Munster in 30 Artworks, No 27: Cahirmee Fair, by Glanmire-born artist Sylvia Cooke-Collis

The painting by the Cork artist was created in the 1940s, and formed part of a donation to various art galleries

Mon, 21 Nov, 2022 - 21:02

Marc O’Sullivan Vallig

Sylvia Cooke-Collis’s Cahirmee Fair is a vivid celebration of the event that brings horse dealers from all over the country, and even further afield, to the North Cork town of Buttevant on 12th July every year.

The fair is so old that no one quite knows when it started, though what is known is that it originally ran at the Fair Field of Cahirmee, two miles west of Buttevant.

It was there that two famous horses are reputed to have been sold in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; Napoleon’s white charger Marengo and the Duke of Wellington’s Irish black named Copenhagen, which the gentlemen rode at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Since 1921, Cahirmee Fair has been run in Buttevant itself, and this is where Cooke-Collis’s painting is set. It depicts a modest scene, with horses being ridden or led about the street.

The most dramatic thing in it is the white horse rearing up on its front legs in the middle-ground, while the eye is inevitably drawn to the green awning of a traveller’s caravan to its left.

Michael Waldron, Curator of Collections and Special Projects at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, describes Cahirmee Fair as one of his favourite works in the gallery’s collection.

“Sylvia Cooke-Collis was a very interesting artist,” he says.

“She was born as Sylvia Margaret Philips in Glanmire in 1900. When she was still a child, her father died and her mother remarried, to Richard Arthur Grove Annesley, and she grew up at Anne’s Grove House, near Castletownroche in north Cork.”

Sylvia Cooke-Collis and Seìamus Murphy at an exhibition of her work, possibly in the 1940s. Picture courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery and Julian Walton

Cooke-Collis studied at the Crawford Municipal School of Art in Cork, and later continued her studies under the artist Mainie Jellett at Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin.

In 1932, she married Maurice Talbot Cooke-Collis, who was more than twenty years her senior.

“She married well; they lived at Ballymacmoy House in Killavullen, Co Cork and had a comfortable life.”

In 1936, Cooke-Collis began exhibiting with the Watercolour Society of Ireland, showing more than sixty works with the organisation over the next twenty years.

She also had solo exhibitions with the Grafton Gallery and the more avant garde Dublin Painters Society.

“She also showed with the RHA,” says Waldron, “but only on three or four occasions, which suggests that her work might have come in and out of fashion. She showed in Cork as well, and was photographed with the local sculptor Séamus Murphy.”

In the 1940s, Cooke-Collis mixed with an artistic set in Dublin that included Basil Rakoczi and Kenneth Hall of the White Stag Group, a collective that formed in England before moving to Dublin before the Second World War.

In Dublin, the group centred on the Buttery Cocktail Bar at the Hibernian Hotel, and grew to include local artists such as Patrick Scott and Thurloe Conolly and the composer Brian Boydell.

Cahirmee Fair was cancelled from 1940–45, so it was probably in the years after the war that Cooke-Coolis produced her painting.

“The work is undated,” says Waldron. “But the browns and reds were the kind of colours she was using at the time. Her style owed a lot to the Fauvists; it was naturalistic and sketchy, with bold outlines, especially around the figures.

“Cooke-Coolis was known to paint out of doors, like other Irish artists of her time, such as Norah McGuinness. So it wouldn’t have been unusual if she had painted Cahirmee Fair on site, or at least made some sketches and worked them up later as a painting.

"Cahirmee Fair is typical of her work in that she mainly painted scenes in Counties Cork and Kerry, though she also produced work in Connemara.”

Among the people Cooke-Coolis mixed with was Elizabeth Bowen, the author of ‘Big House’ novels such as The Last September.

“The two would have known each other from very early on. Anne’s Grove was down the road from Bowen’s Court, so they were neighbours. They were the same age, and died a few weeks apart, Cooke Collis on February 7, 1973 and Bowen two weeks later.”

Cooke-Collis’s husband had predeceased her by about five years, and the couple had no children, which may have prompted the magnanimous gesture she made in her will.

“Cooke-Collis had collected work by her contemporaries such as Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett, probably by swapping paintings. She left her collection - their work, along with her own - to be distributed to different galleries around the country, which is how Cahirmee Fair came to be in the Collection of the Crawford Art Gallery.

“It’s a beautiful painting. It’s not on view at the moment, but we’ve shown it often over the years, and it’s always been a great favourite with visitors.”