the auctioneer’s box. This was something like an enclosed balcony overlooking the ring, with access from a door at the back of the box. The auctioneer – Elliott – was seated to one side; his clerk – me – to the other. Between the raised platforms on which we sat was a narrow gap where vendors would stand at a lower level and identify their cattle in the ring by peering through a tiny slit: they could see the proceedings but, most importantly, they could not be seen by potential purchasers. When standing there, their heads would be roughly level with my feet. As clerk, it was my job to write in a register – as the various lots came through the ring – the lot number, the name of the vendor, the breed of cattle being sold, their gender and number, and the price achieved. As the auction moved very fast, this had to be done at speed and with absolute accuracy. I was soon able to identify the various breeds – Aberdeen Angus, Shorthorn or Hereford Crossbreed – and I only rarely made an error in counting the number of cattle in a lot. The difficulty arose in getting the name of the vendor. As they stood below me squinting through the slit, I could only see the tops of their heads and, not knowing them, would have to ask them ‘What is the name, please?’ Understandably, vendors were very preoccupied and anxious as they watched their livelihood being sold within a space of minutes, and it was very difficult to get them to answer me. ‘What is the name, please?’ I would repeat, and repeat again. Elliott, trying to concentrate on conducting the auction, would become irritated by my ineffective politeness and would snap at me: ‘He’s Paudge O’Toole’ or ‘That’s Larkin, he’s here often enough for you to know him by now.’
On one day, the man who came into the box and took his stand peeping through the slit was ruddy-faced and wearing a tattered gaberdine, Wellington boots, and a much-soiled brown brimmed hat. He was as nervous as every other vendor.
‘What is the name, please?’ I said.
And then I said it again, and again.
In the meantime, Elliott’s patience was being sorely tested. Eventually, and without interrupting the bidding, he shouted across at me: ‘That’s the King of Saxony.’
The way he said it, one would have thought that royalty passed through the box every other day.
I wrote down ‘K of Saxony. 8 Hereford Cross bullocks’ in the register.
Prinz Ernst (b. 1896) had been brought up in Dresden at the Court of Saxony. He joined the army in the First World War and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In 1918 his father was forced to abdicate when Saxony became a Free State. The Prinz opposed the Nazis and, on witnessing the bombing of Dresden in 1945, he fled the city (having buried crates of the family’s treasures in a forest) to escape the advance of the Red Army. His first wife (and mother of his three sons) died in 1941 and he then married an aristocratic actress, Virginia Dulon, in 1947. That year they moved to Ireland, where he purchased a farm of about 300 acres, Coolamber, near Delvin, County Westmeath. There he lived until his death (on a visit to Germany) in 1971. The Princess Virginia stayed on in Ireland for the next thirty years and died at Coolamber in 2002.
From my art history studies, I knew vaguely that the Electors of Saxony (forebears of the kings) had assembled fabulous art collections which are housed in various museums in Dresden. Any general book on the history of art includes reproductions of such famous Dresden masterpieces as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, Rembrandt’s Ganymede and Vermeer’s Procuress. I also knew that the Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto had been invited by the Elector of the day to come to Dresden and paint (famous) views of the city. I would very much have liked to have talked to Prinz Ernst about all of this but, unfortunately, my duties in the auctioneer’s box precluded me from doing so and I was never to encounter him again.
A more satisfactory encounter – and one that led to a deep, lifelong friendship – took place in Trinity itself. One of the very few societies I joined and took part in was the Arts Society. I cannot recall now what the society actually did but they must – on at one least occasion – have put on an exhibition, because I was sitting at a table outside an exhibition soliciting custom when along came a dapper gentleman in his late thirties, balding but handsome and with large brown eyes, a very punctilious manner, a wry, witty expression, and a precision about his speech that was quite singular. He started to talk to me. He was not connected to the university but soon declared his cultural credentials: he had a great interest in pictures, which is why he had sought out the student exhibition, had lived in Rome for many years, and was now working with the Irish Arts Council. In addition he volunteered that he had been to school at St Columba’s and had once been secretary to an MP in the House of Commons (Sir Lance Mallalieu). He asked me about myself, told me how wonderful it must be to be in Trinity, asked me if I painted and, if so, could he see my work. (I didn’t paint.) He suggested that perhaps I might like to meet for a drink sometime, and asked how he might contact me. ‘A note to my rooms in Number Nine,’ I said. On departing, he handed me his card. Engraved and discreet, ‘Mr Speer Ogle’, it read, above the address of the Kildare Street Club.
And that was how I met someone who was to have an enormous influence on my life, becoming a very dear friend and remaining so to the end of his days.
Up to this, I think the only person I had met whose style I would want to emulate had been my Aunt Polly, a clergyman’s widow. But although, from school and university, I had often visited her at her home in Claremont Villas, Glenageary, I was not overly close to her. As she had (with little money) always ‘collected’, her house was wonderful, falling down with lovely things: a wall lined with pewter plates, Percy French watercolours, Dublin delft, ruby glass, needlework-covered chairs, and much more. She was also interested in ‘antiquities’ – and people – and spent a lot of time ferreting about: for example, she interviewed, and wrote about, the last poplin-makers in Dublin, the Elliotts.1 But Aunt Polly was merely a drop at the bottom of a glass compared to the influence that Speer was to have upon me.
He rented a flat (which he had done for many years) on the second floor of a house in Upper Fitzwilliam Street. This was small: there was a sitting room, a bedroom, a cramped corridor that was the kitchen, in which there was a Baby Belling cooker on a cupboard, and a bathroom. The place was chock-a-block: pictures, vitrines of china, a bronze of the equestrian Marcus Aurelius on the floor, part of a pietra dura cabinet under a table, an armchair decked with a fur throw. Speer told me this was made from the pouches of kangaroos and had come from Australia. In a corner to the right of the chimney there was a portrait (unlit) of a seated gentleman, half-length in profile, wearing a crimson silk dressing gown. It was Speer by Harry Robertson Craig and had been exhibited at the RHA in 1955.
‘Terence de Vere White reviewed the exhibition in The Irish Times,’ Speer told me, ‘and said I looked like Whistler’s Mother.’ (I looked up Whistler’s famous portrait of his old mother, seated in profile, three-quarter length, against a blank wall when I went to the library the next day.)
Speer did not tell me at that time what Lennox Robinson, in reviewing the RHA exhibition in the Irish Independent, had written about his portrait:
Robertson Craig has portraits of two attractive young men, whose acquaintance I should like to make. One of them is, extraordinarily, called Speer Ogle. I can hardly believe this; it is surely a name invented by Henry James; it is a character out of The Turn of the Screw, he is Miss Jessel’s half-brother, yet he does not look a bit evil.
Speer’s pictures were lit by placing lamps beneath them, rather than using picture lights; a divan was home to a tiger skin with the head intact. The divan was also littered with loose engravings, mainly of Rome.
‘They are not Piranesi,’ said Speer (I looked him up later in the library too), ‘they are only Domenico de’ Rossi.’
He saw me looking at a bronze statuette of a young man almost hidden by gin
