RICHARD THOMAS MOYNAN, R.H.A. | What Does it Want?

Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Limerick, 1993 

Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1887, no.310;
Dublin Sketching Club, 1887, no.76;
Boston, Boston College Museum of Art, America’s Eye: Irish Paintings from the Collection of Brian P. Burns, 26 January - 19 May 1996, no.27, illustrated p.107, with tour to Dublin, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 19 June - 25 August 1996 and New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, 25 September 1997 - 4 January 1998;
Washington, John F. Kennedy Center, Irish Paintings from the Collection of Brian P. Burns, 13 - 28 May 2000, illustrated p.61;
Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum, A Century of Irish Painting: Selections from the Brian P. Burns Collection, 3 March - 29 April 2007, illustrated p.81

Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Ireland's Painters 1600 - 1940, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2002, no.366, illustrated p.267

Canvas is lined. There is a craquelure pattern visible across the surface, which appears stable; otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. UV light reveals an opaque varnish. There appears to be retouchings along each edge, also a few small areas in the roof in the background and to the right of the standing gentleman. Held in a gilt plaster frame, ready to hang.
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Richard Moynan is an acclaimed Irish artist of the Victorian period, who is noted for his genre paintings, his images of children and his political cartoons. He originally studied medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons, but in his final year, in the words of Walter Strickland: His love for art, inherited perhaps from his mother who was a clever amateur painter, induced him to abandon a career never congenital to him and apply himself to the study of painting.¹ He trained initially in the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, now the National College of Art and Design, moving on to the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools where students had a better opportunity to exhibit at their annual exhibition. He won the Taylor competition in 1881 and the Cowper Prize in 1882. In March of 1883, Moynan scooped the Albert Scholarship for the best picture shown in the Royal Hibernian Academy by a student.  Winning the Albert Scholarship facilitated the artist’s post-graduate education at the Académie Royale des Beaux Art in Antwerp. This establishment was known in artistic circles as Verlat’s Academy, as Karl Verlat (1824-1890), an artist famed for his pedagogical prowess, held the role of the Professor of the Principles of Painting since 1877.

Moynan travelled to Belgium in company with his fellow Irish artist, Roderic O’Conor and they took up lodgings together at 12, Keizerstraat. The Académie had students from Ireland, England, France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany as well as the Scandinavian countries. The following March he participated in the annual Concours, a prestigious all-school competition. Moynan became the first Irish student to win the Concours, the highest distinction available to any student of the Academy, achieving the perfect score of 60/60 for painting the living model. This award was to change his status within the art school as he became part of an elite group of five students who were given their own studio space and were personally mentored by Karel Verlat.

Winning the Concours had other ramification too, as the artist felt his future was secure enough to marry his childhood sweet-heart and cousin, Suzanna Mary Moynan. The wedding took place by special licence at the bride’s home, in Thurles Town, County Tipperary on the 9^th of April 1884. The couple honeymooned in Antwerp, where this picture was painted and Suzanna then returned to Dublin to allow Moynan to finish off his artistic education in Antwerp and later at Académie Julian in Paris.

What Does it Want? dates from the end of the artist’s two year sojourn in Antwerp and the canvas was exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in the spring of 1887. It marked the painter’s return to Dublin as a continentally-trained artist, but it also celebrated Moynan’s marriage. This picture was originally thought to have been made in the Dublin Metropolitan School of art, but research has proved otherwise.

This painting depicts Suzanna dressed in her outdoor clothes sitting at an easel. She is in conversation with the artist who has retreated deeper into the room. On the left of the canvas a curtain is drawn back and folded towards the viewer, inviting the spectator into the studio space. The image on the easel is deliberately obfuscated, a convention that demonstrated that the creative process is taking place in the artist’s mind. A shaft of sunlight from a window located high up on the left of the canvas illuminates Moynan’s shaded features, while the foreground is flooded with soft light. A similar flagged floor appears in other Antwerp works by the artist such as, Girls Reading a Newspaper (1885). The studio contains many classical casts and statues, ranging from vases, to a large acanthus leaf entablature, to a life-size statue of the Medici Venus. These signify Moynan’s academic journey, as art students began their schooling by copying from old master drawings (referenced here by the drawing board on the right of the composition) and advanced to sketching parts of classical statues, graduating to larger pieces, like the Venus figure. This in turn qualified the student to proceed to the life room and work from the living model.

The artist’s choice of the Medici Venus was particularly apt, as this goddess of beauty and love symbolizes the relationship between Moynan and Suzanna. Another, more shady classical figure hovers just above the artist’s head. She holds a trumpet identifying her as Cleo, the Muse of History. Cleo is a key player in a Jan Vermeer’s An Allegory of Painting (1665) Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Indeed there are many other compositional and structural parallels between the two works, beginning with the motif of the curtain to mark the division between public and private space. The presence of the sculpture and tools of the artist, also underscore Moynan’s familiarity with Vermeer’s masterpiece but he has deliberately reversed the position of the artist and his muse. In Vermeer’s An Allegory of Painting the artist is seated at the easel while his muse stands, but in What Does it Want? the figures are arranged the other way around. The subdued palette is typical of Moynan’s Antwerp work, and the browns and creams are countered with the complimentary colour red that is evident in the velvet curtain and the ribbon in Suzanna’s hair.

This early canvas is the first of a suite of four self-portraits in which Moynan established his artistic credentials. Taking Measurements (1887) and The Artist in His Studio in Harold’s Cross (1887) are part of the Moynan collection in National Gallery of Ireland, while the third work, entitled The Artist in his Studio (1888) is located at University College Galway.

What Does it Want? is an important painting in the artist’s oeuvre. It demonstrates Moynan’s considerable training and knowledge of the old masters, and shows all the promise of his bourgeoning artistic vision.

Maebh O'Regan

¹Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, Vol.2, L to Z, London (1913), p.144