Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

78 Artist and stage designer Alongside his sporting talents, Gregory showed his artistic inclinations early. Soon after leaving Oxford, he greatly pleased his mother (who, it seems, was beginning to despair of him finding a suitable ‘career’) by announcing his intention of becoming an artist. 124 From 1903 to 1905 he studied at the Slade School of Art in London under Henry Tonks – a widely respected teacher, if something of a tartar in that role. Later he moved to Paris to study under the Anglophile portraitist Jacques-Emile Blanche. As an artist, Gregory’s range was wide. Between 1905 and 1911 he designed sets, costumes and lighting for the Abbey Theatre, 125 painting the sets himself; Colin Smythe’s book tells us the theatre’s success owed much to his designs. Away from the theatre he painted portraits and ‘atmospheric landscapes’, as well as turning his hand to smaller-scale exercises such as the design of bookplates. He exhibited his paintings and designs twice in London, at the Baillie Gallery in Bruton Street, Mayfair in 1912, and at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea in 1914. At the time at least, his art was well regarded. Blanche said that his work ‘reached the highest level of artistic and intellectual merit’, while The Times , commenting on his 1912 exhibition, said that he ‘has a real gift both for landscape and for scenic design … his pictures are full of the rich and dreamy melancholy that is usually called “Celtic”. Many of them are painted in a “Celtic twilight” and [are] haunted by some brooding sadness that is not due to the subjects only … Mr Gregory is clearly sensitive to several modern movements in art [but] he keeps his own poetic temperament unenslaved.’ The same reports in The Times give particular praise to his stage designs, which showed him to be ‘aware of the need for boldness in construction and reticence in detail’. 126 Posterity has been less kind to his artistic endeavours. A century later, the DIB merely stated that Gregory ‘showed some talent as a painter’, though it acknowledged that his sets for the Abbey Theatre were ‘effective’. Perhaps more pertinently, the article in the Irish Times in 2000 already referred to was able to give no more praise to his art than that he ‘was obviously a methodical and orderly worker, [but] not especially imaginative or adventurous’ and, significantly, concluded that ‘It is as much for Robert Gregory’s family associations as for the works’ own merits that [his] pictures are of interest.’ That that interest persisted into the twenty-first century is shown by the fact that collections of his work were realising sums in the thousands of euro when put up for auction in recent years. But not the sums that would mark him out as an ‘outstanding’ artist. A collection of 24 of his sketches auctioned in 2006 realised € 5,200, against an estimate of € 1,500-2,000, while another collection of nine of his watercolours and other sketches 124 See article ‘Paintings by Lady Gregory’s boy in house sale’ in the Irish Times , 27 May 2000 125 Co-founded in 1904 by Lady Gregory, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin was an early focus of the Irish Literary Revival and of the development of twentieth- century Irish drama - Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Shaw et al. 126 The Times , 11 and 13 June 1912. In the Wickets