Howard Helmick 1840-1907

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Presents for the Priest

Oil on card laid down on panel, 32.5 x 43.2 cm.
Signed ‘H. Helmick’, lower-right

By contrast to this humble, if homely, scene, Presents for the Priest shows an altogether more refined interior, the study of a priest who is interrupted from his books by the visit of a mother with her daughter bearing gifts. The room’s furnishings mix the clerical with the secular, nicely indicated by the rhyming of the wall-mounted pendulum clock with the rosary beads hanging alongside. The gift of eggs was of relatively high value and hence appropriate to a personage of the status of the parish priest. Although the keeping of poultry grew during the second half of the nineteenth century, the ‘cross-channel trade removed large quantities from Ireland’ and eggs were traded by the peasantry for more basic provisions (L. A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford, Feast and Famine, Food and `Nutrition in Ireland 1500-1920 (Oxford, 2001), p. 106). An account from Roscommon in 1904 noted: ‘each market day in the western towns you meet droves of women and girls with baskets of eggs, bringing them to street corners, where they dispose of them to the men who buy, and send them to the English and Scotch markets’. Elsewhere in a compositionally closely related work The Wayward Daughter (South Shields Museum and Art Gallery), the role of the priest as arbiter of ‘transgressive’ female sexuality is the subject, and it is conceivable that Helmick is playing with the symbolism of eggs, broken or otherwise, as famously deployed by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Clearly indicative of its contemporary acclaim, the image was engraved by H. Werdmuller in 1888 (illustrated).