What Is Irish Art? A Short History
Irish art is one of the oldest and most distinctive visual traditions in Europe — and one of the most under-appreciated. From illuminated manuscripts and Celtic stonework to storm-lit Romantic landscapes, Impressionist portraits and bold twentieth-century abstraction, it tells the story of Ireland itself. Here is a short history of Irish art, and where to begin if you want to bring a piece of it home.
Ancient roots: Celtic art
Long before easel painting, Ireland had a visual language all its own — the interlace, spirals and knotwork of Celtic metalwork, high crosses and manuscripts like the Book of Kells. It was never simple decoration but a way of thinking about time, continuity and the connection between all things, and that tradition still runs through Irish design today. We looked at what is actually Irish about Celtic art in more detail here.
The 18th and 19th centuries: landscape and the Romantic imagination
Irish painting came into its own with landscape. James Arthur O'Connor gave the Irish countryside a Romantic intensity — brooding skies, rocky outcrops, tiny figures dwarfed by nature — while meticulous topographers like Samuel Frederick Brocas recorded Georgian Dublin street by street. It is some of the most powerful landscape painting ever made by an Irish hand. Browse the whole tradition in our Irish landscape and seascape collection.
The Golden Age: portraiture and Irish Impressionism
Around 1900, Ireland produced an extraordinary run of painters. Sir John Lavery and William Orpen became two of the most celebrated portraitists in the British Isles; Walter Osborne brought French plein-air Impressionism to Dublin street life; and Sarah Purser was both a fine portraitist and the organiser and patron who shaped Irish art for a generation. Others worked abroad: Roderic O'Conor painted beside Gauguin in Brittany and anticipated Fauvism by a decade.
Stained glass and illustration
Ireland's Arts and Crafts movement produced a genuine genius in Harry Clarke, whose stained glass and jewel-like illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe and Hans Christian Andersen are unlike anything before or since. The story of his rejected Geneva Window is one of the strangest in all of Irish art.
The modernist revolution
Mainie Jellett dragged Ireland into the modern age, bringing Cubism home from Paris to a sceptical Dublin and spending two decades winning the argument. Her Achill Horses is a perfect introduction to Irish abstraction — explore more in our Irish abstract collection.
A national favourite
If one work captures the emotional pull of Irish art, it is Frederic William Burton's The Meeting on the Turret Stairs, voted Ireland's favourite painting. We told the story behind it here.
Irish art today
The tradition is still very much alive. Contemporary artists such as Barra Ó Maoláin paint the Antrim glens, the light of Connemara, and the writers and musicians who made Ireland — Irish art being made right now.
Bringing Irish art home
Whether you are furnishing an Irish home, searching for a meaningful gift, or building a collection rooted in real cultural history, the whole story is gathered in one place: our full Irish Art Prints collection, with more than 600 works by Ireland's greatest artists — framed or unframed, and shipped worldwide for free.