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Lot Essay
The Empire Marketing Board (EMB) was established in London in 1926 for the purpose of promoting the sale of produce from countries associated with the British Empire. During its seven years in existence, the EMB was involved in many areas of marketing, including film promotion and bill board advertisements throughout England. Although the Irish Free State had been established in 1922, continued access to the British market was essential for the economic development of the country. In 1927 the EMB commissioned Irish artist Seán Keating to undertake a design for a large poster to advertise Irish Free State Dairying, which was exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, in 1928. Due to the success of Irish Free State Dairying, Keating was commissioned by the EMB for a further two posters, Irish Free State Bacon and Irish Free State Chicken which were completed in 1928. The three posters were used between June and July 1929 to advertise Irish produce to the English market on specially designed outdoor hoarding sites.
Keating's brief was firmly controlled by the EMB, and due to the propagandistic nature of the advertising programme, the work had to be visually specific in its ability to advertise Irish products in a manner that was immediately recognisable. The present works are Keating's innovative designs for Irish Free State Bacon and Irish Free State Chicken, both replete with the visual iconography that was expected of Ireland in the 1920s. Keating was trained in and familiar with the skills necessary for large scale mural painting which translated well into poster designs of this scale. Therefore, in order to render the advertisements more legible he reduced the compositional elements to the bare essentials. Irish Free State Bacon features a caricature of the artist, wearing traditional Aran clothing and smoking an old fashioned pipe to the left of the image. He looks away into the distance, while the farm hand, leaning on a pitch fork to the right, peers out from the shadows. In the background, a man, ostensibly the owner of the farm takes his dog for a walk across the yard. While the image is reduced to basic compositional form, still the attention to detail is notable. The bricks around the doors and windows and the guttering and drainpipes are rendered as if they were freshly painted red, while the slates on the roof look new and the farm yard is orderly and clean.
When the artist received the commission, he was under time constraints and the EMB wanted the designs within months. Keating had just completed a series of illustrations for John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, published by George Allen and Unwin, London in 1927, for which he used a series of compositional photographs. It was at this time that Keating became artistically associated with the project to create hydro-electricity on the River Shannon at Ardnacrusha in County Clare, for which he also used a camera as a compositional tool. Anxious to facilitate the EMB and to compose clearly legible designs, Keating photographed the buildings in a local farmyard. He also utilised figurative elements from recent sketches and paintings of the Aran Islands and from his illustrations for The Playboy of the Western World. As a result, Irish Free State Chicken is in modern terms, a cut and paste image based on Keating's sojourns on the Aran Islands. The old man to the right featured as the model for The Turf Buyer, 1928, and the couple appeared again in Aran Couple with Donkey and Cart which was likely originally titled Past Definite, Future Perfect, 1928, shown in the Royal Academy, London in 1928, while the pigs in Irish Free State Bacon previously made an appearance in a colour illustration, Rising Up in the Red Dawn, 1922 for The Playboy of the Western World.
The survival of Keating's original designs, which were intentionally ephemeral, is noteworthy. They appear, at first glance, to reflect an imagined view of Ireland as a rural ideal and idyll, as dictated by the advertising concerns of the EMB. But there is arguably a degree of artistic subterfuge in the images. There are no green rolling hills, shamrocks, shillelaghs or white thatched cottages. Instead, he posited an image of a peaceful and prosperous peasantry, within a well maintained farmyard that refutes the age old and worn vision of misery and deprivation in Ireland in the 1920s. The close range view and stage-like setting combined with clear architectural and figurative detail serves further to engage the viewer with the atmosphere of a real and prosperous Irish farm. The appeal in the work is, therefore, premised on Keating's ability suitably to advertise Irish Free State bacon and chicken within the limits of the constraints set by the EMB, but without reducing the images to mere pastiche.
Éimear O'Connor
The Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin
Keating's brief was firmly controlled by the EMB, and due to the propagandistic nature of the advertising programme, the work had to be visually specific in its ability to advertise Irish products in a manner that was immediately recognisable. The present works are Keating's innovative designs for Irish Free State Bacon and Irish Free State Chicken, both replete with the visual iconography that was expected of Ireland in the 1920s. Keating was trained in and familiar with the skills necessary for large scale mural painting which translated well into poster designs of this scale. Therefore, in order to render the advertisements more legible he reduced the compositional elements to the bare essentials. Irish Free State Bacon features a caricature of the artist, wearing traditional Aran clothing and smoking an old fashioned pipe to the left of the image. He looks away into the distance, while the farm hand, leaning on a pitch fork to the right, peers out from the shadows. In the background, a man, ostensibly the owner of the farm takes his dog for a walk across the yard. While the image is reduced to basic compositional form, still the attention to detail is notable. The bricks around the doors and windows and the guttering and drainpipes are rendered as if they were freshly painted red, while the slates on the roof look new and the farm yard is orderly and clean.
When the artist received the commission, he was under time constraints and the EMB wanted the designs within months. Keating had just completed a series of illustrations for John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, published by George Allen and Unwin, London in 1927, for which he used a series of compositional photographs. It was at this time that Keating became artistically associated with the project to create hydro-electricity on the River Shannon at Ardnacrusha in County Clare, for which he also used a camera as a compositional tool. Anxious to facilitate the EMB and to compose clearly legible designs, Keating photographed the buildings in a local farmyard. He also utilised figurative elements from recent sketches and paintings of the Aran Islands and from his illustrations for The Playboy of the Western World. As a result, Irish Free State Chicken is in modern terms, a cut and paste image based on Keating's sojourns on the Aran Islands. The old man to the right featured as the model for The Turf Buyer, 1928, and the couple appeared again in Aran Couple with Donkey and Cart which was likely originally titled Past Definite, Future Perfect, 1928, shown in the Royal Academy, London in 1928, while the pigs in Irish Free State Bacon previously made an appearance in a colour illustration, Rising Up in the Red Dawn, 1922 for The Playboy of the Western World.
The survival of Keating's original designs, which were intentionally ephemeral, is noteworthy. They appear, at first glance, to reflect an imagined view of Ireland as a rural ideal and idyll, as dictated by the advertising concerns of the EMB. But there is arguably a degree of artistic subterfuge in the images. There are no green rolling hills, shamrocks, shillelaghs or white thatched cottages. Instead, he posited an image of a peaceful and prosperous peasantry, within a well maintained farmyard that refutes the age old and worn vision of misery and deprivation in Ireland in the 1920s. The close range view and stage-like setting combined with clear architectural and figurative detail serves further to engage the viewer with the atmosphere of a real and prosperous Irish farm. The appeal in the work is, therefore, premised on Keating's ability suitably to advertise Irish Free State bacon and chicken within the limits of the constraints set by the EMB, but without reducing the images to mere pastiche.
Éimear O'Connor
The Humanities Institute of Ireland, University College Dublin