Boy catching a butterfly
Thomas Kirk RHA (Cork 1781 - Dublin 1845)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1826
Materials
Brass, Marble
Measurements
457 x 285 mm; 546 mm (L)
Place of origin
Dublin
Order this imageCollection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565245
Summary
Sculpture, marble; Boy catching a butterfly; Thomas Kirk (1781-1845); 1826. A marble sculpture of a young boy on his knees, grasping a butterfly by its wings. Commissioned by Walter McGeough Bond (1790-1866) in 1826, and exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 1827. A companion to Kirk’s sculpture of a Child asleep upon a Greek chair, also at the Argory (NT 565244).
Full description
A marble sculpture depicting a young boy in the act of capturing a butterfly. He is dressed in a loose shift, the end of which is caught under his left knee, pulling the garment down as the boy moves forward on his knees. He gazes intently towards a butterfly which has been resting upon a rose and reaches with his right hand to grasp it by its wings. The ground along which the boy crawls is uneven and scattered with plants; in front of him lie two roses, whilst under his left hand is a lily of the valley and, under his right knee, a fleshy acanthus leaf. The sculpture is set upon a rectangular slab of white marble with canted corners, supported by four brass bun feet. Signed and dated on the back of the base. The Cork-born sculptor Thomas Kirk (1781-1845) had the most important sculpture practice in Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century (for Kirk, see Murphy 2010, pp. 52-57; Murphy 2014, pp. 205-07). Unlike other successful Irish-born sculptors such as John Henry Foley, Kirk opted not to move to London to further his career, but instead remained in Dublin, where he made a number of patriotic commissions for Anglo-Irish and Protestant patrons, as well as gaining a great reputation as a sculptor of portrait busts. At the first exhibition of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1826, Kirk exhibited, as well as the Boy Catching a Butterfly, a number of other works, including what was described in one report as the ‘fine collossal’ statue of the Unionist politician Thomas Spring Rice (1790-1866), which was shown alongside a cast of the Barberini Faun, donated to the RHA by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and ‘collossal Busts of Canova and Thorwalden [sic] , sent from Rome’ (Bolster’s Quarterly Magazine, Vol. I (1826), p. 288). The sculpture was commissioned from Thomas Kirk by Walter McGeough Bond (1790-1866). Although it is dated 1826, it was only exhibited in 1827 at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, as ‘Boy Catching a Butterfly, executed in Marble for Mageough Bond, Esq.’ It is a companion, if not a strict pair, to Kirk’s ‘Child asleep upon a Greek chair’, exhibited at the RHA in 1826 (NT 565244). Like that work, it is a charming composition which narrowly avoids sentimentality, the child’s clinging drapery very effectively rendered in marble. The lily and the rose are both symbols of purity. Jeremy Warren September 2022
Provenance
Commissioned from the artist by Walter McGeough Bond (1790-1866); exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 1827; by descent; given to the National Trust by Walter Albert Nevill MacGeough Bond (1908-1986) in 1979.
Marks and inscriptions
Back of base:: T. Kirk RHA Invenit /1826
Makers and roles
Thomas Kirk RHA (Cork 1781 - Dublin 1845), sculptor
References
Strickland 1913: W. G. Strickland, Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 vols.1913, I, p. 592. Stewart 1985-87: Ann M. Stewart, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts: Index of exhibitors and their works 1826-1979, 3 vols., Dublin 1985-1987, II, p. 165, 1827, no.300. Roscoe 2009: I. Roscoe, E. Hardy and M. G. Sullivan, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851, New Haven and Yale 2009, p. 708, no. 39. Murphy 2010: Paula Murphy, Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture. Native Genius Reaffirmed, New Haven/London 2010 Murphy 2014: Paula Murphy, ed., Art and Architecture of Ireland. III. Sculpture 1600-2000, Dublin/New Haven/London 2014