Cork In 50 Artworks, No 7: A View of Cork from Audley Place, by John Butts
A View of Cork from Audley Place, by John Butts,
The vista from Bell’s Field at the top of Patrick’s Hill is one of the best-known views of the second city. It featured recently in TV series The Young Offenders, with the protagonists having a heart-to-heart on a bench overlooking Shandon Bells.
Take a first glimpse at John Butts’ A View of Cork from Audley Place, painted in around 1750, and you’d be forgiven for imagining that the two figures in the foreground of the landscape occupy much the same position as Conor and Jock did 270 years later. The positioning of Shandon and the buildings on the quayside, the distant mêlée of the city centre, are the same.
But look a little closer, and you’ll realise Butts has tricked you. His landscape is impossible; it’s a composite, a stitched together foreground and midground from different angles.
Dr Michael Waldron is curator at The Crawford Art Gallery, where the Butts landscape now makes its home in a building visible in the painting itself, which was then a recently constructed Customs House.
Dr Waldron has walked around Audley Place and the Patrick’s Hill vicinity, puzzling over Butts’ composition: he believes the vantage point seen in the midground of the painting is only visible from further down Cork’s famously steep hill, closer to where Bruce College is now based.
Despite Butts’ creative licence, though, to Dr Waldron the painting is “Cork before your eyes, topographically speaking. It kind of invents a foreground, but essentially the middle of the painting is a portrait of the city at a very particular moment in its history.
“You have the city centre itself, and the island at the centre: it’s bathed in sunlight and I think it’s an image of prosperity, even welcome. It’s summer, so the trees are in full leaf; it’s evening, because the sun is shining on the north face of Shandon. We’re getting the best image of the city, at a remove.”
It’s a vantage point likely to have appealed to the kind of wealthy patrons Butts had in mind while working on his painting. It’s unknown whether he was working on commission or hoping to sell the work on spec but, Dr Waldron points out, many merchant families of the day lived at an affluent remove from the cholera- and TB-ridden city centre.
“They may have had business and property in the city centre, but they were probably living in Montenotte or Tivoli, in suburban areas where they could still have views of the city,” he says. “Their commerce was rooted in the city, so having a view of it at arms’ length meant you could still have an affection for it, but you didn’t have to deal with its social and public health problems.”
John Butts lived a short life, and died penniless in Dublin, where he moved for work as a theatrical set painter in the years after producing his view of Cork in his twenties. Not a great deal of his work survives, and he’s probably best known for having taught two painters who emerged in his immediate wake, Nathaniel Grogan and James Barry.
His painting of his native Cork, heavily influenced in composition and style by the works of Dutch masters whose pastoral landscapes he was probably only familiar with through prints, is not only a depiction of a city in an important phase of growth, but an early example of an emerging culture of Irish visual art.
“The Ireland of the 17th century was a turbulent place,” Dr Waldron says. “The Siege of Cork was in the late 17th century. While investment in art existed, it was really the early 18th century that things start to settle politically and economically. The Georgian period was this great period of prosperity for some, accompanied by a population boom. The Irish art scene started to emerge.”
On loan to the Crawford, the Butts landscape went up for auction in 2005, the year Cork was European Capital of Culture. It was purchased for €700,000 by the local McCarthy family for permanent donation to the Crawford’s collection.
“It came at a really important moment for the collection, because the next year, we became a National Cultural Institution, and therefore it became part of the national collection,” Dr Waldron says.
“It was a very important hinge moment where the gallery moved from municipal to national. A painting like this being held for the nation and being available to view free of charge is a big deal. This could never have disappeared into a bank vault; it’s a gem. And there couldn’t be any other home for it.”
