Colouring the Claddagh: a distorted view?

This article examines the dress worn in a selection of Marguerite Mespoulet’s autochromes taken of the inhabitants of the Claddagh and in the vicinity of Galway City, western Ireland in 1913. The autochromes belong to the Archives de la Planète, an ambitious project launched by French financier Albert Kahn in 1908 to record the culture of ordinary people in fifty countries in order to promote peace through mutual understanding. The Lumière brothers’ autochrome was the first viable photographic process to reproduce authentic colours, unmitigated by intervention or manipulation, and was used for commercial and private purposes between 1907 and the early 1930s. Mespoulet’s images are thought to be the first colour photographs ever taken in Ireland, and so are invaluable records of the folk dress of a region where the last vestiges of Gaelic culture survived into the twentieth century. Along with her diary notes, they provide a platform from which to explore the slippery nexus between myth and reality, and to question the veracity of some commonly held assumptions about Irish folk dress.