At first look, Daniel MacDonald’s portray The Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne 1847 appears fairly cheerful. A younger man is flinging himself into the toss of a ball, his arm swung again and his ft off the bottom. A crowd has gathered round him, keen to look at, maybe ready for an opportunity to play. However 1847 was not a contented yr in Cloyne, Eire; it fell in the midst of the nation’s Nice Famine, the results of a potato blight that induced about 1 million deaths in only a handful of years. With that in thoughts, the portray hits otherwise. The colours look gloomy, the sky a dingy yellow-gray. The onlookers not appear as jovial. A lady on the scene’s periphery, her ashen face poking out of a black hood, stares eerily on the viewer.
Nonetheless, the bowling match appears to be holding most people engaged—perhaps even distracted, if just for a second, from their starvation, their worry, the precarity of figuring out they may want to hitch the surge of individuals fleeing Eire. At the least that is how the poet Greg Delanty (initially from Cork, Eire, identical to MacDonald) interpreted the portray. In his poem “After Viewing the Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne (1847),” he writes about seeing the work, and the potential of artwork to liberate by interrupting the tedium and lack of on a regular basis life. Simply because the bowling spectators could also be drawn out of their particular person sorrows, viewers of MacDonald’s portray may hope to be transported. And readers of Delanty’s poem may expertise the identical course of.
This concept may suggest that such pleasures—the match, the portray, the poem—are mere diversions from the true world. Delanty calls the bowling ball “a planet out of orbit,” which does counsel a type of unreality. However in giving it such cosmic significance, I wish to assume he’s hinting, too, that artwork and play should not simply reflections of, or deflections from, life. They’re a vital a part of it.
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