Fine art, poetry and music at Eagle Island in the 1870s and 1880s

 

The above painting is entitled "The Irish brigantine Sligo and other vessels in rough weather below Eagle Island, county Mayo," which is not quite as snappy as The Kiss or The Scream. He may have been a decent enough painter (he had to have been to have painted that picture with the boat bobbing up and down like it was on a spring) but Admiral Richard Brydges Beechey - the artist - had a lot of work to do on title length.

RBB was an artist of note, as was his father, Sir William Beechey who was a celebrated portrait painter and also fathered eighteen children, not necessarily at the same time. Followers of Arctic maritime history will know that Beechey Island was the last resting place of two of the crew of the ill-fated Franklin expedition to discover the North West passage. The island was named for Sir William by another of his many sons who was a lieutenant on one of Parry's Arctic voyages.

Junior Beechey entered Naval College in 1825 and was part of the maritime survey of Ireland ten years later. By 1864 he had fully retired and had time to concentrate on his paintings. The painting above is dated 1874, when of course two lighthouses sat proudly on Eagle Island. The east lighthouse, was destroyed by a violent storm in 1894 and the west lighthouse was destroyed by a violent burst of corporate architectural vandalism in 2014.

The painting above is also by Richard Brydges Beechey and is entitled "Eagle Island, off Erris Head, W. Coast of Ireland," which is better but still too wordy. It was painted in 1885, ten years later. One suspects the driftwood (bottom left) was part of the Irish brigantine, Sligo, in the top picture, which seems to have been placed just where those two nasty rocks jut out. 

As if one dose of art was not enough to make you lie down, I now give you a piece of rhyming verse from 1878 by a poet called C.B., whose bid for everlasting fame and fortune were blighted when he refused to reveal the other letters in his name. It details a pleasure trip from Belmullet to Inishkea and back which strangely takes in Blacksod, Inis Glora and Eagle Island. I have lifted it from the Connaught Telegraph 14th September 1878.

Of course, it isn't easy marrying CB's words of a tranquil sea with Beechey's violent waves for which Eagle Island is renowned. It is also difficult imagining the cost of public liability insurance today for a cruise around an island notorious for bad weather but, as I have often maintained, the Victorians were completely mad.

And if that wasn't enough to convince you that Eagle Island, more than Florence or Milan or London was the artistic capital of the world in the 1870s, I give you a testimonial from Charles O'Brien, lightkeeper, of Eagle Island, who doubtless organised melodeon parties on the rock as part of his enlightened musical education policies in regard to the children of his fellow-keepers.