After viewing a grand master plan for the restoration of Moore Hall — the author’s ancestral home and birthplace in the remote west of Ireland — I wrote my own mini prospectus concerning George Moore. It is entirely contained in this blog post, requiring just a few minutes rather than hours to consider. It wouldn’t involve much planning or expense, yet like the Moore Hall master plan it promotes Irish culture and tourism at home and abroad.

Thus it is proposed: An Exhibition of Pictures of George Moore. 

I have mentioned more than a few times that there are hundreds of pictures to choose from, but the cool show I have in mind would include just a dozen: all of them masterpieces (arguably) by notable artists, dating from the 1870s until the 1920s — about sixty years that pace Moore’s biography. 

In addition to a dozen life portraits, I would put posthumous works — such as art by Louis le Brocquy and John Behan —  in a space towards the end of the exhibition, so that visitors can sense the presence of a still-evolving “man of wax. “

These are the life portraits I have chosen for an exhibition:

1. Une Académie de Peinture (1876), by Rodolphe Julian
2. Le Noyé Repêché (1879), by Edouard Manet
3. Le Jeune Homme Symbolique (1887), by Jacques-Emile Blanche
4. The Boiled Ghost (1891), by Walter Sickert
5. The Art Critic (1896), by William Rothenstein
6. The Sage of Upper Ely Place (1903), by William Orpen
7. The Most Stimulating Mind ((1905), by John Butler Yeats
8. The Living Life (1907). By Sarah Cecilia Harrison
9. The Sage of Ebury Street (1915), by Mark Fisher
10. Our Last Victorian (1919), by Edmund Dulac
11. An Irish Storyteller (circa 1920), by Philip Wilson Steer
12. The Red Dressing Gown (circa 1925), by Henry Tonks

The titles used in this list are mostly mine rather than the artist’s or owner’s.

An exhibition of these artworks, for the first time in one place, would be great fun, but I would like to make it even more fun. The whereabouts of paintings 1 and 11 are unknown, but in this AI-modulated era that fact can be “improved.” Those two pictures can be repainted by neural networks that are trained to emulate the actual historic artists. Doable and worth doing!

In order to make an exhibition scintillating, I would also disinter Moore’s voice to perform the audio guide. To my knowledge, George Moore was never recorded and nobody alive today ever heard him speak. So this may be a little tricky though not too difficult.

Once again with the help of technology, I would infer what Moore sounded like in person on the basis of his written language, his Irish origins, his education, his English and French domiciles, the memoirs of people who knew him, and the voices of living people who are comparable to him. When I say “I” in this context, that refers to software, of course, with the creative assistance of sound scientists, engineers, ethnologists etc. 

Where would such an exhibition be staged? Well to be honest, nowhere. Ain’t gonna happen. It’s technically feasible but downright impractical. George who? Nobody would come.

However if we’re willing to suspend disbelief, I can imagine an exhibition that opens in Dublin and then travels to London and Paris where Moore lived for years and left a footprint. Then the exhibition would cross the Atlantic (which Moore never did) and set up in Chicago.

Why Chicago? … well, because I live there and the Art Institute seems like a wonderful American venue to introduce George Moore to folks who haven’t met him, but would like to. It is the ultimate fly-over town for this strangely fly-over author.

By the time the exhibition has been staged — though it will never be staged — Moore Hall will be restored to something like its original glory, a beautiful monument to the author will mark the spot where his ashes are buried, and a gallery in the Moore Hall Visitors Center will display photos of his portraits — hundreds of portraits — presented by the virtual man himself.

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