Jim Butler
Anglia Ruskin University
Fitzwilliam’s Dublin: Shining a Light on a Colonial Legacy
Panel: Heritage-Making
As an Irish immigrant living in Cambridge, I approached curators in The Fitzwilliam Museum with a project to explore Fitzwilliam’s Dublin. The museum was founded on the death of Richard 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam in 1816. Fitzwilliam’s vast Dublin estate stretched from city to the coast. Fitzwilliam developed a significant part of the estate in his lifetime, re-orienting the city eastwards. This forms the Georgian core of Dublin which has survived largely intact to the present day. The museum’s Founding Bequest included drawings and paintings of the estate commissioned by Fitzwilliam while the Dublin development was financially lucrative.
The recent Black Atlantic exhibition has explored the museum’s connection to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yet institutional thinking around decolonisation frequently overlooks the question of Ireland as colony in what Hall might term “selective amnesia and disavowal”.
This paper looks at the role of the illustrator in initiating the project, raising a number of questions: How might visual practice, reliant on intuition, the contingent, the emotional and the poetic fit with historical narrative? How can multiple voices and perspectives be presented in visual form? How might images create an open dialogue with texts by collaborating poets and geographers? What strategies might be developed for making visual work?
This project aims to explore ideas around cultural inherence, the colonial legacy, collective social memory and the validity of the personal mapping through a body of images and texts. It considers Fitzwilliam’s built legacy in Dublin as an expression of the power of Empire which remains contested in the post-colonial Irish Republic. As one cabinet minister welcoming the demolition of part of Fitzwilliam’s streetscape stated “I was glad to see them go. They stood for everything I hate”.
Jim Butler was born in Dublin, trained at Manchester School of Art and has lived in Cambridge since 2007. He is a Senior Lecturer Illustration at Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University.
Illustration clients include The Guardian, The NHS, Adidas and New Island Books. His book Blackrock Sequence won the 2018 AOI World Illustration Award for best professional book.
His work is in numerous public collections including The Tate, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The British Library and Bodleian Library in the UK, The National Gallery of Ireland, Meermano Museum and Bavarian State Library in Europe and The Art Institute of Chicago and Yale Center for British Art in the USA.