Paintings of the Irish Plight by Daniel MacDonald

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Paintings of the Irish Plight by Daniel MacDonald

April 30th, 2017

Awake Goy

Daniel MacDonald comes from a line of Scottish bluebloods who moved to County Cork sometime in the beginning of the 19th century. His father James was a painter, caricaturist, art critic, and musician, who was involved with the Cork Literary and Scientific Society. James had four children, including Daniel, who was born in Cork in 1820 and quickly follow in his father’s artistic footsteps. Daniel’s debut was at the age of 13 when he would contribute sketches to The Tribute (1833), a literary endeavor. By his early 20s, Daniel had become a prodigious painter in Cork and joined the managing committee of the Art Union, where he would exhibit many of his paintings. In 1945 Daniel moved to London, where he would achieve even more success, having many members of the royal family and of the aristocracy sit for him, including Prince George and Princess Mary of Cambridge, Lady Anglesea, Lord Sudeley, and Lady Douro. Queen Victoria also purchased a drawing, ‘Returning from a Funeral’, by MacDonald, which she kept in one of her prized albums, which is still in the Royal Collections.

Daniel is widely celebrated for being the only known artist to paint the “famine” while it was taking place. From The Irish Examiner:

In the first half of the 19th century, Irish artists with ambition went to London. There, artists painted for an elite market and patrons would not purchase pictures of rotting potatoes, emaciated bodies or diseased corpses to hang in their homes.

Irish artists would have considered it improper to turn the Famine into art; the few British artists that did also muted the horror. So, Daniel Macdonald’s Famine painting is remarkable. Although the 1847 British Institution, where it was shown, was excoriated for its mediocrity, the response to the only painting of the Irish Famine was predominantly silence.

The favourite painting that year was also of an Irish subject, but painted by an English artist, Frederick Goodall. British audiences found the Irishness, the sentimentality and faux normality of Goodall’s ‘Irish Courtship’ a comforting analgesic to the reality of Famine and the raw distress evident in the MacDonald painting.

It was not so much a question of how to convey contemporary horror adequately, but the unacceptability of conveying it at all. As the only contemporary painting of the Famine, its importance in Irish art and social history cannot be overstated.

Perhaps the painting was exhibited to reinforce the narrative that there was a famine taking place, rather than a deliberate act by the British to commit mass murder of the Irish people. We hear all about the potato blight, but Ireland produced lots of other food, most of which was stolen by British troops and shipped off. Even without this now well-documented knowledge, why does no one question why Ireland’s next-door neighbors in the United Kingdom never lifted a finger to help as millions starved to death?

Daniel also painted an image of Irish peasant youth from this time, which was not explicitly about the famine, instead showing the plight of the Irish people in a more palatable way. There is also a powerful painting of an Irish family getting evicted from their family home; just like in the famine painting, there are three generations shown suffering through the hardship. Another painting shows an Irish man preparing to engage in a street brawl. Daniel did not just paint the suffering of the Irish, though; he also showed them making merry, performing a wedding dance, and playing a game of Irish bowling.

Daniel died of a fever at age 33 in 1853. Although he left behind many paintings, many of them are still inaccessible to the public (i.e., internet). Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum was planning an exhibition of the work of Daniel MacDonald and asking that people around County Cork check their attics to see if they could find any of Daniel’s missing paintings.