Selling Irish Bacon: The Empire Marketing Board and Artists of

the Free State

Cronin, Mike.

Éire-Ireland, Volume 39:3&4, Fómhar/Geimhreadh / Fall/Winter

2004, pp. 132-143 (Article)

Published by Irish-American Cultural Institute

DOI: 10.1353/eir.2004.0016

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eir/summary/v039/39.3cronin_mik.html

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Mike Cronin Selling Irish Bacon:

Cover The Empire Marketing
Board and Artists
of the Free State

The images on the front and back covers of this issue—Irish Free
State Bacon by Seán Keating (–) and Irish Free State Butter
by Margaret Clarke (–)—were commissioned by the
Empire Marketing Board (EMB), a state body formed in  to
boost the sale of empire goods within the British marketplace.
Although these cover images were created by major Irish artists of
the Free State period, they have been buried in the National
Archives, London, far from the public eye since the s. This arti-
cle, exploring the development of the EMB and its relationships
with the Irish Free State, suggests the complexity of Anglo-Irish
relations after independence and the interactions between politics
and culture in a newly independent country, ideologically commit-
ted to a rural self-identity. These cover images, essentially adver-
tisements for Irish agricultural production, are unique in the series
of EMB poster campaigns in that they are were created not by Lon-
don designers, but by native Irish artists. Although explicitly com-
mercial in intention, the images reveal much of the shared heritage
of two painters whose work emerges from a rural national ideology
and subtly subverts the imperial brief of the EMB.
The EMB represented a Conservative government’s response to
intense pressure for reform of the tariff system in the second half of
the s—with proposals ranging for protectionism to free trade.
Members of the empire, including the recently formed Irish Free
State, were insistently demanding preferential access to the prof-

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itable British market for their agricultural and industrial goods.

Attempting to avert both a political crisis at home and further pres-
sure from the Commonwealth, the Conservatives set up the EMB to
promote empire goods and thereby stimulate trade and satisfy the
demands of the colonies and dominions for greater access to the
British market. Closed down in  in the wake of the trade agree-
ments signed by Britain and its empire nations in Ottawa in ,
the EMB operated for barely seven years.
The goals of the EMB—both publicizing and promoting empire
products and supporting scientific work that would increase pro-
duction—met only limited success in regard to the Free State,
largely through underfunding. The EMB failed to support the
southern Irish state adequately, not only in scientific research, but
also in publicity of its products for trade.1 In all, the organization
spent ,, on publicity, with the bulk of that money expended
on a series of posters designed to illustrate empire produce.2 All
forms of publicity were designed to showcase either specific impe-
rial goods or the virtues of an individual nation—with the related
goals of boosting sales and developing a product-based imperial
consciousness. Overall, southern Ireland’s presence in the EMB’s
campaigns was especially meager.3

. In the scientific area the EMB spent £,, on research and the dis-
semination of results. The bulk of this work was in the field of crop yields, animal
husbandry, and the transportation of goods, work that continued after the closing of
the EMB under the auspices of the Imperial Economic Committee. Despite the
Free State’s initial support for the idea of the board, especially given the governing
Cumann na nGaedheal’s close relationship with London, Irish agriculture was poorly
served by the workings of the EMB. Of the £,, invested in scientific research
and the total of  grants awarded, the Free State received only three grants total-
ing £,.
. A smaller proportion of the publicity budget was spent on the production
and distribution of films, a series of public lectures, attendance at trade fairs, and the
promotion of the EMB’s work in British schools.
. For example, none of the one hundred films produced by the organiza-
tion—with titles like Lumbering in Canada and South African Fruit—focused on Free
State produce. (Irish eggs, however, made their appearance in a film depicting a boy
collecting the ingredients for an Empire Christmas pudding from society women in
Buckingham Palace, each of whom represented a country. Lady Hazel Lavery,
whose face appeared on Irish banknotes from , turns up dressed in a large
green Maori style dress and presents the boy with a basket of eggs.) The Free State
was represented at various trade fairs that the EMB attended, but unlike other

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The most important and visible work of the EMB was its poster
publicity campaign that commissioned and displayed approximately
one hundred poster series on specially built wooden frames. Each
series featured five different posters: three  inch by  inch picto-
rial ones and two smaller posters that carried press messages offer-
ing details of the country being promoted or messages advancing
imperial trade. The five posters on each frame endorsed a linked
theme—for example, fruit from the tropics or the value of import–
export trade with Australia. By  poster frames at , different
sites graced  British towns. The EMB’s poster subcommittee
worked with most of London’s major design houses and significant
artists and designers such as MacDonald Gill (designer of the Lon-
don underground map), E. McKnight Kauffer, Sir William Nichol-
son, and Austin Cooper. As Stephen Constantine has noted, EMB
“became a major patron of commercial art,” whose impact on the
fields of interwar design and the developing advertising business
should not be underestimated.4 But despite the scale of the EMB’s
publicity campaigns, the Free State featured only three times in the
prestigious and highly visible one hundred poster frame sequences;
Canada, in contrast, was the chosen country for twenty-five
sequences.
From the beginning, the EMB demonstrated its naïveté in deal-
ing with the complexities of Irish relationships; it proposed, for
example, that an image of the Free State be coupled with one of
Northern Ireland at a time when the governments in Belfast and
Dublin barely recognized each other’s legitimacy. In February ,
the Publicity Sub-Committee Poster section agreed to commission
two sequences depicting Irish scenes, choosing eminent landscape
artists: James Humbert Craig was to represent a Northern Irish
locale and Paul Henry, the Free State. After a seven-year sojourn on
Achill Island that had transformed his imagery, Henry was identified

colonies and dominions, never chose to take its own display stand. A lecture series
that toured Britain promoting the work of the EMB featured , public talks that
were heard by , people in the year from August  alone. But neither in that
year, nor throughout the EMB’s existence, did any of the lectures touring Britain
focus on the Irish Free State.
. Stephen Constantine, Buy and Build. The Advertising Posters of the Empire
Marketing Board (London: HMSO, ), .

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closely with the new Irish nation in the s, and indeed has since
been described as the “painter laureate of the Free State.”5 Repro-
ductions of his Connemara landscape, used by various Irish railway
companies to promote travel in Ireland, sold thousands of copies.
Offering Craig and Henry each the generous fee of  guineas, the
EMB subcommittee asked for rapid submissions of sketches of two
pictures to be presented as a poster frame series, flanking Charles
Dixon’s completed poster of the River Mersey. By March  the
EMB had approved Craig’s rough sketch of flax pulling in Northern
Ireland and agreed that a photograph of that image be sent to
Henry for his guidance as he prepared the Irish Free State poster.6
However Craig’s depiction of flax in Northern Ireland was, finally,
to appear alone in the sequence. No mention of Henry’s poster
again turns up in the minutes of either the Publicity Committee or
the Poster section, nor do any files in the Irish National Archives
refer to his commission. From references made in biographies of the
artist, however, we can surmise that the southern Irish government
specifically requested that Paul Henry’s poster of the Irish Free
State dairy industry be withdrawn.7 Given the high esteem with
which the Free State government regarded Paul Henry at the time,
it would hardly have rejected his proposed poster on aesthetic
grounds. That the EMB envisaged using it alongside an image from
Northern Ireland, and on a frame implying a positive linkage
between the two states, suggests a more likely explanation for the
failure of Paul Henry’s image to appear with Craig’s.
The initial interest in Henry’s work suggests the kind of depictions
the EMB sought. Paul Henry’s images, like those that Seán Keating
and Margaret Clarke would later deliver, were straightforward depic-
tions of a landscape emphasizing the Free State’s rural agrarian iden-
tity. Significantly, the dairy scene Keating painted for the EMB (front
cover) differs sharply from the work he was concurrently producing
for the Electricity Supply Board to commemorate the building and

. Brian Fallon, Irish Art, – (Belfast: Appletree, ), .

. Minutes of the Meeting,  March , EMB Publicity First Sub-Com-
mittee Poster Section, Minutes and Papers, –, NA C /, . See Con-
stantine, Buy and Build, plate , for illustration.
. See, for example, Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists:The Twentieth Cen-
tury (Dublin: Merlin, ), .

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opening of the Shannon electrification project. The Shannon paint-

ings, culminating in Keating’s  image, Night’s Candles Are Burnt
Out, predict a transformative industrialized future for a modernized
Free State.8 The EMB, in contrast, asked dominions to present
themselves and their wares through motifs of traditional agricultural
production. As David Meredith has noted of such imagery, “Empire
countries were reduced to merely commercial values, a great many
inaccuracies were disseminated and hyperbole ran riot.”9
Until the decision to use Keating’s image, the Free State’s sole
representation on EMB posters was through the generic series of
images designed by F.C. Herrick, a staff artist of the Baynard Press
in London. Herrick’s work featured national animals of various
dominion countries, representing, for example, Canada with a bison
and South Africa with a springbok. For his Free State image Herrick
chose the wolfhound, a choice approved by the Poster section in
May .10 Although this imagery drew on a traditional icono-
graphic symbol for Ireland, Herrick’s depiction of a white cottage in
the rear of the poster demonstrated his total unfamiliarity with his
subject. By this period, numerous painters such as Henry, Charles
Lamb, and Maurice MacGonigal had established the motif of a
specifically Irish white cottage as representative of the national land-
scape—indeed as a virtual icon of Irish rural life. Yet Herrick
depicted no humble rough textured white domicile of the
windswept West of Ireland, but rather a classic southern English
white cottage, replete with an orderly thatched roof. To add to the
image’s incongruity, the cottage’s chimney spouts a flume of smoke
featuring the artist’s signature and the word “London.” Although
provoking no recorded official response, Herrick’s image demon-
strates how the EMB commissioned artists who apparently neg-
lected to visit or understand the countries they painted.11 Unfamil-

. For details of Keating’s work for the ESB, see Andy Bielenberg (ed.), The
Shannon Scheme and the Electrification of the Irish Free State (Dublin: Lilliput Press,
).
. David Meredith, “Imperial Images: The Empire Marketing Board,
–,” in History Today :, .
. Minutes of the Meeting,  May , EMB Publicity First Sub-Commit-
tee Poster Section, Minutes and Papers, –, NA C /, .
. John Hewitt, Poster Art of the Twenties and Thirties (Manchester: Holden
Gallery, ), .

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iar with the new nation he was to represent, Herrick produced a

poster imploring viewers to buy Irish Free State eggs, bacon, and
milk, even as he depicts a traditional Irish wolfhound, standing on a
green summit with an English country cottage in the background.
The appearance of Margaret Clarke’s painting on a poster
resulted from the EMB’s  decision to sponsor a poster series
representing Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India,
and the Irish Free State.12 After consultation with the noted artist Sir
William Orpen, the board asked P.J. Tuohy, to make a sketch, this
time for the fee of only  guineas.13 After Tuohy declined, J.W.
Dulanty, Irish Trade Commissioner, instead suggested the success-
ful artist Margaret Clarke, wife of the renowned stained-glass artist
Harry Clarke.14 The rough sketches depicting an Irish farm scene,
Irish Free State Butter, that she submitted to the committee were
accepted in principle in January  (back cover). Contentious
political issues, however, invariably made their presence felt, now in
regard to a map—that highly fraught iconographic form preoccupied
with national boundaries. The EMB planned to use Clarke’s picture
as the left-hand flank poster on a frame set, with the center of the
frame containing a map of Britain and Ireland. Clarke had herself
illustrated the map with depictions of various agricultural and
industrial activities, and in doing so had removed the line that
marked the border between the Free State and Northern Ireland.
The committee’s response, however, was firm: “the maps of Eng-
land and Ireland [were] to be left temporarily blank and in white,
and the pictorial details which Mrs. Clarke had indicated in pencil
to be omitted.” Members agreed, “whatever form these maps
should take the boundary between Northern Ireland and the Irish
Free State must be clearly defined.”15 Significantly, in the final

. Minutes of the Meeting,  March , EMB Publicity First Sub-Com-
mittee Poster Section, Minutes and Papers, –, NA C /, .
. Minutes of the Meeting,  July , EMB Publicity First Sub-Commit-
tee Poster Section, Minutes and Papers, –, NA C /, .
. Harry Clarke’s illness at the time (he died in early ) and the resulting
financial strains on the couple’s firm, Harry Clarke’s Stained Glass Ltd., helps
explain Margaret’s willingness to travel to London to be interviewed and to take on
the commission.
. Minutes of the Meeting,  Jan. , EMB Publicity First Sub-Committee
Poster Section, Minutes and Papers, –, NA C /, .

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poster frame set the map was eliminated, and thus debates about
the existence of the border and the two competing states were, for
the time being, avoided.
Problems surrounding the image of a map of Ireland recurred in
the final EMB series to depict Irish Free State goods, produced by
another professional London design company, Carlton Studies.
This time the company was commissioned to fulfill elaborate
instructions that the posters include a butter box, an egg box, and a
side of bacon, and that these articles provide “the foreground to the
poster, the background of which should consist of a silhouette of
the map of Ireland with the wording ‘buy Irish butter,’ etc., hiding
Northern Ireland.”16 Despite such specific instructions about how
Northern Ireland could be obscured from view, the Committee
decided that the original Carlton Studio sketches were unsatisfac-
tory. Again the map problem was avoided by a decision to rely
instead on national symbols—the “harp and the appropriate ani-
mals as depicted on the back of Irish coins as a background pat-
tern”—to evoke the Free State.17
Clarke’s and Keating’s images, rare works produced by native
artists rather than the London-based studios, both reveal and sub-
vert some of the basic tenets of an EMB art of racial stereotyping.18
Typically the nations depicted by the EMB were presented in for-
mulaic ways. Posters for African countries featured exotic animals
such as elephants; women workers were either scantily clad or else
wore traditional native dress. Landscapes were wild, and often, as
with the case of the wide-open spaces of Australia, Canada, and
New Zealand, emptied of human habitation—the space instead
reserved for the produce, the sheep, or the cow. Most notably in
many of the posters, as Meredith observes, “natives toiled, while
white officers lounged.”19 As the posters depicting the far-flung and
less developed dominions were produced by London studios, this

. Minutes of the Meeting,  May , EMB Publicity First Sub-Commit-
tee Poster Section, Minutes and Papers, –, NA C /, .
. Minutes of the Meeting,  June , EMB Publicity First Sub-Commit-
tee Poster Section, Minutes and Papers, –, NA C /, .
. See Meredith, “Imperial Images,” , for discussion and examples from
other dominions.
. Ibid.

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retreat into stereotype is not unexpected.20 But when Irish artists

Clarke and Keating painted two of the four major poster groups for
the Free State (with the remainder produced by the London based
Herrick and Carlton Studios), a more complex imagery emerged.21
Keating’s and Clarke’s work for the EMB decisively subverts
stereotypical depictions of the imperial “native.” Other EMB
posters projected a focused imperial agenda: industrious native
workers and producers are employed, as Constantine notes, in a
“democratic, egalitarian Empire in which labour, by all races, was
given an especial dignity through its dedication to a single,
admirable purpose.”22 However, Keating’s and Clarke’s Free State
workers are differently conceived. In one of her images for the EMB
series about England, Our exports of coal to the Irish Free State (figure
), Clarke paints two coal workers in an industrial landscape full of
trains, factories, and production. The image, in stark contrast to the
rural idyll that she depicts when producing her Irish posters, proj-
ects industrial production, smoke-filled scenery, and closely packed
buildings. Her representation of the British worker, moreover, fulfills
the EMB’s brief to portray industriousness for the common good.
Clarke’s images of the Irish at work are very different from her
English scenes. Our coal for the Irish Free State (figure ) and Irish
Free State Butter are set in rural landscapes emphasizing pleasurable
activity rather than productivity. A woman feeds her farmyard ani-
mals in Irish Free State Butter (back cover), but given the cleanliness
of her somewhat idealized surroundings, her work implies an agree-
able life choice set in a landscape reminiscent of storybook illustra-
tions, rather than purposeful work. The buildings surrounding the
woman farmer are not typically Irish, although the landscape in the
background—the green fields, low mountains, and high cloud—
suggests the Irish West. Clarke places her pigs and hens at the
entrance to a prosperous looking and far from typical Irish farm-

. For a discussion of stereotypical imagery and the failure to commission

“native” artists, see Hewitt, Poster Art, –.
. Keating’s and Clarke’s training influenced their approach to the EMB work:
both studied under William Orpen at Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art and
painted the landscape of the Aran Islands together during World War I.
. Constantine, Buy and Build, .

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F : Margaret Clarke, Our exports of coal to the Irish Free State (EMB,
). Courtesy of the Public Record Office, Kew, England.

F : Margaret Clarke,

Our coal for the Irish Free State
(EMB, ). Courtesy of the
Public Record Office,
Kew, England.
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house, with a long wall seemingly enclosing landscaped estate

grounds. However, the pigs, animals normally restricted to pens and
muddy farmyards in Ireland, here roam freely across the threshold
that forms a barrier between the road and the great house’s walled
pleasure grounds. Clarke, in other words, grants the pigs freedom of
access to parts of the Irish countryside that British and Anglo-Irish
landlords would traditionally have denied to rural dwellers and farm
workers. Similarly, in another image, Our coal for the Irish Free State,
depicts a coal delivery wagon in a rural landscape. Accompanied by
immobile, if not indolent, delivery boys, the wagon drives through
the same rural idyll invoked in Irish Free State Butter.
Keating’s Irish Free State Dairy (figure ) subverts the EMB’s
agenda of purposeful labor even more decisively than Clarke’s idyl-
lic version of farming in Irish Free State Butter. In Keating’s image,
apart from a lone male figure milking a cow, no one works. The
other men depicted in the distance are taking a break. The framing
device of the archway employed by Keating, although a familiar
artistic technique, is rarely used elsewhere in his work. Such an
architectural feature, an unfamiliar feature of ordinary Irish farms,
although perhaps reminiscent of the elaborate vaulted stables some
Irish landlords built for their horses, invokes Mediterranean classi-
cism rather than Irish ruralism.23 In Irish Free State Bacon (front
cover), there is a similar lack of industry. In this picture no one
works. The two men in the foreground are observed filling a pipe or
merely leaning against a wall. A figure wearing an overcoat and hat
shuffles through the background, his dress and posture implying the
militancy of an anti-Treaty Irregular rather than a pig farmer. In the
context of Keating’s well-established Republican sympathies, this
figure suggests the artist’s return to earlier allegorical depictions of
men defeated in the Civil War in works such as Night’s Candles Are
Burnt Out () or An Allegory (). Together, Keating’s and
Clarke’s representations of the Irish countryside both play into and
subvert the EMB’s agenda of depicting productivity. Moreover,
both use settings that challenge conceptions of a typical Irish farm-
ing landscape.

. See, for example, the stables of Strokestown Park House that are now the site
of the Irish Famine Museum in County Longford.

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F : Seán Keating, Irish Free State Dairy (EMB, ). Courtesy of the Public Record
Office, Kew, England.
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The Irish Free State was undoubtedly poorly served by the EMB,
the experience leading if anywhere to a downturn in trade with
Britain that was a foretaste of the economic war to begin in .
Other dominions such as Canada and Australia featured more fre-
quently in the board’s scientific and publicity work and appear to
have benefited financially as a result. Although the majority of
images produced for the EMB came from the pens and brushes of
British design firms and artists, the Irish Free State is unusual in
that two of its poster series were produced by major native artists.
Keating’s and Clarke’s images, created from a position of familiar-
ity with Ireland, exist in stark contrast to those produced by Herrick
and the Carlton Studios, which emerge from uninformed percep-
tions of the country. Undoubtedly, Keating and Clarke embraced a
commercial art form in return for exposure and commissions.
Although these images may not represent their best work, they
demonstrate an awareness both of the ideological demands of the
Free State and of assumptions being made about Ireland abroad.
Neither Keating’s nor Clarke’s farmyards seem in any sense real,
but these images manage to allude to an existing ideology of Irish
ruralism even as they subvert London’s brief by depicting inde-
pendent Irish indolence rather than subservient imperial industry.

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