John James Barralet 1747-1815

SOLD

Donnybrook Fair

Pencil, pen and black ink and grey wash, 47 x 74.6 cm.

Provenance: Christie’s (in association with Hamilton Osborne King), 29 June 1994, lot 23

Held annually on the green of Madden’s farm next to the medieval graveyard, the patent for Donnybrook Fair originated under King John and it was held ever August for centuries. Ostensibly a market for the sale of cattle, sheep and horses, it later became synonymous with drunken revelry, gambling and faction fights. In the eighteenth century the fair was depicted on several occasion by Francis Wheatley and later by William Sadler and Erskine Nicol. This drawing by John James Barralet shows figures of all classes in sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, interaction. In the background, carriages, tents and flagpoles, create a temporary village with a stream, presumably a tributary of the Dodder, forded by a plank. In the foreground a drunken young man is led away by a friend while, to his right, well-dressed young ladies offer charity to a beggar woman with two young children. On the left of the composition, meanwhile, a bare-knuckle boxing bout of two pugilists stripped to the waist looks set to soon degenerate into a pitched brawl as shillelaghs are drawn. Engrossed in themselves, the soon-to-be combatants ignore the plight of more genteel figures in an adjoining carriage which has lost its wheel and, in a motif beloved of Thomas Rowlandson, a young woman tumbles to the ground petticoats in disarray. In the centre foreground a low x-framed table serves as a bar. To its left, two women have clearly imbibed its refreshments to excess, with the younger one slumped and, in a motif famous from Hogarth’s Gin Lane, her child abandoned.

The ill effects on intemperance were often noted as among the worst results of the fair, cited in the regular calls to have it closed down. A few years after Barralet’s drawing, one commentator wrote in despair: ‘it has been calculated, that during the week of Donnybrook fair, there is more loss of female character, and greater spoliation of female virtue among the lower orders, than during all other portions of the year’. Not just this, the same source opined but there was ‘more misery, devilment and debauchery’, with ‘dissipation and profligacy practiced without restraint,’ than in ‘an equal space of ground in any part of the habitable globe’ (Dublin Penny Journal, Vol. 2, 1834). Despite the subject matter, Barralet, that most of elegant of draughtsmen, imbues his low-life characters with elegance, poise and humour – the sprawling young woman is a wittily appropriate misquotation of Correggio’s Dresden Magdalen. At the same time the overall composition is finely balanced and Barralet’s control of the monochrome technique is subtle and effective.