afternoon, asking me to bring my thesis with me and, at the end of about an hour’s chat, he said that if I had no better offer, he could give me work at Leixlip for a month or two sorting photographs and Georgian Society files.
‘Could I start tomorrow morning?’
I was delighted: it was a break, and I have never forgotten Desmond’s kindness.
The couple of months I spent at Leixlip that summer were just wonderful. Desmond’s wife Mariga was not there, although she appeared for a week or so, making her presence felt by the rustling of her petticoat under a long tartan skirt as she descended the stairs. Patricia McSweeney, an American, was Desmond’s secretary: ‘raven-haired Miss McSweeney’ as she was referred to in a newspaper interview. She was the greatest of fun. We worked from an office upstairs, which Desmond also sometimes shared, and Patricia and I had many hilarious moments together. I was still quite timid and shy – and, frankly, in awe of the circumstances in which I found myself – but I was treated by Desmond rather in the manner of an eighteenth-century tutor in an aristocratic household. I was included in the dining room at lunch every day, with Desmond and whatever guests there were, and in that way I encountered a host of exotic (to me) individuals. His brother Jonathan; the legendary wealthy aesthete Rory Cameron11 and his handsome boyfriend (and gardener), Gilbert; Desmond and Helen Leslie; sundry rich (and confused by Leixlip) Americans; Mark Bence-Jones12 and his wife, who asked for a glass of milk with her lunch rather than wine; and many more. I was invited to the Leixlip ‘Dinner and Dancing’ in Horse Show Week. It was all terrific. I observed and took things in: Desmond’s sense of fun and style, his ease, his kindness and thoughtfulness, his lack of snobbery.
One afternoon, I was in Dublin and walking through Trinity when I was hailed by Anne Crookshank.
‘You must go immediately and ring James White,’13 she said. ‘John Gilmartin14 has got a good job in the Birmingham Museum and is leaving the National Gallery. I’ve told James that you are the man to take John’s place.’
I did as I was bidden. James invited me to come to the gallery. We had a brief talk and he asked me when I could start. The post was a menial one, with a desk at the end of the library, but as Michael Wynne was James’s only curatorial assistant, there would be lots of interesting work to do. I would be the ‘temporary cataloguer’. When my mother rang my brother Elliott to boast that I had now got a proper job, he asked what sort of job.
‘As a temporary cataloguer in the National Gallery,’ she said proudly.
‘Temporary?’ said Elliott. ‘The postman who brings the letters to Rathcormick has been temporary for thirty-five years.’
But my mother’s satisfaction was undimmed. She had been indulgent of my migration from incipient solicitor to the unfamiliar territory of art historian and, although never without some strictures, she had always tolerated all my other nonsense as well – such as my enthusiasm for foreign travel.
‘But I always knew you wouldn’t let me down,’ is what she said in reporting Elliott’s reaction.
In the diary pages that follow, written at the time I worked under James White in the National Gallery, I seem to denigrate James. But this is a callow youth who is writing. Yes, there were things about James that could be denigrated: his lack of academic credentials, for a start. And his eye for a picture could sometimes be shaky. His writing on art tended towards the haphazard. But James had many other qualities that elevated him above the ordinary as a director and which accounted for his success. He was a superb communicator, both as a lecturer on art and in handling public relations. The gallery (and James) was always in the news. He could get on with people – from the man in the street to the highest in the land, be they politicians, business tycoons, foreign ambassadors or the old Anglo-Irish gentry. Had I been endowed with even a fraction of his political acumen, I would, in later years, have been a great deal more successful as director of the gallery than I ever was. James liked to be liked but did not bear grudges if he was not. Working under him could be something of a roller coaster, as some of my diary entries imply. He himself worked at speed; he got things done; all was possible; and he expected those who worked with him to be of the same frame of mind. Maddening he might have been on occasion, but he was also endearing, and by the time I left the gallery after just over two years, I was very fond of him. He too liked me (as later chapters here will show) and, after I went to London, he would sometimes look me up and ask me to dine with him and over dinner indulge his penchant for naughty chat. His wife, Aggie, was someone I came to admire greatly too. She was stylish and dignified, and always forthright in her views. James seemed to keep her in the background, but she was very sound and sensible and gave James a very contented family life.
James was the instigator in establishing at this time the Association of Irish Art Historians – a novel concept, as there were hardly any Irish art historians to speak of. His principal challenge was to get Françoise Henry to sit round a table with Anne Crookshank; and in this he eventually succeeded. Notwithstanding there being such a very small pool in which to fish, discussions as to who counted as an art historian were protracted. Were the scholars of early Irish art really art historians in the strict sense of the word? There were those who would want to be included – was it enough to have passed the Purser–Griffith exam? – but were not considered sufficiently academic; and there were those who were desirable as members, such as John Teahan15 and Catriona MacLeod16 in the National Museum, but would they join? No question mark hung over the eligibility of the tiny terrier that was Mrs Leask17: she would almost be accepted honoris causa. And what about architectural historians?
Eventually, things got under way, and I was made assistant honorary secretary. James came up with a project for members to update the Irish biographies in the multi-volume Thieme-Becker Künsterlexikon, and lists of suitable entries were solicited. As to whether Thieme-Becker wanted their Irish biographies updated, no one actually knew. But in the event, it did not matter one way or another, as nothing ever happened. I did not know Françoise Henry, but once or twice, following a meeting, she came to the gallery and, on finding me at my desk in the library, sat down opposite me. She was terrifically large (and was to become even larger) and I found her acutely fearsome. She would come to correct some details in the minutes that I had sent out. She did not do this in an unkind or bullying way but more to inculcate in me an appreciation that accuracy was important. It dawned on me after a couple of these sessions that she was actually trying to reach out and befriend me. But as I left the gallery before too long, it was a friendship that had no time to blossom. In spite of that, Françoise was to play a pivotal role at a later – and crucial – stage of my career.
It is difficult to imagine today, when art history is such a firmly established discipline being taught in colleges
