In this week's Work of the Week with the Crawford Art Gallery, Conor Tallon and curator Michael Waldron met face to face for the first time since Lockdown to discuss the painting in the gallery itself, rather than purely online. A little extra engineering was involved to ensure arrangements were Socially Distant and safe. This work is hanging over the grand staircase of the gallery, and it's one many people might pass by. Now his story is being told, more people will take note of and remember John Philpot Curran.
The subject of this portrait, lawyer and politician John Philpot Curran, was born at Newmarket, County Cork on 24 July 1750. Noted for his oratory, he had overcome a speech impediment by reciting the works of Shakespeare and Bolingbroke before a mirror! Having fought five duels in his lifetime, he subsequently rose to the senior judicial position of Master of the Rolls in Ireland.
Curran had been called to the Irish Bar in 1775 following an education at Midleton College, Trinity College Dublin, King’s Inns and Middle Temple. By then, however, he had already co-defended James Somerset – a slave who had declared his own freedom – to the Court of the King’s bench (Somerset v. Stewart, 1772). He would rousingly proclaim that Somerset’s “body swells beyond the measure of his chains which burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of universal emancipation.”