Ireland in New York

A movement to establish in Manhattan an Irish Cultural Center started in 1927 when a group of Irish and Irish-Americans organized what they patriotically called the Irish Theatre. They took over the Greenwich Village Theatre, gave a noteworthy performance of Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie. Last week, the group carried their plans a step further with the opening of a Museum of Irish Art. Occupying four of the six rooms leased by the Irish Theatre in the Barbizon Hotel, the Museum intends to "contribute the culture and arts of old and new Ireland to the American scene." For the opening it contained an exhibition, part loaned, part permanent, of Irish paintings and sculpture.

Any Irish project is sure, in a city with the Irish ingredients of New York, of many and potent sympathizers. In the original Irish Theatre group there were twelve members, including a clerk from Bog of Allah named Sean Dillon, a Dublin sign painter, a Drogheda school teacher, a traveler named Rex Moore McVitty who came originally from Tandiragee, and two professional actresses, one from Athlone, one from Wicklow. Co-directors were Miceal Breathnach, a Galway engineer, and Patric Farrell, a young man with social connections in Manhattan, protegee of Sir Thomas Glen-Coats. They had no trouble in finding such powerful patrons as Mayor James John Walker, Financier Francis Patrick Garvan, Lawyers Dudley Field Malone and Frank P. Walsh, Critic Ernest Boyd, Sportsman Aiden Roark (of the British International Polo team), Actor Dudley Digges, the widow of Author Donn Byrne (now Mrs. M. M. Willoughby Craig) and Socialites like Mrs. Walter A. Burke, Mrs. Charles Gary Rumsey. By the time the Museum opened last week, several non-Hibernian names often connected with Culture in New York had been added to the list of sponsors and patrons--Otto Hermann Kahn, William Ziegler, Percy Rivington Pyne Jr., Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock Sr. and Jr., Publisher Conde Nast's daughter Natica.

Stars of the opening exhibit were Sir John Lavery and the late Sir William Orpen, two great Irishmen whose memberships in London's Royal Academy have dimmed the fact that they belong also to the Royal Hibernian Academy which, chartered in 1823, now has 24 members and a gallery on Grafton Street, Dublin. Sir John and Sir William were eagerly reclaimed for Ireland last week. One of the three Orpens on view was a severe portrait of Solomon R. Guggenheim. Other paintings on view were a seascape by the late Nathaniel Hone, last survivor of the Barbizon School; 20 lively sea and landscapes by George ("AE") Russell. Most indigenous works were a John Keating, called Holy Joe of the Mountains; and Power O'Malley's Irish Madonna, a serene and affectionate study of a Connemara peasant girl clasping her towheaded brat; and 25 or more canvases by Patrick Joseph Tuohy, 36-year-old member of the Royal Hibernian Academy who was found dead in his Manhattan apartment Sept. 4, 1930.

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