Celtic Art: What Is Actually Irish About It
The most famous object in Irish art is called the Tara Brooch. It was not found at Tara, it has no connection to Tara, and the name was invented by a Dublin jeweller who wanted to sell copies of it.
The National Museum of Ireland, which has it, writes the name in quotation marks.
Bettystown, 1850
It came out of the ground near the seashore at Bettystown, County Meath, in 1850 — a boy digging, a box in the sand, a story that may itself have been adjusted, since scholars have long suspected the real find spot was inland by a river and the beach was named to keep a landowner from claiming it.
It reached George Waterhouse, a jeweller on Dame Street, who was in the business of selling Celtic Revival jewellery to the Victorian middle class. Waterhouse had a habit of giving brooches romantic names. Tara was the seat of the High Kings, and a great many people in 1850s Ireland liked the idea that they were descended from them. So the brooch from Bettystown became the Tara Brooch, and Waterhouse sold replicas of it — about a third smaller, and considerably simpler than the thing itself.
He showed the original at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, the Great Industrial Exhibition in Dublin in 1853, and the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1855. Queen Victoria came to the Dublin exhibition and bought several of the facsimiles.
That is the moment "Celtic art" became a thing you could own. Not a scholarly rediscovery — a shop window.
What the brooch actually is
Eighth century. Not quite nine centimetres across, with a pin thirteen inches long and a little over two hundred grams of silver, gold, glass, enamel, amber and copper worked into it.
The front carries gold filigree so fine it has to be read with a lens — panels of animals and abstract motifs, divided by studs of glass, enamel and amber. The back, which nobody was meant to see, is finished to the same standard: cast scrollwork and triple spirals. There is a plaited silver wire chain on a swivel, and among the cast heads on it are human faces a few millimetres across.
It is not jewellery in the modern sense. It is the fastening of a cloak, and it announced who you were before you spoke.
The knot is the borrowed part
Here is the thing most Celtic-art pages get backwards.
The interlace — the endless knot, the thing everyone means by "Celtic" — is not native to Ireland. Interlace ornament was used in Roman floor mosaics, in Germanic metalwork, and possibly came in from Coptic Egypt as well. It arrives in Irish art from outside. The animal interlace, those long biting beasts tangled through the borders of the Book of Kells, descends mainly from the Germanic branch of a much wider Eurasian animal style; you can see it at Sutton Hoo in the early seventh century.
What is native is the spiral. The triskele, the trumpet curve, the pelta, the running scroll that never resolves into a straight line — that vocabulary comes down from the Iron Age, from the La Tène style that reached Ireland centuries before Christianity did.
So the honest description of Irish medieval ornament is not "ancient Celtic pattern". It is a native spiral tradition that absorbed a foreign knot and then did more with it than anyone else in Europe.
The Iron Age evidence
In February 1896, two ploughmen named Tom Nicholl and James Morrow were double-ploughing a field in the townland of Broighter, near Limavady on Lough Foyle, and turned up gold fourteen inches down.
The hoard is first century BC. It includes two twisted torcs, a bowl, two chains, a hollow collar the National Museum calls the finest example of Irish La Tène goldworking — and a model boat seven inches long, complete with benches, rowlocks, two rows of nine oars, a paddle rudder, a yardarm and a spear. Someone in Iron Age Ireland made a working inventory of a seagoing boat in gold and put it in the ground.
The collar's decoration is worked three ways: the design raised by beating back the gold around it, separate pieces attached, and the background filled with incised curves. There is not a knot anywhere on it. It is all curve and spiral, and it is unmistakably Irish.
The eighth century
Then the two traditions meet, and for roughly a hundred and fifty years Ireland produces work that is difficult to account for.
The Book of Durrow, between 650 and 690. The Lindisfarne Gospels, around 690 to 721. The Book of Kells, around 800. The Tara Brooch. And the Ardagh Chalice, which two boys — Jim Quin and Paddy Flanagan — dug out of a potato field beside Reerasta ringfort in County Limerick in late September 1868, along with four brooches. Quin's mother sold the hoard to the Catholic Bishop of Limerick.
The chalice uses hammering, engraving, lost-wax casting, applied gold filigree, cloisonné and enamel, sometimes within a single square centimetre. The names of the apostles run around it in a band you would miss if you were not looking.
Flanagan was buried in the pauper's graveyard at Newcastle West. Quin emigrated and died in Melbourne in 1934.
What the Revival did
Waterhouse was not alone, and the Revival he was selling into ran for the best part of a century — through the Celtic Twilight, through the Arts and Crafts movement, into the design of the new state's coins and stamps and passports.
It flattened things. Medieval Irish ornament is asymmetrical, restless, full of jokes and animals and mistakes that are not mistakes. Revival ornament is regular. It repeats. It can be laid out on a grid and stamped into silver plate, which is precisely what made it saleable.
That is not a complaint. The Revival kept the vocabulary alive at a point when it might have gone the way of the law tracts, and it produced real work of its own. But the design on most things sold as Celtic today descends from Waterhouse's shop rather than from Durrow, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.
How to tell them apart
Three things give away the older work.
It is asymmetrical: the two halves of a genuine medieval panel almost never match. It is dense past the point of usefulness — filigree finished on the back of a brooch, ornament at a scale the eye cannot resolve without magnification, because the point was not that you could see it. And it moves: the line is always going somewhere, spiralling out of one form and into the next, with no repeat you can find.
Revival work is symmetrical, legible at arm's length, and built from a repeating unit. Both are worth having on a wall. They are just not the same thing.
Where to see it
The Tara Brooch, the Broighter hoard and the Ardagh Chalice are all in the Treasury at the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street, and admission is free. The Book of Kells is at Trinity College. The high crosses are still standing outside, at Monasterboice, Clonmacnoise, Kells and Ahenny, and cost nothing at all.
On the wall
Browse the Celtic Designs collection, or our Celtic & Mythology prints and Irish Mythology collection. If the knotwork is what draws you, the companion piece to this one is what the Celtic Tree of Life actually means — another design with a shorter history than it is usually given.
Archival matte paper, framed or unframed, made to order, free worldwide shipping.
Sources: National Museum of Ireland on the "Tara" Brooch and the Broighter Collar; the Broighter hoard find of February 1896 at Limavady; the Ardagh hoard, found at Reerasta, Co. Limerick, in September 1868; and the standard account of Insular art's ornament — La Tène spirals and triskeles as the native element, interlace and animal interlace arriving from Roman, Germanic and possibly Coptic sources.