Michael Farrell 1940-2000

‘They make every possible statement on the Irish situation: religious, cultural, political, the cruelty, the horror….every aspect of it’. (Michael Farrell on the subject of his Madonna Irlanda Series)

Executed in 1978, THE THIRD VERY REAL IRISH POLITICAL PICTURE is one of the most important works from Farrell's Madonna Irlanda series. The genesis for these paintings came with the reigniting of the Troubles in the early 1970s and the series forms the artist’s own unique metaphoric vision of Ireland at the time.

With the Dublin bombings on 17^th May 1974, Farrell’s already heightened awareness of the Troubles was brought into sharp relief and moved the artist to produce a response which would have a profound and lasting influence on both his painting style and his own life. In the immediate aftermath of the bombings in both Dublin and Monaghan, Farrell began to weave a political commentary into his Pressé Series; he replaced the lemon drops with blood and replaced the lemon peel with assorted press cuttings.  The resultant works formed the Political Pressé Series, and although they were widely acclaimed, he found their abstract style too limiting leading to a fundamental shift in his oeuvre to the subjective representational style of the Madonna Irlanda Series.   

The central figure of this series was a remarkable Irish born courtesan, Marie-Louise O’Murphy (1737-1814). She was the fifth daughter of an Irish bootmaker who emigrated from Dublin to Rouen as a cobbler to the large contingent of Irish mercenaries retained by the French Court at that time. With his death, Marie – Louise’s mother moved the family to Paris where she traded old clothes and put her daughters to work as actresses, dancers and models. In 1752, aged barely 15, Marie - Louise posed nude for Francois Boucher’s memorably provocative portrait of her, now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Her beauty caught the eye of a court valet who introduced her to King Louis XV and she quickly became a favourite mistress, giving birth to his illegitimate daughter, Agathe Louise de Saint Antoine (1754-1774). Her reign as king’s favourite ended, as did so many others, when she tried to unseat the wily Madame De Pompadour as maitresse en titre and she was married off to a minor noble and never again held sway at court. She remained in France for the rest of her life and, surviving the Revolution, died in 1814.

Farrell interpreted Miss O’Murphy as a modern metaphor for Ireland during the Troubles. Reworked in her sexually submissive Boucher pose, she became a contemporary Caitlín Ní Houlihan, The Madonna Irlanda,
‘I thought, here we go; this is the right way to do it. You’d have Ireland as a whore, ridden by everybody, mixed up with religion and the whole business, and as Ireland was a woman…that seemed to be a better political way of doing the thing than the other paintings I’d done before….Ireland is a feminine country and constantly referred to as she' (Michael Farrell quoted in David Farrell, Michael Farrell, The Life and Work of an Irish Artist, The Liffey Press, 2006, p.81).

The work gains an added significance with the inclusion of the artist’s self portrait, trapped within a glass of water between Miss O'Murphy's legs and indicates both Farrell’s sense of outrage at the situation in the North and his inability to effect any real change.