Nevill Johnson: Paint the smell of grass - Eoin O'Brien

Europe(detail)
II. The Dublin years 1947–1958
“It is often, I think, difficult to detect whether we make decisions or accept them:
whether we are willing or willed.”
PLACE RECURS as a constant theme in The Other Side of Six, Nevill Johnson’s autobiography.
It is a book that is full of poetry and sensations rather than facts, but we are taken
from his childhood home to holidays on the Isle of Man, to the “Presbyterian facades” of Belfast,
the rural austerity of Armagh, the freedom of Dublin, the primitive peace of Ticknock and the
bohemianism of the studio in Convent Place, a list of places that is remarkably evocative of the
period. While some of these moves were forced by physical necessity, we can also see a process of
unselfconscious stages in Nevill Johnson’s development as an artist and in his career.
Belfast was an introduction to a less straitlaced lifestyle, and painting at night beside John
Luke, while the retreat to the country seems to indicate a need for more peace and space to work
and a growing independence as an artist. The end of the war marked a change in Johnson’s life
in almost every way, all of which is in some way encapsulated in his move to Dublin; it becomes
synonymous with the next decade of his life.
The key to this break was the figure of Victor Waddington, whose small gallery in South Anne
Street spawned the galleries that dominated Cork Street over the last decades of the twentieth
century. The dominant painter in Dublin in the 1940s was Jack Yeats, who shared an exhibition
with William Nicholson at the National Gallery during the war. The generation that had been in
the ascendancy in the pre-war years was dominated by two important groups with contrasting
backgrounds and ambitions; well-travelled modernist painters led by Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone,
Mary Swanzy and Norah McGuinness on the one hand and, on the other, the Orpen-taught
Nevill Johnson l The Dublin years 1947–1958 23