he’d have the savvy to close the National Gallery
When the National Gallery Restaurant is open.
Who does Homan Potterton think he is – Homan Potterton?
From The Berlin Wall Cafe by Paul Durcan published by Harvill Press. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. ©1995.
The poet Paul Durcan published this poem first in Image magazine and when I read it (having, to my shame, never heard of Paul) I was not very impressed. I was engaged at the time in trying to close, not the National Gallery, but the National Gallery restaurant. It, and its menus, dated from 1968 and very few of the people who lunched there – arriving in their BMWs and discussing office-block architecture – had the slightest interest in Poussin or indeed any other artist represented in the gallery. As to why St Joseph is a black man in Poussin’s Holy Family, I had had very little time to consider such iconographical complexities since becoming director of the gallery a year or so previously.
But I was new, and I was young, and I am flattered that Paul described me as a ‘dynamic whizz-kid’. But was I a ‘flash in the pan’?
Yes, I am afraid I was. Paul was right. Many people thought it unseemly when I resigned after only eight years in office.
Mine was not the shortest-lived directorship: several of my predecessors – Hugh Lane among them1– served for an even shorter period. But, appointed in December 1979 at the age of thirty-three, I was the youngest.
The road I had taken from a childhood in County Meath and schooldays in Kilkenny and Dublin to the director’s office in Merrion Square had, in retrospect, been quite straightforward and what one might expect of any museum director: I studied art history at university and then studied more of it at another university, got a job in a museum or two, published some art-historical articles and books, and before I knew it, I was a director.
I did, however, make a few detours and stops as I travelled – quite unintentionally, at some speed – along this route. Some people engaged my attention; particular events caused me to linger; certain places appealed to me more than others. It was those detours and stops – rather than my progress – which rendered my journey enjoyable and (to me) memorable.
As to what I found when I reached my destination, much of that was enjoyable – and certainly memorable – too, although some of it was not. But I had arrived far too soon; my journey had been too short.
And that, I think, was what made me just ‘a flash in the pan’.
As to who I thought I was, the following pages may tell.
Endnotes
1.Lane was appointed in March 1914 and drowned from the Lusitania fourteen months later on 7 May 1915.
CHAPTER 1
‘WHERE THERE’S GRASS,
THERE’S NO BRAINS’
When I was at Mountjoy School in Dublin, I once did a most dreadful thing.
In applying for Trinity College, it was required to include with the application a confidential reference as to one’s character and abilities. This was sealed in an envelope by the referee and sent in to the college by the candidate, together with the application form. My reference, as was normal, was supplied by the headmaster of Mountjoy, William Tate. Before sending it in, I opened it and read what he had written. This was not only disreputable of me but also a very big mistake. Mr Tate wrote, among other comments,‘He has a colourless personality and he is unlikely to contribute anything to the university.’ The assessment came as something of a blow (and I have never forgotten it) and, since that time, I have never, ever read any document or letter that was specifically not intended for my eyes.
Mountjoy School (now Mount Temple Comprehensive) was, by the time I got there as a boarder in 1961, no longer in its heyday. Originally in Mountjoy Square, the school had moved to the Malahide Road in about 1950, when it acquired a large red-brick Gothicky mansion (designed by the Belfast architects Lanyon, Lynn & Lanyon in 1863) with acres of grounds that stretched down almost to the Clontarf seafront. A functional wing had been tacked on to the original building to accommodate the school. Mr Tate, who had been a fine headmaster in his time, was by 1961 old and near retirement, and he had long since given up on imposing any order or ethos on the school and the hundred-and-fifty or so boys who went there, among them a large contingent of day boys. Games were not compulsory (as they had been in my previous school, Kilkenny College), and there were practically no extra-curricular programmes, no music or other cultural activities, no choir, no dramatics, possibly no library: I don’t think that there was even a Scout troop. There was a lax approach to exeats – so that permission to go into Dublin for an afternoon was easily obtained – and little or no emphasis on aspiration or achievement. Only one of the masters made a positive impression on me. This was T.J. McElligott1 who taught French. Unfortunately, I did not make a positive impression on him. In spite of that, when I was appointed director of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin he wrote to me (31 December 1979):
It was in 1963 or 1964 that one of my pupils sent me a card from Florence whither he had gone to see the treasures of that city. And, even though I did not see the pupil in the intervening years, I had followed his progress. This is simply to say how very glad I am that you have been selected for what will be a wonderfully satisfying position in which you can fulfill your own ambition in the service of the country.
The only master I did seem to impress, but for the wrong reasons, was the teacher of Irish. This was a weird (to me) Gaeilgeoir called ‘Puck’ Franklin, who was given to telling smutty jokes in class at which he sniggered riotously himself, but which we found simply embarrassing. When I would fail to answer correctly some question he would have put to me as Gaeilge, he would in his nasal voice, and with a sneer, say to the class in English: ‘Eh! Where there’s grass, there’s no brains.’ He would then repeat it in Irish as (evidently) it is a known Irish expression.
As to my ‘colourless personality’, I think – in retrospect and on reflection – I would have to take issue with Mr Tate. Among my possessions, I have recently come across a small silver medal inscribed M.S.D. Deb. Soc. 1963: no name. It meant nothing to me until I ran into a boy who had also been at the school; he said he remembered me taking to the stage in the vast (and crowded) Metropolitan Hall in Abbey Street representing Mountjoy at a huge inter-schools debate, and how he had been staggered that I had had such confidence. Then I recalled that I did debate at Mountjoy. This memory led me to remember giving a talk at Mountjoy (illustrated with musical excerpts on a record player) about Gilbert and Sullivan: I think I was trying to set up a music-appreciation group. I took up the study of the piano again (although very few boys learned music at Mountjoy) and, as I have the Studies & Pieces (dated 1962) for the Grade V Royal Irish Academy of Music examination, I must have reached that level and been able to play, among other pieces, the Presto from Haydn’s Sonata in D. It has, for some reason, stuck in my memory that, one day when I was practising (the piano was in a small room next to the Tates’ private quarters), Mrs Tate came in and, smiling, said to me, ‘Ah! ... Brahms.’
In the summer holidays between my two years at Mountjoy, I organised myself to spend three months with a family in France (this was quite unusual at the time) and, on my return to school, I set up, with my friend Malcolm Benson (who had also spent time in France), a cercle français. We were the only two members, but we did contribute humorous ‘Notes’ (in French) to the school magazine. Occasionally, dances were held in the school. Invitations were printed and we would send these out to any girls we knew (or would like to know) in other schools. The Alexandra College
