An artist can communicate so much with little more than a brush, paint, and canvas. Messages can be subtle or direct and a painting can conjure emotions like no other medium. When a rare talent comes along, it becomes apparent from a very young age. Such was the case with James Brenan.
Born in Dublin in 1837, Brenan lived through The Great Hunger and began training at The Royal Dublin Society school of design while still in adolescence. At the age of fourteen, he departed Ireland for England. There he continued his training as both artist and instructor, first in London and later in Birmingham.
Brenan returned to Ireland in 1860 where he embarked on a lengthy career in art education. Brenan first accepted the role of Headmaster at The Cork School of Art, a position he held for nearly three decades. In 1889 he took up the same role at the prestigious Dublin Metropolitan School of Art.
These paid positions offered Brenan the ability to follow his heart when selecting the subject matter for his own work, rather than painting more commercially viable pieces.
Brenan's muse was rural Ireland itself along with her people, whom he came to adore. Much of his free time would be spent in countryside, often returning to visit, live and work alongside the same families year after year. Poverty, hardship and emigration worked their way into his pieces, where the impact of each on traditional Irish family life and the island's culture were laid bare.
In "The Finishing Touch" (1876), Brenan captures an emotional scene, one which played out continually in humble cottages across the island during and long after The Great Hunger. Three generations of the O'Connor family prepare their simple home for an "American Wake", while bracing themselves for their daughter's imminent departure for New York.
As the daughter adjusts a hat, procured for the occasion, her mother looks on, possibly offering some final advice. The son has just returned to the cottage with a creel full of turf. Surely a supply would be needed for the night's sendoff, but Brenan's implication is clear. Daily and seasonal tasks, traditions and the O'Connors themselves must go on despite the daughter's departure. The son too, will likely follow his sister across the Atlantic, something which may already weigh upon him.
An old man in a top hat, presumably the grandfather, is seen in the corner - his role as head of the family ebbing with time along with his way of life. As the family name and destination is painted on the daughter's small trunk, her father rests his hand upon it. Perhaps he is contemplating his daughter's life to date, impossibly wrapped up in such a small parcel. Or perhaps he is unconsciously leaving a small part of himself, to accompany and protect his daughter on her journey. In any case, her surname's placement on the case and her father's somber gesture, together, represent "The Finishing Touch".
For the O'Connors, life will go on, but it will do so with an ocean separating generations that until now.
