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In the Lions Den: Daniel Macdonald, Ireland and Em |
February 23, 2016 |
Reviewer:
Luke Gibbons, Professor of Irish Literature from Ireland
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In this pioneering study, Niamh O'Sullivan charts the elusive career of Daniel Macdonald recovering his once impressive reputation from the archives of the overlooked. Cork featured prominently in depictions of the Great Famine, not only on account of the immense suffering that took place there, but it also produced the artists that confronted the disaster, and evoked it on canvas or in illustration. Macdonald was the only painter to give direct rendition of the horror. His ground-breaking work is set in its immediate artistic and iconographic context, and the study also places the artist in a wider cultural firmament in Cork and London that has included Daniel Maclise, Thomas Crofton Croker, James McDaniel, William Maginn, Francis Sylvester Mahony (Fr. Prout), Thomas Davis, and others. The Famine tested the limits of visual representation, but here we see how one artist rose to the challenge, capturing aspects of the hidden Ireland that arrest the eye, even 150 years later.
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