At first glance, Daniel MacDonald’s painting Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne, 1847 seems pretty cheerful. A young man is flinging himself into the toss of a ball, his arm swung back and his feet off the ground. A crowd has gathered around him, eager to watch, perhaps waiting for a chance to play. But 1847 was not a happy year in Cloyne, Ireland; it fell in the middle of the country’s Great Famine, the result of a potato blight that caused about 1 million deaths in just a handful of years. With that in mind, the painting hits differently. The colors look gloomy, the sky a dingy yellow-gray. The onlookers no longer seem as jovial. A woman on the scene’s periphery, her ashen face poking out of a black hood, stares eerily at the viewer.
Still, the bowling match seems to be keeping most of the people engaged—maybe even distracted, if only for a moment, from their hunger, their fear, the precarity of knowing they might need to join the surge of people fleeing Ireland. At least this is how the poet Greg Delanty (originally from Cork, Ireland, just like MacDonald) interpreted the painting. In his poem “After Viewing the Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne (1847),” he writes about seeing the work, and the potential of art to liberate by interrupting the tedium and loss of everyday life. Just as the bowling spectators may be drawn out of their individual sorrows, viewers of MacDonald’s painting might hope to be transported. And readers of Delanty’s poem might experience the same process.
This idea could imply that such pleasures—the match, the painting, the poem—are mere diversions from the real world. Delanty calls the bowling ball “a planet out of orbit,” which does suggest a kind of unreality. But in giving it such cosmic significance, I like to think he’s hinting, too, that art and play are not just reflections of, or deflections from, life. They’re an essential part of it.
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