no!’ he said. ‘I’ll be sharing it with a friend.’
‘I would have to meet your friend before deciding,’ I said.
The following evening there arrived on my doorstep a face that was vaguely familiar: a good-looking – in a sexy way – young man in jeans and a leather blouson. This was the potential flat-sharer.
‘I know your face,’ I said, ‘but I can’t think how.’
‘I’m Jim Bartley,’ he said with some diffidence. ‘Perhaps you’ve seen me on Telefís.’
Indeed I had. He was Sean Nolan, the heart-throb in a long-running soap, Tolka Row.
‘What is this?’ I thought. ‘All these actors. Am I to become, inadvertently, a theatrical landlord?’
The Englishman was a photographer, but no ordinary photographer: he was Mike Bunn, who was to make his career in Ireland and become its most celebrated and best-known fashion photographer.
And there I was, landlord to all these celebrities-in-waiting, paying my bank loan, and living a life of elegance in my own two rooms. But it came to an end before all that long when I moved to London, to take up a job in the National Gallery. I decanted my lodgers (all of whom had proved to be excellent tenants) and sold the house on my departure.
Endnotes
1.I recall that one of the ladies was a Frau Springer, married to one of the sons of the Axel Springer publishing empire.
2.Ernst Gombrich (1901–2001) the doyen of British art historians and hugely influential, he was a Professor at the Warburg Institute. A friend of Peter Feuchtwanger and a German Jewish emigre. Peter thought he might be able to help me get into the Courtauld.
3.(1907–83) Director of the Courtauld Institute, 1947–74; Surveyor of the King’s (and later the Queen’s) Pictures, 1945–72. Authority on the artist Poussin. Exposed in 1979 as a Soviet spy.
4.(z`z1908–97) He was Secretary of the Arts Council from 1957–75. His comic fantasy novels (published in the 1940s), The Unfortunate Fursey and The Return of Fursey are his best known.
5.(1902–82). Renowned scholar of Irish art in the early-Christian period. Born in France, she graduated from the Sorbonne and first came to Ireland in 1926 and was moved to focus on early Irish medieval sculpture as a subject of research. Appointed to the French Department of UCD in 1932, she later moved to the Department of Archaeology while teaching a course on the History of European Painting; and established the History of Art Department in 1965. She first published her Irish Art in 1940 and this was expanded to a three-volume L’Art Irandais in 1963. Subsequently published in English, it remains the standard text on early Irish Art.
6.Architectural historian, b.1938. Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, later Professor of History of Art at UCD, Principal of Edinburgh College of Art, Professor of History of Art at University College Cork (UCC). Editor of The Buildings of Ireland series and author of the North-West Ulster volume.
7.Neil had read history at Oxford and has had a distinguished career as an architectural historian, first with the Council for Places of Worship, then with GLC Historic Buildings, next with English Heritage and, later, as Secretary of the Georgian Group. Now a private architectural historian.
8.An early woman graduate of Trinity College, she taught at Alexandra College and became an authority on the art of Early Christian Ireland. The first woman President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.
9.Architect, artist, writer, conservationist and conversationalist, and polymath (1943–2015). Author of Architecture in Ireland, 1837–1921 (1994). (d. 24 December 2015). Obituary by Charles Lysaght Irish Independent, 10 January 2016.
10.(1928–2005). Belfast solicitor, journalist, author and founder (and chairman) of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society.
11.Decorator, socialite host, author (d.1985) and son of the scandalous Lady Kenmare. His villa, La Fiorentina at St Jean Cap Ferrat, was a mecca for the international beau monde.
12.(1930-2010). ‘An elegant writer on architecture, Roman Catholicism, Ireland and the Raj with an admiration for the upper classes and grand houses.’ Obituary, Daily Telegraph, 30 April 2010.
13.Lecturer in the history of art, appointed curator of the Dublin Municipal Gallery (now the Hugh Lane) in 1960 and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, 1964–80. My obituary of James, Burlington Magazine (September 2013).
14.Dr John Maiben Gilmartin, my predecessor as temporary cataloguer in the National Gallery of Ireland and later deputy keeper of art in the City Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham. Subsequently, long-time art history lecturer in the College of Marketing and Design (later the Dublin Institute of Technology). President of the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland (FNCI).
15.Keeper of the Art and Industry Department of the National Museum of Ireland who wrote extensively on Irish furniture and decorative arts.
16.A curator at the National Museum of Ireland, she was a specialist on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century decorative arts. She published on Irish eighteenth-century glass and other topics.
17.Ada Longfield Leask (1899–1987), widow of Harold Leask, Inspector of National Monuments in Ireland and author of Irish Churches & Monastic Buildings. She was a graduate in law from Trinity who researched and published widely (long before many people were interested) on Irish decorative arts of the eighteenth century.
18.C.P. Curran (1880–1972) was a lawyer and historian of eighteenth-century Dublin architecture. Author of Dublin Decorative Plasterwork (1967).
19.Poet, friend in Paris of Samuel Beckett, and director of the National Gallery of Ireland, 1950–63.
20.Assistant to Tom McGreevy at the National Gallery and curator of the Dublin Municipal Gallery (the Hugh Lane), 1964–90.
21.(1939–99). Authority on Walter Osborne and the Celtic Revival in art, she was virtually the first of the modern generation of Irish art historians to study (at the beginning, largely under the aegis of Anne Crookshank) Irish art from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. From an artistic (and slightly bohemian) background, she had studied something or other in Paris. Her Walter Osborne thesis was published in a book (1974) and further in the catalogue of the Osborne exhibition in the National Gallery (1983). Her book on The Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (1980), although by her account only a general survey, is still regarded as a landmark of research. In the mid-1970s she took up a post as lecturer in the history of art in what became Oxford Brooks University, and remained there until her death.
22.(1937–2003). A curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, 1965–97. He was assistant director to James White. Deeply religious (he had studied for the priesthood in Rome for six years), his degree was in archaeology from UCD. He later researched and published on Irish stained glass and Irish painting in the eighteenth century and was widely regarded as an authority. He suffered ill-health for much of his life.
23.Director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin from 1991. Author of James Arthur O’Connor (1985).
24.b. 1949. Artist and art historian, and the leading authority on Irish artists of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Author of The Irish Impressionists (1984). Lecturer in the National College of
