Peter Costello
Casimir Markievicz: A Polish Artist on Bohemian Dublin
(1903-1913)
An exhibition in the State Apartments of Dublin Castle, runs to September 14 2025;
Co-produced by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland and the Office of Public Works. Entrance fee, €3.00; catalogue, €5.00.
Count Markievicz, the Polish husband of the redoubtable Constance Gore-Booth, was an artist rather cast into the shadows by the fame in Ireland of his patriotic spouse.
This exhibition, in the elegant state apartments of Dublin Castle, will go a long way to making him better known to the general public.
It is really the second part of the exhibition that is truly revealing”
The catalogue contains short essays by the curators of the exhibition, Prof. Emily Mark-Fitzgerald and Kathryn Milligan, art historians based in Dublin. In addition, there is a piece by Patrick Quigley, the Chairman of the Irish-Polish Society, and another by Lauren Arrington , author of the biography Revolutionary Lives (Princeton University Press, 2016).
The exhibition falls into two parts. The material on Dublin and its artistic community is inevitably familiar to a certain extent, as Constance Markievicz never lacked admirers. But there is also opened up the wider aspects of what the couple were engaged with in Dublin in the years 1903-1913. They were deeply involved in the United Arts Club in Dublin, an institution which still flourishes; but drama and art occupied most of their attention.
However, it is really the second part of the exhibition that is truly revealing. The very idea of this show conceived back in 2023 and has been brought into existence by the enthusiasm of the Polish Embassy to mark in some “European way” the Polish term in the Presidency of the EU in the first half of this year.
With the co-operation of three private collections in Poland, pictures and archival items of the greatest interest have been brought to Ireland that demonstrate, I suspect for the first time, the true nature of the Polish-Irish life of the Markievicz couple.
Lifetime
But what really attracts attention and arouses interest are rather the paintings, drawings and photographs the couple created in Poland over the years. These were, echoing their Irish experiences, often of rural scenes, of peasants, cottages and landscapes. The Countess emerges as a talented photographer of local scenes and people on the family estate in the years 1902 and 1903.
Casimir left Dublin in 1913 for Poland leaving Constance, whom he never divorced, to pursue her patriotic endeavours in Ireland. Those later years, until his death on December 2 1932 – announced in a telegram sent by their son Sasko to the Gore-Booth family in Sligo – were difficult.
His career was in a sense a fractured one. But clearly one that developed on his return to Poland; after the Irish paintings, a portrait of his friend Prof. Henryk Jakubanis is very striking in its liberty of technique. Casimir remained involved in all kinds of artistic activates in Poland.
Many will go to this exhibition out of an abiding interest in the Countess and her role in the creation of modern Ireland”
One senses that there must be much more to learn about Casmir himself, and that he well deserves a biography in his own right, and not merely as the husband of Constance. Here his Irish novel Przemac Krwie (“The Power of Flesh and Blood”) might be properly explored.
Doubtless many will go to this exhibition out of an abiding interest in the Countess and her role in the creation of modern Ireland. When she was fatally ill in 1927 Casimir returned for a time to Ireland. He lovingly painted her ill in bed, on the bedspread a copy of the Protestant bible given her as a child by her grandmother. That bible, the King James version naturally, is on display. The simple faith of her childhood was with her to the end.
Few people ever realised that when she died, the Countess beloved of the poor of Dublin who followed her coffin to Glasnevin, was in law a Polish citizen. Unwilling to have a Free State passport issued in King George’s name, she had obtained a passport from the now independent Polish Republic. That in itself sums up the strange cross currents of history and culture through which the Markievicz couple navigated their adult years and creative lives.
Few people ever realised that when she died, the Countess beloved of the poor of Dublin who followed her coffin to Glasnevin, was in law a Polish citizen”