Oscar Wilde | Se non avessimo amato / Ay! had we never loved

Se noi non avessimo amato,

Chi sa se quel narciso avrebbe attratto l'ape

Nel suo grembo dorato,

Se quella pianta di rose avrebbe ornato

Di lampade rosse i suoi rami!

Caspar David Friedrich | Ruins of the Oybin, 1835 | Hermitage Museum

William B. Yeats | Quando sarai vecchia / When you are old

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) è stato un poeta, drammaturgo e scrittore Irlandese, nonché una delle figure più importanti della letteratura del XX secolo.

Fu una forza trainante dietro l'Irish Literary Revival ed, insieme a Lady Gregory, fondò l'Abbey Theatre, di cui fu il direttore durante i primi anni.

Gli fu conferito il premio Nobel per la Letteratura nel 1923 ed in seguito ricoprì due mandati come senatore dello Stato libero d'Irlanda.

Quando tu sarai vecchia, tentennante

tra fuoco e veglia prendi questo libro,

leggilo senza fretta e sogna la dolcezza

dei tuoi occhi d’un tempo e le loro ombre.

Vincent van Gogh | A Pair of Lovers (Eglogue en Provence), 18888 | Sotheby's

Oscar Wilde | Flower of Love

Sweet, I blame you not, for mine the fault was, had I not been made of common clay

I had climbed the higher heights unclimbed yet, seen the fuller air, the larger day.

From the wildness of my wasted passion I had struck a better, clearer song,

Lit some lighter light of freer freedom, battled with some Hydra-headed wrong.

Had my lips been smitten into music by the kisses that but made them bleed,

You had walked with Bice and the angels on that verdant and enamelled meed.

Paul Cadmus

Jack Butler Yeats RHA | Expressionist painter

Jack Butler Yeats RHA (29 August 1871 - 28 March 1957) was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. W. B. Yeats was his brother.

Butler's early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906.

His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland - especially of his boyhood home of Sligo.

Yeats's work contains elements of Romanticism.

He later would adopt the style of Expressionism.

Oscar Wilde | De profundis, 1897

Il "De Profundis" è una lunga lettera al Lord Alfred Douglas, il giovane amato da Wilde, scritta nei primi mesi del 1897 nel carcere di Reading dove Oscar Wilde (Scrittore, aforista, poeta, drammaturgo, giornalista e saggista irlandese dell'età Vittoriana, esponente del decadentismo e dell'estetismo Britannico, 1854-1900), si trovava da quasi due anni per aver amato un uomo.

Nel 1895 Oscar Wilde, al culmine del successo mondano e letterario, fu condannato a due anni di lavori forzati per “atti osceni”: alla sofferenza della reclusione si unirono la bancarotta finanziaria e la morte civile, con il divorzio e la perdita dei figli.

Chiuso tra le mura del carcere di Reading, Wilde scrisse una lunga lettera a Lord Alfred Douglas, il giovane poeta aristocratico di cui era innamorato e che era stato la causa dello scandalo.

Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, May 1893 | British Library

Rose Barton RWS (1856-1929) | Watercolor painter

Rose Mary Barton RWS was an Anglo-Irish artist; a watercolourist who painted landscape, street scenes, gardens, child portraiture and illustrations of the townscape of Britain and Ireland.

Barton exhibited with a number of different painting societies, most notably the Watercolour Society of Ireland (WCSI), the Royal Academy (RA), the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), the Society of Women Artists and the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS).

Daniel Maclise (1806-1870) | History painter

Daniel Maclise was born to a family of Scottish descent. After a brief period working in a bank, Maclise’s passion for drawing led him to pursue a career in art which he studied at the Cork Society of Arts.

His lifelong interest in antiquities began through his acquaintance with the antiquarian Richard Sainthill and folklorist Thomas Crofton Croker.

Maclise copied from their collections, and they secured commissions for the young artist from their circle of wealthy and influential friends.

Francis O'Toole | Figurative painter

Francis O'Toole is a Dublin based artist, who has studied in Florence, Italy.

At 17 Francis was involved in an industrial accident which very nearly claimed his life. After spending over a year in hospital and rehabilitation, Francis spent a number of years confused about what path to take in life, this lead to him straying into the wrong group of people and encountering a dark world of up and coming criminals.

One day out of concern for her son Francis' mother suggested he paint, at first Francis believe this to be silly, but slowly began to enjoy this activity.

Paul Henry R.H.A. | Post-Impressionist painter

Born in Belfast, Paul Henry (11 April 1877 - 24 August 1958) was for much of the 20th century, one of the country’s most identifiable artists, with prints of his paintings of the west of Ireland popularised by railway companies in the 1920s and Bord Fáilte in the 1940s.

In 1898 he went to Paris studying under Jean-Paul Laurens, with Constance Gore-Booth a fellow student.

Roderic O’Conor | Post-Impressionist painter

From National Gallery of Ireland:

Although he was born in Ireland, and attended art school in Dublin, Roderic O’Conor’s (1860-1940) work only became more widely known in Dublin in the late 1950s.

Much of O’Conor’s career was spent in Belgium and France: after attending the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools, he travelled first to the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, and later attended the atelier of Charles Carolus-Duran in Paris.

Walter Osborne (1859-1903) Genre painter

Walter Frederick Osborne was an Irish🎨 Impressionist / Post-Impressionism landscape / portrait painter, best known for his documentary depictions of late 19th century working class life.

Most of his paintings are figurative and focus on women, children, the elderly, the poor, and the day-to-day life of ordinary people on Dublin streets, as well as series of rural scenes.

He also produced cityscapes, which he painted from both sketches and photographs.

Francis Bacon | Expressionist painter

Born to an British family in Dublin on 28 October 1909, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was the second of five children of Christina Firth, a steel heiress, and Edward Bacon, a race-horse trainer and former army officer. His childhood, spent at Cannycourt, County Kildare, was blighted by asthma from which he suffered throughout his life.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, his father took the family to London and joined the Ministry of War; they divided the post-war years between London and Ireland. Bacon repeatedly ran away from his school in Cheltenham (1924-6).

After his authoritarian father, repelled by his burgeoning homosexuality, threw him out of the family home for wearing his mother’s clothes, Bacon arrived in London in 1926 with little schooling but with a weekly allowance of £3 from his mother.

Bob Quinn, 1948 | Figurative sculptor

Bob Quinn works full time as a sculptor in Blackrock Co Dublin.

He has pursued his love of drawing and sculpture throughout his career and has illustrated several publications and has been a regular contributor of illustrations to Independent Newspapers.

His sculptures appear in private collections and gardens throughout Ireland, Britain and Europe.

Conor Walton, 1970 | Allegorical figurative painter

Conor Walton is a leading Irish artist and a painter of international renown.

He has had eighteen solo exhibitions in Europe and America and participated in museum exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery (London), MEAM (Barcelona), The National Gallery of Ireland, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Museo Páblo Serrano (Zaragoza), Palazzo Litta (Milan), Palazzo Cini (Venice), the American University Museum (Washington DC), WMOCA (Wisconsin), Castello di San Leo (Italy) PO.RO.S Museum (Portugal), Pasinger Fabrik (Munich) and Winchester Museum (UK).

Sir Frederic William Burton | Victorian painter

Irish painter🎨 Sir Frederic William Burton RHA (8 April 1816 in Wicklow - 16 March 1900 in London) was the third director of the National Gallery, London.

• Artistic career

Educated in Dublin, he was elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy at the age of twenty-one and an academician two years later.

In 1842 he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. A visit to Germany and Bavaria in 1842 was the first of a long series of trips to various parts of Europe, which gave him a profound knowledge of the works of the Old Masters.

Sir William Orpen | Portrait painter

Sir William Orpen, in full Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen (1878-1931) was a Irish painter.

He attended the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin (1891-1897), and the Slade School of Art, London (1897-1899). He became a friend of Augustus John and joined the New English Art Club.

The influence of Velázquez, in particular, is apparent in such early genre subjects as The Mirror (1900; London, Tate).

Oscar Wilde: "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance"

• The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

• To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

• A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

• A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Vladimir Kush

• What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

• There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Brian McCarthy, 1960 | Magic Realism painter

Brian McCarthy is a Irish painter, best known for his Boomtown and Masquerade series of paintings.

Brian McCarthy's artistic career began in 1981, when a painting sold at Ireland's Douglas Hyde Gallery's 'Living Art Exhibition'.

Fine art auctioneers, such as Christie's in London and Adam's in Dublin, regularly feature his paintings, which can be found in many corporate and private collections, both in Ireland and internationally.

Elsewhere, his work has been included in numerous group shows at commercial galleries in Ireland and the UK, as well as annual exhibitions at the Irish Royal Hibernian Academy.

Irish Art History and Sitemap

The history of Irish art starts around 3200 BC with Neolithic stone carvings at the Newgrange megalithic tomb, part of the Brú na Bóinne complex which still stands today, County Meath.

In early-Bronze Age Ireland there is evidence of Beaker culture and a widespread metalworking.

Trade-links with Britain and Northern Europe introduced La Tène culture and Celtic art to Ireland by about 300 BC, but while these styles later changed or disappeared under the Roman subjugation, Ireland was left alone to develop Celtic designs: notably Celtic crosses, spiral designs, and the intricate interlaced patterns of Celtic knotwork.

Phoebe Anna Traquair | Arts and Crafts Movement painter

Sir John Lavery R.A. | Plein Air / Portrait painter

Sir John Lavery R.A. (1856-1941)* was a well-known Irish-born British painter*, associated with the Glasgow Boys*, a group of artists who followed the French "En plein air*" movement.

Sir John Lavery R.A. was born in Belfast in 1856 and educated in Glasgow, London and Paris.

For biographical notes -in english and italian- and other works by Lavery see: Sir John Lavery R.A. | The Glasgow School of Art*.