James Brenan

The School Room (or Empty Pockets)

One of the most popular figures in late nineteenth-century Irish art, James Brenan was an important arts educator, as well as an accomplished genre painter. As headmaster of the Cork School of Art and the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, he established design classes to develop and improve the lace-making industry and other crafts.

This Victorian genre painting depicts ragged, but handsome, boys, indifferent to the proper business of the schoolroom. Two argue about possessions, others chat or play. Brenan's role as arts educator supports an interpretation of the work as a subtle indictment of the national school system. By the late-nineteenth century, a state educational bureaucracy had displaced the native Irish hedge schools. Formerly these open air academies had offered rural Catholic children instruction in Latin and Greek, taught in the Irish language by itinerant masters. In the painting, ironic details illustrate Brenan's criticism of the newer state educational system: books with broken spines and missing pages; the floor strewn with papers; the vague outline in the picture on the wall of a figure wielding a club over a small child.