It is almost twenty years since the National Gallery of Ireland received a surprise bequest from Máire MacNeill and her partner John (Jack) Lincoln Sweeney. Kevin Kelly tells the happy story
When John (Jack) Lincoln Sweeney (1906–86) and Máire MacNeill (1904–87) got together in the mid-20th century, it was a “marriage of true minds” and the beginning of a journey together among fellow writers, artists, poets, critics and academics. They had many distinguished friends, including T S Eliot and Valerie Eliot, Padraic and Mary Colum, Ivor and Dorothy Richards, Edward Estlin and Marion Cummings, Seamus and Marie Heaney, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath-Hughes, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Montague, Thomas Kinsella, Louis le Brocquy and Barrie Cooke
