Francis William Topham 1808-1877
St. Cúan's Well, 1847
Watercolour heightened with white on paper, 55.5 x 43.5 cm.
Exhibited: New Society of Painters in Water Colours
Various versions, unclear whether paint or print, were exhibited as follows: Cranfield’s, Dublin, 1848; McWatters’, Armagh, 1848; Fletcher's, Cork, 1848; Douglas’, Kilkenny, 1848; Irish Industrial Exhibition, World’s Fair, St Louis, 1904.
Topham was born in Leeds and moved to London where he became a member of the Artists’ Society, Clipstone Street, a group of artists devoted to genre painting featuring rustic figures. When Topham visited Ireland in the mid 1840s, he encountered extreme deprivation that exceeded anything staged in London. Real life conditions in the west of Ireland led to the production of some major works by Topham, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, Sheffield Art Museum, the Guildhall, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Glasgow Art Gallery and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Topham executed several versions of this subject. Two young women, one holding rosary beads, pray in front of a well; a young mother lifts a bowl of holy water for her child to drink; an elderly boccough (beggar) hovers expectantly nearby; while other pilgrims approach from the distance, where we see the Round Tower and Temple St Finghin, Clonmacnoise, imaginatively grafted onto the scene.
Notwithstanding the absence of acute hunger and mass evictions evident in his paintings executed at the height of the Famine, Topham’s acknowledgments of conditions in Ireland may have been oblique, but were not non-existent. The art critic, James Dafforne, perceived ‘nothing vulgar nor unpleasant in the poverty [he] depicts – it rather suggests the simplicity of lowly rural life than suffering or want.’ (Art Journal, February 1880). Thus, as Topham perceived it, any ‘ignorance’ was circumstantial, caused by poverty, not endemic, due to the innate deficiencies of the Irish.
Topham’s Holy Well and Pilgrim paintings concede grace and poetry in the peasantry, far removed from the standard negative characterisations of the Irish in art and literature. The two girls dispel any notion of brutishness and, in that sense, the painting is socially progressive, and even politically corrective, by the standards of the time. Denigrating the Irish as superstitious was a staple disparagement, but when all else failed, religion was all that was left to a despairing people. Topham’s paintings of religious devotion are closely-studied and respectful. This painting of St Cúan’s Well is masterful in detail, and demonstrates striking watercolour skill.
This Holy Well is at Castlegar, Ahascragh (near Ballinasloe). Featuring unusually sculptural arma Christi (the instruments of the Passion), the scene is iconographically rich in Christian symbolism. Topham here demonstrates his knowledge of Irish High Crosses from the ninth century onwards. The carved figure of Christ is surrounded by sun and moon, scourge and reed, hammer and rosette of silver, skull and crossed bones, cock and pot. The ladder, partly covered by the flowing perizonium (loincloth), suggests Topham’s knowledge of a work in the French family mausoleum at Cloonshanville Dominican Priory (near Frenchpark, Co. Roscommon) that features an eighteenth-century crucifixion plaque (commissioned by Edmond French Fitzstephen), obviously seen by Topham.(1)
As an underrated medium, operating largely outside the strictures of the Academy, watercolour allowed artists to be more experimental in both content and execution. And Topham’s skill was undeniably impressive. His return to the Claddagh and Connemara in the 1860s was rapturously welcomed by the once comely maidens who feature in these paintings, now middle aged women, who encouraged him to revisit the same subject matter, but on a larger scale producing works in watercolour that attains at times the power of oils.
The print version, Sisters at the Holy Well, engraved by Francis Holl, was promoted as a companion to Burton’s Blind Girl at the Holy Well, and hailed as a ‘national subject’. Encomiasti reviews attracted elite buyers (such as the Lord Lieutenant), the print’s rarity being guaranteed by the destruction of the plate.
Niamh O’Sullivan
1. My thanks to Martin A. Timoney for bringing this to my attention; see Timoney, ‘Two Stone Crucifixion Plaques from East Connacht’ , in Irish Midland Studies: Essays in Commemoration of N.W. English, Athlone, 1980, pp 142-6; Timoney, M.A., ‘Roscommon Crucifixion Plaques – A Detective Story’, in Roscommon Association Yearbook, 1892, pp 8-9.