The first major show of Irish art in London for over 30 years – taken from a collection assembled by a bank then made available to the nation after the financial crisis – reveals a century’s worth of poetry and protest on canvas

Some of the gems of a museum-quality art collection – which could easily have been scattered in a fire sale when the Irish economy crashed and burned – are going on show in London this week at Mall Galleries. It is, the gallery’s director, Lewis McNaught, observes in wonder, the first major exhibition of Irish art in London for more than 30 years – although many of the artists spent their lives crossing the Irish sea, and showed regularly with London dealers and art societies.

Market Day (c1977) by Colin Middleton.

“Some of the great names here, like [John] Lavery and [William] Orpen and Jack Yeats, will be familiar, but many will be quite unfamiliar – and I think people will be astonished at their quality,” says McNaught.

The paintings and sculptures all come from a collection assembled over decades by Allied Irish Banks (AIB), begun when it moved in 1980 to a grandiose new HQ. The collection was unusual because the bank set out not just to commission boardroom portraits but to collect backwards – to assemble a collection that traces the history of Irish art back into the 19th century. As Frances Ruane, who advised on acquisitions, notes in her catalogue introduction, the collection outgrew the lobbies and meeting rooms until the bank’s thousands of employees became accustomed to pictures hanging on almost every wall. The bank bought the work of young contemporary artists, which was cheap, as well as the work of Yeats, Orpen and Lavery, which even in the 1980s was not. Louis le Brocquy, who has several paintings and two glowing tapestries in the show, would become the first living Irish artist to smash the £1m barrier at auction.

Among the other works are a number of very unusual acquisitions for Irish corporatives, which document almost a century of the Troubles – from Seán Keating’s large oil painting of bored, exhausted guerrilla fighters slumped against a farm cart in the 20s, to Willie Doherty’s eerie 1994 image of scorched concrete blocks closing a border road in northern Ireland, and FE McWilliam’s 1972 bronze of a woman blown sideways like a bundle of twigs by a bomb blast in Belfast.

On the Run: War of Independence (1921) by Séan Keating.

A striking 2007 canvas by the self-taught Dublin artist Shane Blount, showing his brother David mourning the loss of their sibling Joseph, closes the exhibition and virtually closed the collection. In 2008, the roar of the Celtic Tiger became a whimper, and the previously booming Irish economy, fuelled by cheap credit and soaring property prices, collapsed in the world banking crisis. AIB, like other Irish banks, was rescued by the Irish tax payer, who would cheerfully have sold off any assets that weren’t nailed down. Disposing of the AIB’s art was discussed, but in the end it was kept as a national collection, and dozens of the best works were transferred to the lovely Crawford Gallery in Cork.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest It’s a Blue Giraffe (2007) by Shane Blount.

“It would have been a great loss to the Irish people if this collection had been broken up. It’s often said from outside that Ireland produces great writers but not artists,” says curator Nicholas Usherwood. “Well this exhibition proves otherwise.”

Many of the earlier works show the influence of overseas artists whom the Irish studied and worked with, including Whistler on Paul Henry’s misty western landscapes, the post-impressionists on the glowing colour of Roderic O’Connor, and an exotic landscape in which Mary Swanzy seems to have swallowed whole the work of Gauguin.

“Gorgeous,” McNaught says firmly, gazing up at the Swanzy. “Yes, you can see the influences, but I think in all these works there is a softness, almost a poetic quality, that marks them out as distinctively Irish.”

• The Art of a Nation: Irish Works from the AIB and and Crawford Art Gallery Collection is at Mall Galleries (020-7930 6844), London, until 31 May