Race, Irishness and Art History: Margaret Clarke's 'Bathtime at the Creche' (1925), Motherhood and the Matter of Whiteness

Barber, FC (2017) Race, Irishness and Art History: Margaret Clarke's 'Bathtime at the Creche' (1925), Motherhood and the Matter of Whiteness. In: Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World. McGill University Press, pp. 62-80. ISBN 9780773549791

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Abstract

Art in the Irish Free State of the 1920s was a varied affair. In the work of Paul Henry (1877–1958), Charles Lamb (1893–1964) or Seán Keating (1889–1977), peasants and fishermen populated a rural idyll somewhere to the west of the River Shannon, their paintings helping to articulate in visual form the ideologies of the newly independent state that rejected its British past in favour of the search for an authentic Irishness. There were also artists whose work was closer to the interests of European avant-gardes. Jack Yeats’s (1871–1957) depictions of the experience of modernity in 1920s...