‘Whipping the Herring’, currently on view at the Crawford Art Gallery, conveys the gritty reality and on occasion the lighter side of 19th-century life, but does it constitute a local School of Realism, asks Peter Murray?
The framework for a school of Irish Realist painting was outlined in the mid-19th century by Thomas Davis, a founder of the Young Ireland movement. In 1842, three years before his death, Davis, together with John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy, established the newspaper The Nation. Taking its lead from Young Italy and Young Germany, movements that had brought a new political purpose to Romanticism, The Nation provided a platform for Davis to outline the role of art in the life of the nation
Nicola Gordon Bowe discusses Harry Clarke’s exquisitely detailed interpretation of Synge’s Queens, an ode to history’s most memorable female characters
