Philip McEvansoneya considers the work of Joseph Stafford Gibson, a major patron of the Crawford Municipal School of Art and significant painter in his own right
Joseph Stafford Gibson, who was born in Kilmurry, Co Cork, on 9 October 1837 and died in Madrid on 3 February 1919, was an important benefactor to Cork. To the Crawford Municipal School of Art, as it was then called, Gibson bequeathed a large and miscellaneous collection of objects, plus well over 200 examples of his own work in watercolour, along with nearly £15,000 (over €1 million today). The importance of the bequest fund in building up the collection of interwar Irish painting in the Crawford Art Gallery (CAG), Cork is unquestionable. Today the collection boasts examples of work by many of the principal Irish artists of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Gibson’s diaries and notebooks in the CAG Archive give a good deal of biographical information and report his numerous opinions, which became quite forthright over time, but many facts of Gibson’s life are quite difficult to establish and there is no known image of him. The diaries are the source of much of the information given here.
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