Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/172

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

IRIARTE


132


IRISH


the Patriarchate of Constantinople. At this period the Byzantine emperors had taken the province of Isauria from the Patriarchate of Antioch. Ramsay ("Asia Minor", London, 1890, p. 335), following Ster- rett, identifies Irenopolis of Isauria with Irnebol, of which he does not indicate the exact situation. Coins found bearing the name Irenopolis belong rather to a city of the same name located in Cilicia, the ancient Neronias, some of whose bishops are also known. Le QuiEN, Oriens Christianus. II, S97-900, 1029 sq.

S. Vailhe.

Iriarte, Ignacio de, painter, b. at Azcoitia, Guipuz- coa, in 1620; d. at SeviUe, 1685. Iriarte was the son of Est^ban de Iriarte and Magdalena Zabala, and received his early education at home, but in 1642 went to Seville, and entered the studio of the elder Herrera. Here he learned to understand colour- ing, but he was never aljle to draw the human figure with spirit or accuracy, and therefore determined to devote his attention exclusively to landscape, and was the one Spanish artist who walked that rarely trod- den path, and obtained in it the greatest possible celebrity. In 1646 we hear of him as residing at Aracena, near to the mountains, and there it was that he married Dona Francisca de Chaves, but his first wife lived a very short time, and in 1649 he married in Seville his second wife Dona Maria Escobar. He was an original member of the Academy of Seville, its first secretary in 1660, and again secretary from 1667 to 1669. For very many years, he was the intimate friend and associate of Murillo, who praised his land- scapes very highly, and on many occasions the two artists worked together, Murillo executing the figures, and Iriarte the landscape. In consequence, however, of a dispute with reference to a series of pictures on the life of David, this division of labour came to an end, and the two painters, both of them men of great determination, decided to work separately and not in conjunction. Murillo painted the whole of the picture representing an episode in the life of David, and Iriarte contented himself with his exquisite landscapes, as a rule wild and rugged scenes, some- what allied to those of Salvator Rosa, in which at that time he was the greatest exponent. There is a landscape preserved at Madrid in an unfinished con- dition, with the figures merely sketched in by Murillo and the background left incomplete by Iriarte, and this is said to have been left incomplete at the time of the quarrel. The painter has been called the Span- ish Claude Lorraine, and Murillo declared that his best landscapes were painted " by Divine inspiration", but the comparison and statement are not accurate, as there is a forced character and an imaginary romance about Iriarte's landscapes with an extraordinary lack of atmosphere. They are, however, pleasing and attractive, although rare. His works are to be found principally in Madrid, but can also be studied in the galleries of St. Petersburg and the Louvre.

Qdilliet, Dictionnaire des Peintres Eapagnols (Paris, 1S16); De Castro t Velasco, El Museo PicUrico y Escala Optica (Madrid, 1715); Stirling-Maxwell, Annals of the Artists of Spain (London, 1848); HuARD, Vie Complite des Peintres Es- pagnols (Paris. 1839); Hartley, A Record of Spanish Painting (London, 1904)

George Chaeles Williamson.

Irish, The, in Countries other than Ireland.— I. In the United States.- — Who were the first Irish to land on the American continent and the time of their arrival are perhaps matters of conjecture rather than of historical proof; but that the Irish were there almost at the beginning of the colonial era is a fact well supported by historical records. The various nations of Europe whose explorers had followed Columbus were alive to the possibilities of land conquest in the new continent. For this purpose colonists were needed, and expeditions were fitted out under govern- ment protection, which brought over the earliest


settlers. England was especially active in promoting these expeditions, and during the seventeenth century various colonies, beginning with that of Jamestown in 1607, were planted with immigrants, most of them of English nationality. Irish names, however, are met with occasionally in the documents relating to these early settlements; it is certain that there were Irish Catholics in the Virginia Colony prior to 1633. In the narrative of the voyage of the Jesuit Father Andrew White and his associates in the "Dove" and "Ark" from England to Maryland in 1633 in Lord Baltimore's expedition, we are told that on the way over they put in at Montserrat (one of the smallest of the Caribbean Islands) where they foimd a colony of Irishmen "who had been banished from Virginia on account of professing the Catholic faith " (see Old Catholic Maryland, p. 14). The accepted history of that island attests the fact that it was originally settled by the Irish, although at present the white population has largely disappeared. A modern trav- eller (Stark, 1893) says: "It is not surprising, there- fore, that the descendants of the slaves who belonged to the Irish settlers all have Irish names and speak a jargon of Irish, English, and African in which the brogue predominates." While Father White and most of his companions who first planted the cross in Maryland were of English origin, it is equally true that Ireland, as well as other Catholic lands in Europe, contributed her quota of missionaries who nourished the Faith in the early Maryland settlement, and among the Jesuit missionaries of these times we find Fathers Carroll, Murphy, Hayes, Quin, O'Reilly, Casey, and others whose names indicate their Celtic origin.

But the beginning of immigration from Ireland to America, in such numbers and under circumstances so notable as to become matter of definite historical record, may be said to date from the subjugation of Ireland completed by Cromwell in 1651. Lender that merciless conqueror the English policy of trans- planting the Irish was ruthlessly carried out. The native Irish were deprived of their lands, routed from their homes, and onlcred to remove their families and such effects as were permitted to the Province of Connaught in the west, where a certain territory, mostly wild and desolate, had been prescribed, within which they were to remain under mihtary surveil- lance and establish a new residence. Those who re- fused suffered various punishments and sometimes death. In many cases the complaisant commis- sioners appointed by Cromwell ordered the deporta- tion of the recalcitrant Irish to the American plan- tations, and enterprising English merchants from Bristol and London carried on a lucrative business in shipping and transferring these unfortunate victims to their destination. In order to sustain their traffic, leave was granted to these traders to fill their ships with such destitute or homeless inlwbitants (made such by their conquerors) as might be delivered to them by the military governors for transportation abroad, so that, as the records show, during the years 1651 to 1654, (3400 such exiles (mostly young men and women) were carried away and distributed, some to Barbados and others to the different English colonies in America. Two thousand more Irish boys and girls were shipped the following year to Bar- bados and to the American plantations, and it lias been estimated (hat in the year 1660 there were 10,000 Irish who liiid been thus distributed among the dif- ferent English colonies in America (see American Cath- olic Quarterly Review, IX, 37). Of the total num- ber thus shipped out of Ireland across (he main, the estimates vary between 60,000 and 1(10.000 [Lingard, "History of England", X (Dolman cd.. 1,S49), :5(i()].

Prior to this deportation (here had been some voluntary emigration from Ireland to -America; with the development of the Colonies this emigration steadily increased and later assumed such enormous