MARGARET EGAN: THE MYTHIC STORIES OF LIFE AND LANDSCAPE

OPENING NIGHT SPEECH

Niamh O’Sullivan

Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design

I’m delighted to speak at this preliminary launch, of a terrific and long overdue book, which Tara has kindly organised, to coincide with this exhibition of Margaret’s recent work.

As an art historian of the nineteenth century, living in the twenty-first century, I find myself hugely drawn to Margaret Egan’s painting.  Don’t get me wrong, although there are deep roots to our history in Margaret’s work, there is nothing dated about it: her work is seductive, poetic, bold, expressionistic, evocatory… In Margaret’s paintings, one is in the presence of work that is at once, both absolutely contemporary, but with a plumb line to the past. 

Margaret describes herself as peeling back the layers of history to find what lies beneath, reflecting on the people that once walked the land, seeking patterns of life, and recalling events. From times of fertility to harrowing famine, the land thrums though us all… 

Two illustrious historical sources come to mind when thinking about this book. The first is Giorgio Vasari, the Italian Renaissance painter and architect, best known for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Vasari produced the first book of art history, one that determined the course of the discipline from the Renaissance to today. While Vasari has been long revered, he also did a disservice to art history in that he pushed the biography of the artist, at the expense of his or her work: think Caravaggio as murderer, or Toulouse Lautrec the syphilitic, or Van Gogh sans ear.

Now Mark Ewart has written a terrific essay on Margaret’s work. But I have to tell you, he and I had great difficulty in persuading Margaret to allow anything of herself, as a person, to go into the book. ‘Who’d want to know that’, she say, as we asked where she grew up? And as for putting a date or two in there, there was definitely no question of that!

So while Margaret’s work is powerful, Margaret herself is far too modest. You may note that information on Margaret, as a person, in Mark’s essay is sparce, but on her work, rich. We got around her reticence by inviting a number of people who worked with her, or knew her, or sat for her, or purchased her work, to fill in some of the detail on her as an artist. The tributes by Bernard Farrell, Kathleen Barrington and Gary Hynes, and her gallerists in Ireland and England, as well as her children, give wonderful glimpses into Margaret at a person and an artist. I particularly like the story of the round table in the kitchen, as her children were growing up. Round, so no one sat at the head of the table: all shouted in, and all were heard. The tributes on Margaret by Colm, Cormac, Dermot and Carol are very moving and revelatory. 

The second historical figure who comes to mind is the philosopher Edmund Burke. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke argued that ‘the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other’. The concept of the sublime – the utter loneliness of a rural road,  the awful grandeur of a mountain range, the vast expanse of an ocean – ‘produces in the soul a feeling of awe, not unmixed with terror’. Burke contrasted the awesome, the vast and the wild, with the beautiful, denoting the small, the tranquil and the gentle.. 

This contrast was exemplified by Turner, Turner embodying the Sublime, and Constable, Constable embodying the picturesque or beautiful. But in Margaret Egan, we have that juxtaposition contained within a single artist:  an artist of commanding power – those apocalyptic landscapes, emanating from a  person of extraordinary delicacy and gentleness. 

Margaret is an outstanding colourist, a trait that gives her work a remarkable alchemical intensity that places her among the very best of her contemporaries, and this has earned her her place among Ireland’s most important artists, an artist we can be proud of at home and abroad.

Niamh O’Sullivan

Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design

7 March 2024