Beginning in the early 17th century and continuing to the present day, the city of Dublin has built up a portrait collection that is unique on the island of Ireland in terms of range and diversity, and is brilliantly expressive of the political aspirations and realities that have informed its creation. The collection contains 66 works in oil-on-canvas and 8 statues in bronze and marble. This book contains a catalogue of the entire collection with an introduction placing it within the broader context of civic imagery and regalia, giving due regard to ceremony, heraldry, dress and accoutrements of office.
"Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) was the most gifted and successful British portrait painter in the generation following Gainsborough and Reynolds, and his pre-eminence was publicly confirmed when he was elected President of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1820 ... This book is the first sustained study of the work of Lawrence to be published for many years ..."--Inside front cover jacket.
A sweeping survey of the arts of Ireland spanning 150 years and an astonishing range of artists and media This groundbreaking book captures a period in Ireland's history when countless foreign architects, artisans, and artists worked side by side with their native counterparts. Nearly all of the works within this remarkable volume--many of them never published before--have been drawn from North American collections. This catalogue accompanies the first exhibition to celebrate the Irish as artists, collectors, and patrons over 150 years of Ireland's sometimes turbulent history. Featuring the work of a wide range of artists--known and unknown--and a diverse array of media, the catalogue also includes an impressive assembly of essays by a pre-eminent group of international experts working on the art and cultural history of Ireland. Major essays discuss the subjects of the Irish landscape and tourism, Irish country houses, and Dublin's role as a center of culture and commerce. Also included are numerous shorter essays covering a full spectrum of topics and artworks, including bookbinding, ceramics, furniture, glass, mezzotints, miniatures, musical instruments, pastels, silver, and textiles.
Dublin's Georgian squares are 18th-century architectural gems and this is the first publication to examine each of them in detail. Essays by conservation architects describe the planning, design and construction of Parnell, Mountjoy, Merrion, Fitzwilliam and Mountpleasant Squares, giving an overview of each and focusing on notable houses and interiors, along with the central parks, mews buildings and street furniture. With contributions from Mary Bryan, Anthony Duggan, John Heagney, Loughlin Kealy, Nicola Matthews and Susan Roundtree. An introductory essay by Professor Loughlin Kealy, School of Architecture, UCD, places these developments in the overall context of Georgian Dublin.
Between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, Britain evolved from a substantial international power yet relative artistic backwater into a global superpower and a leading cultural force in Europe. In this original and wide-ranging book, Hoock illuminates the manifold ways in which the culture of power and the power of culture were interwoven in this period of dramatic change. Britons invested artistic and imaginative effort to come to terms with the loss of the American colonies; to sustain the generation-long fight against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; and to assert and legitimate their growing empire in India. Demonstrating how Britain fought international culture wars over prize antiquities from the Mediterranean and Near East, the book explores how Britons appropriated ancient cultures from the Mediterranean, the Near East, and India, and casts a fresh eye on iconic objects such as the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles.
The first biography of the beloved long-time Lord Mayor of Dublin Alfie Byrne was that rarest of things: a genuinely popular politician. He is still a figure of legend in Dublin, where he was elected Lord Mayor ten times. He was also a TD and a Senator; and only a backroom deal prevented him from contesting the race to become the first President of Ireland - a race he would have been favourite to win. Rising from inner-city Dublin to become known as the 'Lord Mayor of Ireland', he was a truly remarkable figure. And yet there has never been a biography of Alfie Byrne - until now. Trevor White's sparkling book tells the story of a man of many parts and contradictions. He was an urbane man of the world who left school at thirteen. He was a teetotal publican. He was a Parnellite who opposed violence, but he was sympathetic to the Easter rebels. His politics were fundamentally conservative, but he was deeply devoted to the poor of his native city. This is the story of an energetic young man who offered to lead his community and refused to stop governing for forty years. His ambition and charm won admirers in the great cities of the world - and in the tenements of Ireland's capital. At his best, he represented and encouraged a broader understanding of what it means to be Irish. And, through it all, he was a great personality, the living embodiment of Dublin. 'Not just the definitive biography of the definitive Dubliner, Alfie is a wonderfully written social, political and cultural history of the country through the capital's most famous son through a tumultuous half century. At last, justice has been done to the legend that was Alfie Byrne.' Joe Duffy 'Trevor White brings [Alfie Byrne] vividly to life in the pages of his elegant new biography' Leo Varadkar, Sunday Independent 'White has found a deliciously rich seam to mine in Alfie Byrne ... Byrne's Dublin is revived in glorious Technicolor, and with much affection. It's a lively, boisterous, contradictory, occasionally maddening place, Much like the man himself, really.' Irish Times 'Hugely entertaining ... This is the first proper account of his life, and it's bolstered by White's access to Byrne's family papers' Irish Independent 'Peppered with delectable anecdotes ... Well researched and spryly written, this is an elegant account of one of our capital city's half-forgotten sons' Sunday Business Post 'This enormously enjoyable biography doesn't seek to canonise Alfie, or to demonise him. It does what all good biographies should, which is simply to tell us the protagonist's true story; and it does what all great biographies should do, which is to make that story a delight to read.' Irish Daily Mail 'Alfie could easily have been a sentimental rags-to-riches story about the son of a docker who escaped Sean O'Casey's "long haggard corridors of rottenness and ruin" to become a minor power broker among the bankers and lawyers while living in a Dublin 6 pile. Instead, White , who admires his quarry, doesn't pull punches when it comes to describing how the career of the genial Byrne eventually lost steam.' Sunday Times 'Brilliantly told ... an inimitable portrait of Dublin for the forty-two years, 1914-56, that Alfie dominated the political scene' Cara 'Trevor White has done today's citizenry some service in providing us with a balanced and well-researched account of the phenomenon that was Dublin's own Alfie Byrne' Dublin Review of Books
Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886–1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists’ representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book examines artworks by Walter Osborne, Rose Barton, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons and Flora Mitchell, encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is already renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate the many attractions it held for Ireland’s artists, offering a vivid visualisation of the city’s streets and inhabitants at a crucial time in its history.
This book sets a new standard as a work of reference. It covers British and Irish art in public collections from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, and it encompasses nearly 9,000 painters and 90,000 paintings in more than 1,700 separate collections. The book includes as well pictures that are now lost, some as a consequence of the Second World War and others because of de-accessioning, mostly from 1950 to about 1975 when Victorian art was out of fashion. By listing many tens of thousands of previously unpublished works, including around 13,000 which do not yet have any form of attribution, this book becomes a unique and indispensable work of reference, one that will transform the study of British and Irish painting.
