Nicholas Condy (1793-1857)Interior of an Irish Inn at BallyboylebooOil on canvas 47 x 63.5cm (18½ x 25”)SignedExhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1843, No. 415Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843, Condy’s recently rediscovered depiction of an Antrim interior populated by twenty very different individuals and with a rich variety of objects on display is an invaluable portrayal of Ulster country life in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although he described the picture as Interior of an Irish Cottage at Ballyboyleboo, what is shown is an inn, tavern or shebeen, making it a rare early depiction of an Irish public house. In contrast, however, to the small body of work showing Irish pubs by artists such as Charles Henry Cook, Erskine Nicol and Nathaniel Grogan, which invariably feature the Catholic Irish peasantry in stereotyped attitudes often verging on the caricature – here the clientele seems distinctly more mixed in terms of class and confession with a noticeably military flavour. The primary interaction in the painting is between the doubly amputated figure standing on the right in smart but sober attire and the seated black man at left who has suffered the loss of just one foot and who leans back in his chair as he raises a toast. This is an extraordinarily rare image of racial equality in an Irish genre scene of this date. Where black figures appear at all in Irish painting of the period it is invariably as marginal, often servile, subsidiary figures as, for example, in Erskine Nicol’s The 16th, 17th (St Patrick’s Day), and 18th March (National Gallery of Ireland). It seems likely that equality – or at least the superficial appearance of equality – has been gained through shared endeavour on the battlefield, and that the seated black man is a veteran toasting his former commanding officer. Certainly the deportment and dress of the man standing, very comfortably it must be said, on his double prosthetic limbs, suggests his elevated social position. The gathering includes both army and naval elements. An advertising bill on the right seeks able seamen, while the format of Condy’s signature, ‘Lt. Condy bf 43rd regt’ reminds us that he had begun his career as an army officer, serving in the Peninsular War, and retiring on half-pay at Christmas 1818. Continuing the military theme, a bust of the Duke of Wellington looks down from a shelf at upper left in the somewhat indecorous company of candlestick and brass kettle (and with a canoodling couple directly beneath his gaze). Prints of naval victories adorn the walls while to the side of the chimney hangs a toleware candle box and pair of bellows. A drunken sailor has passed out under the table his clay pipe and glass lying smashed in front of him while a serving woman brings more refreshments to those at table – a punch bowl, small glasses for toasting and pipes. Music is provided by a fiddler in the background.Claudia Kinmonth notes that Condy’s Ulster subjects ‘convey a real sense of how poor people’s homes in Antrim may well have been in the 1840s’ (Claudia Kinmonth, Irish Rural Interiors in Art (2006) p. 94). However, he also mixes Irish and English elements within his work, sometimes reusing still-life motifs or even whole figurative groups with which he was pleased. On the shelf to the left, the silver-plated vessel with a pouring spout and a handle on the side was used for serving hot chocolate, a delicacy unlikely to be widely available in Irish pubs of the 1840s, and indeed it, and other elements of the composition, appear again in Estate Workers in a Kitchen Interior (Mount Edgcumbe House). Similarly, a small work in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter, repeats almost verbatim the seated man shown here smoking a pipe. This is clearly a reduction from the present work, rather than the other way round, as the man’s motivation for turning round and looking upwards is lost when the figure is shown in isolation and removed from its context.Condy’s composition is artfully created and rather than the mere ‘slice-of-life’ recording of an interior and the objects within it, he offers knowing and witty allusions to the art of the past and also perhaps to that of his contemporaries. He relishes the chance to paint textures as different as scaly fish, metal, glass and ceramics and to record the differing way that light falls on each. The beautifully painted still-life in the lower right corner consisting of earthenware jug, crutch and broom resting on a barrel offers a deliberate reference to the art of David Teniers who time and again places a similar grouping of objects with a prominent diagonal formed by a brush or similar object to lead the eye into the composition. Similarly the still-life of fish may reference Teniers’s ‘well-kept kitchen compositions’ (‘de welvoorziene keuken’). The quotation of Teniers would have been recognised widely, as the seventeenth-century Flemish artist was synonymous with ‘low-life’ genre scenes such as this and his work was avidly collected and frequently engraved.Even more fundamental as a source of inspiration, however, was the phenomenally successful career of David Wilkie who applied the compositional dynamics of Teniers to modern-life subjects. Like Wilkie, Condy here deliberately echoes Teniers earthy ‘old master tonalities’ and shows a similar ‘delight in details and in rough irregular surfaces’ (David Solkin, Painting out of the Ordinary, Yale University Press, 2008, p. 12). Wilkie had also introduced a black soldier into his famous Chelsea Pensioners (Apsley House). Unlike Cushendall, the subject of another Ulster work by the artist, there is no townland in Antrim called Ballyboyleboo. It seems to be an Anglicization – exaggerating the Irishness of the name – of Ballyboley. In the rich account of life in Ulster of a couple of decades earlier written by John Gamble (published as Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by Brendán Mac Suibhne, Dublin, 2011, p. 280, n. 4), Gamble records how he stopped ‘at a lone public house between Larne and Ballymena’ and enjoyed a session in which tall stories were narrated. Mac Suibhne suggests that this may be ‘the premises now call the Ballyboley Inn’. An earlier building on this site may also be the setting for Condy’s work, though an older inn only a few miles distant at The Battery is also a possible candidate.
