AN GORTA MÓR
Selections from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum
AN GORTA MÓR
Selections from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum
An exhibition organized by Quinnipiac University and the Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield
April 11-August 16, 2025
Director’s Foreword
It is our great pleasure to present An Gorta Mór: Selections from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, an exhibition that allows us to share some of the most important works from the collection of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in the Museum’s Walsh Gallery. This remarkable collection, formerly housed in Hamden at Quinnipiac University, investigates the Irish Famine of 1845-1852 and its impact through art by some of the most eminent Irish and Irish-American artists of the past 170 years.
The exhibition, which takes its name from the Irish Gaelic phrase for the Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór, includes 38 works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, watercolor, and pastel. The works, ranging from Romanticism to post-modernism, by more than 30 artists, serve as a reminder of the many ways in which the Famine affected Ireland in both the short and long term. Included in this exhibition are two watercolors by Alfred Downing Fripp generously lent by Karen O’Keefe, which will soon be gifted to the Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum collection.
Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum’s Hamden site shut down in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but soon after, Quinnipiac University trustees voted to move the historic collection to Fairfield under the care of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield, which Quinnipiac has chosen as the future stewards of the collection. The new iteration of the Museum hopes to open in Fairfield in 2026-27 at 636 Old Post Road.
We are pleased to have William Abbott, associate professor of History, as our faculty liaison for this exhibition, and are grateful to him and his colleagues in the Irish Studies program for their engagement with this exhibition. We are very appreciative of Dr. Abbott’s contributions of both the informative essay on the Great Hunger which follows in this catalogue, and also his talk on the same topic which will be delivered to enhance our audiences’ understanding of the subject of the exhibition.
We would like to thank guest curator Ryan Mahoney for his expertise and collegiality in creating this exhibition at Fairfield, and Niamh O’Sullivan for her essay on the collection. We are also grateful to the team at Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield, especially John Foley, Loretto Leary, Dorothea Brennan, and Kendra Williamson for their enthusiastic support of this exhibition.
Thanks, as always, go to the exceptional Museum team for their hard work in bringing this exhibition and its associated programming to life: Michelle DiMarzo, Curator of Education and Academic Engagement; Megan Paqua, Museum Registrar; Heather Coleman, Museum Assistant; and Elizabeth Vienneau, Museum Educator. We are grateful for the additional support provided across the University by Erin Craw, Susan Cipollaro, and Dan Vasconez, as well as by our colleagues in the Quick Center for the Arts, the Media Center, the Center for Arts & Minds, and Design & Print.
~ Carey Mack Weber Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director
The Great Hunger: An Introduction
The Great Hunger of 1845-1852 was one of the most terrible famines in world history. Its causes were political and social as well as simply biological and economic. By 1800, British conquests and land seizures had ensured that approximately 95% of Ireland’s arable land was owned by British-descended Protestants. These wealthy Protestant landowners had little cultural connection with the poor Irish tenant farmers who paid them rent. Unlike England, whose landowning classes had in the 1700s enormously increased food supplies there via agricultural innovations, the irresponsible Protestant landowners had done little to improve agriculture in Ireland.
By 1845, Ireland’s population was approximately 8.1 million, and nearly two million Irish people had become dependent almost entirely upon the potato for sustenance. Nourishing and easy to grow on a small patch of land, the potato was vulnerable to various diseases. In 1845-46, a vicious blight wiped out the potato crop, leaving these two million Irish in danger of starvation. The blight would recur repeatedly over the following five years.
Britain was the wealthiest country on earth at this time, and its government could have sent sufficient food to feed the two million starving Irish. The British government, however, believed that the free market would solve the problem: that food scarcity in Ireland would cause food prices to rise there, which would encourage overseas farmers to ship food to Ireland in order to make higher profits than they could by selling the food at home. The huge flaw in this theory, however, was that the two million starving Irish had no money to pay for such food imports, and there was thus no incentive for foreign farmers to ship food to Ireland. While the British government did send some aid, it was woefully insufficient. Indeed, so strong was the British adherence to free-market economics that food was actually shipped out of Ireland during the famine: landowners found it more profitable to ship food overseas to people who could actually pay for it.
British views of Irish Catholics as lazy, dirty, ignorant people also contributed to British reluctance to send aid, as did a revolt in 1848 by some idealistic university-educated young Irishmen, who were not themselves starving but whose revolt convinced many British voters that the Irish would only bite the hand that fed them. As a result, approximately one million Irish people died of starvation or starvation-related diseases in only six years. Another million emigrated to Britain, Canada, or the United States. The USA, dominated by Anglo-American Protestant culture, saw these immigrants as racially and socially inferior, and shunted them into the lowest jobs and poorest ghettoes in American cities.
The memory of the Great Hunger still plagues British-Irish relations. The Irish never forgot the sight of food wagons rumbling along Irish roads to take ship overseas, while starving men and women scrabbled in vain to get at the food, and British politicians complacently saw the famine as a beneficial economic development. The lessons of this disaster should be heeded today.
~ William Abbott, PhD Associate
Professor of History, Fairfield University and Faculty Liaison to the Exhibition
The Art of Memory: Visualizing the Great Hunger
In the face of the Great Hunger (1845-52), British artists may have muted the horror but, truth told, it was Irish artists who looked away. From helplessness and perhaps not a little snobbishness, Irish artists removed themselves to London, where many did well, but scantly acknowledged their Irishness, let alone the reality of what they had left behind. Admittedly, the physical and psychological effects of famine defied the classical training of artists, but the careers of Irish artists would not have survived the attempt. In London, the art market was centred on annual exhibitions where wealthy patrons would not be reminded of what was considered unacceptable subject matter. Artists painted for an elite market; not surprisingly, neither aristocrats nor landlords – the purchasing classes – would buy pictures of emaciated bodies, rotting potatoes, or diseased corpses to hang in their homes. Notable exceptions include John Tracy, who remained and painted the peasantry, and Daniel MacDonald, who returned from London in 1847 to paint the horror in Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store (National Folklore Commission) and Irish Famine Children.1
Irish artists went to Britain in pursuit of the patronage of the elite while British artists went to Ireland in pursuit of the primitive: holy wells, pattern days, superstitions, domestic chores – the ways of the peasantry. There they found a simple, not a savage people. The iconography of poverty is sparse, and fraught with ethical considerations, not least the bias of the artist. In this regard, four British artists stand out: Alfred Downing Fripp, Henry Mark Anthony, Frederick Goodall and Francis William Topham, all strongly represented in Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum collection.
Their paintings challenge the consensus. In overcoming their own prejudices (no less than the expectations of their patrons), many British artists produced images sympathetic to the victims of colonial rule in Ireland, and critical (albeit mildly) of the regime. It would, therefore, be a mistake to view these paintings as insignificant. Apart from lending themselves to stylistic analysis, they provide some of the most detailed
1 See Niamh O’Sullivan, In the Lion’s Den: Daniel Macdonald, Ireland and Empire (Hamden, CT, 2016).
and empathetic perspectives on the plight of the people in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, and it is interesting to observe evolution in the artists themselves, as they progressed from viewing the Irish as “specimen,” to human.
Anthony, who ploughed his own wrenchingly melancholic furrow, as in Sunset or View of the Rock of Cashel from the Village, (cat. 7, right) demonstrated moreover his familiarity with antiquarian debates, especially the work of George Petrie, who lamented that among the ruins of Ireland “We are among the dead ... forced, as it were, to converse with men of other days.” 2 Fripp, Topham and Goodall painted homely scenes, set in dreadfully poor hovels made of mud and driftwood, revealing levels of subsistence unknown in other parts of the “civilized” world. Notwithstanding the domesticity – not a subject generally admired – they garnered reputations among important critics. F.G. Stephens described Fripp as “a subtle chiaroscurist, a good colourist, a poet in painting with a rare and delicate sense of what is peaceful and idyllic in Nature and expressible by art.”3 While their work now seems sentimental, they are what remain visually of the conditions endured by Irish people under British rule and, as such, are vital pictorial documents.
The material culture of the peasantry lends itself to the study of the ethnographic, social, political, and economic conditions of the day. But as the Famine took hold, the empty skillet, the bare dresser, and the cold hearth tell of the terrible conditions under which people subsisted and expired. Thus, the recent acquisition of two paintings by Fripp are poignant testaments to life on the cusp of the Famine in 1845. In the first, we have a faithful record of a home, and in the second, barely months after the arrival of the blight, the consequences – no home at all. There we have it: a hair’s breadth between grinding poverty and imminent death.
2 George Petrie, ‘An essay on the round towers of Ireland’, Dublin University Magazine 14, no. 84 (December 1839).
3 F.G. Stephens, ‘The late Alfred Downing Fripp’, Magazine of Art 18 (1895).
Cat. 7
As early as 1772, Benjamin Franklin observed the chasm in Ireland: a small part of the society are landlords, great noblemen, and gentlemen, extremely opulent, living in the highest affluence and magnificence. The bulk of the people are tenants, extremely poor, living in the most sordid wretchedness, in dirty hovels of mud and straw, and clothed only in rags.4
Isaac Weld described:
floors sunk in the ditches; the height scarcely enough for a man to stand upright; … a few pieces of grass sods the only covering; and these extending only partially over the thing called a roof; the elderly people miserably clothed; the children all but naked. 5
Middens – of human and animal waste – seeped indoors, “trodden into a filthy adhesive glue by the feet and hoofs of the semi-naked children, pigs, fowl, and cattle.”6 British newspapers ascribed this poverty to the innate ignorance of the Irish in the face of the generosity and tolerance of their colonial masters.
In Galway Family Preparing Food, the one-roomed cabin in the Claddagh – where the River Corrib meets Galway Bay –Fripp lays bare the life of a fishing family. Girl clasping a ladder to the loft, child at her feet, father on a three-legged stool huddled over the fire, where their frugal sustenance, a pot of potatoes, hangs from a crook. The earthen-floored cabin is ventilated by a hole in the roof through which smoke escapes and light enters. Strewn nets, an artisan-framed plaster or wood bas relief of Christ on the Cross, a rough-hewn bed, a borane (a drum used for winnowing, and serving potatoes) – peasant life in the raw.7 The Victorian writer, Mary Howitt described Fripp’s paintings
4 Quoted in John Bigelow (ed.), The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself, vol. 2 [1874] (Cambridge, 2011), 98.
5 Isaac Weld, Statistical Survey of the County of Roscommon (Dublin, 1832), 477.
6 Times, 25 December 1845.
7 Mr. & Mrs. S. C. Hall, Ireland: its scenery, character, &c, vol. 1, (London, 1841-43), 83-4.
Cat. 16
as “mournful poems” in which she perceived “the crushed and bleeding soul of the Irish people… a brave and noble nature, suffering hopelessly and undeservedly with all the strength of a martyr…” 8 In the second painting, Irish Mendicants, the elderly blind man, the hapless, bare-footed mother and forlorn child, are set in a bleak landscape: the ominous sky and withered land signal winter ahead. Their sole surviving possession: a crucifix.
Living conditions were the breeding ground for recurring famines but the magnitude of the Great Famine was unparalleled. The worst demographic catastrophe of nineteenth century Europe is best understood as a hundred-year event rather than a seven-year one – an outcome of systematic dispossession and abuse by landlords, not to mention neglect by the government – its longevity providing ample time for the authorities to address the horrendous conditions, opportunities disdained. Laissez-faire economics and the rhetoric of Providentialism kept the peasants in their ordained place.
In 1790, the population of Ireland was approximately 4 million. Fifty years later, it had exploded to over 8 million. Between 1841 and 1891, it dropped to 4.7 million. One million died during and in the immediate aftermath of the Famine, and 1.25 million emigrated (66 percent to the U.S. alone), followed by up to 2 million further emigrations to the end of the nineteenth century. Over a fifty-year period, almost half of the country’s population disappeared. The cull was considered a success.
With the 150 th anniversary of the Great Hunger in the mid-1990s, a determination to build a museum to commemorate the tragedy that continues to shape the lives of over 40 million Irish and Irish-Americans today was declared by John Lahey, President of Quinnipiac University. In 2012, it opened to huge acclaim. It is striking that it took a century-and-a-half to address the Famine, to examine the causes and consequences, and consider its long afterlife in Ireland and elsewhere around the world.9
The historiography of the Famine is now vast but prior to the establishment of the Museum no institution had borne witness visually to the catastrophe – remembering that those who experienced the devastation did so first with their eyes: they saw their crops rot in the ground; they saw the food they cultivated exported while they starved; they saw their homes razed to the ground; they saw their mothers and fathers and children die terrible deaths; they saw their country recede as, dispossessed and desolate, they fled.
The loss of life and language, the erosion of culture, and the distresses in post-traumatic memory remained largely unaddressed in the visual arts until the 1990s. And although difficulties in articulation linger, this collection follows those struggles, leading up to and after Ireland emerged as an independent nation. It also offers opportunities to highlight the ongoing injustice of famines around the world today.
8 Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress, vol. 2 (1847), 10.
9 Research in the visual cultural sphere is more recent, but expanding, see for example, Niamh O’Sullivan, ‘Lines of Sorrow: Representing Ireland’s Great Hunger’, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum Inaugural Catalogue (Hamden, CT, 2012); Emily Mark-Fitzgerald , Commemorating the Irish Famine: memory and the monument (Liverpool, 2013); Luke Gibbons, Limits of the Visible: Representing the Great Hunger (Hamden, CT, 2014); Catherine Marshall, Monuments, Memorials and Visualizations of the Great Famine in Ireland (Hamden, CT, 2014); Niamh Ann Kelly, Ultimate Witnesses: The Visual Culture of Death, Burial and Mourning in Famine Ireland (Hamden, CT, 2017); Niamh O’Sullivan (ed.), Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger ( Hamden, CT, 2018).
Notwithstanding conditions inimical to cultural expression, the collection is a contemporary testament to key strands of visual culture in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century Ireland. Thematic museums are difficult. The tendency is to acquire art that illustrates the theme rather than art that merits its place by virtue of its calibre. But in this collection there are some powerful images that tell aspects of the story, while others are more tellingly expressed by their absence, as it were.
Much is made of the silence following the Famine, yet much is written, not least by the social activist and humanitarian from Connecticut, Elihu Burritt, who visited Skibbereen, County Cork: “I can find no language nor illustration sufficiently impressive to portray the spectacle to an American reader,” he lamented, but he did, and his accounts are harrowing. He described a soup house engulfed by famine spectres, half naked, and standing or sitting in the mud … young and old of both sexes struggling forward with their rusty tin and iron vessels for soup, some of them upon all fours, like famished beasts….Had their bones been divested of the skin that held them together, and been covered with a veil of thin muslin, they would not have been more visible … an appearance … seldom paralleled this side of the grave.
Burritt found a small shed surrounded by an embankment of graves, half way to the eaves. The aperture of this horrible den of death would scarcely admit ... the entrance of a common-sized person. And into this noisome sepulcher living men, women and children went down to die; to pillow upon the rotten straw, the grave clothes vacated by preceding victims and festering with their fever. Here they lay as closely to each other as if crowded side by side on the bottom of one grave.10
And indeed there are few paintings from the time that match such shocking words. Historically, violence or distress in art was softened for the sensibilities of the rich – distanced in time, or cloaked in mythology or allegory. Artists were trained to paint in a classical manner, before studying the life model, by which time they were tuned to see the human body in an idealized way. Confronting the disfigurement of children whose faces wrinkled like old men and women of seventy years of age was out of the question. In 1848, in this regard, Dr. Daniel Donovan published his observations: “the face and limbs become frightfully emaciated; the eyes acquired a most peculiar stare; the skin exhaled a peculiar and offensive fetor, and was covered with a brownish filthy-looking coating, almost as indelible as varnish.” 11 The “tanned” faces of the peasantry evident in Erskine Nicol’s Knotty Point (cat. 11, facing page) were thus not evidence of their indolence, but their hunger.
As survivors dispersed, progress towards nationhood was slow. After independence was won, the struggle to build the nation took precedence. Memories of the Famine thus burrowed deeper. In 1945, the
10 Elihu Burritt, Four Months in Skibbereen, A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood. London, 1847; reprinted Southern Star, 4 & 11 October 1869.
11 Dublin Medical Press, 2 February 1848.
anniversary was scantly acknowledged until resurfacing in works such as Lilian Davidson’s harrowing Gorta, in which we see a family burying its child – a glimpse of terrifying grief, without religious or heroic redemption. It may have been painted one hundred years after the Famine but, Davidson reminds us that hope did not grow out of loss. The bareness of the setting suggests a Cillín, or unconsecrated ground. This child was excluded from interment in consecrated ground. Unbaptised, stillborn and illegitimate children, as well as murderers, the mentally ill, the shipwrecked, those who took their own lives, and those of unknown religion, were buried there. So, in the 1840s, were many victims of the Famine – a more desolate place would be hard to imagine.
The onus to confront the Great Hunger, to make sense of it, passed from one generation to the next. The view that the Famine could not be expiated until Ireland mourned its dead and came to terms with the presence of the past in our lives today is a relatively recent concept. As is the idea that art has a role in that endeavour. With the 150 th anniversary in the mid-1990s, an eruption of memorials by John Behan, Kieran Tuohy, Glenna Goodacre, and others provided transnational maps of memory on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to bronze memorialization, an attempt to face history through pushing the limits of visual form is evident in the work of Alanna O’Kelly and Dorothy Cross, for example. If facing the sorrow, anger and suppression is necessary – so that we can acknowledge, understand and let go – it may be that nonfigurative art allows the image to go below the surface to what lies below, revealing deeper truths through disfiguration. Hughie O’Donoghue explores the significance of memory in his evocative work, and reminds us that while the past may be over, the work of memory remains to trace its long shadow on the present.12
Works of “record” include Rowan Gillespie’s Statistic I & Statistic II (cats. 36-37, p. 14) commemorating the discovery under a parking lot on Staten Island of some 650 bodies, the remains of immigrants who, having fled the Famine, survived the horrors of “coffin ships,” arrived in the New World and died in quarantine from the diseases they carried with them. Amazingly they have been identified by name, age, date, and cause of death.
12 Angela Bourke, Voices Underfoot: Memory, Forgetting, and Oral Verbal Art (Hamden, CT, 2016).
Cat. 11
The rage deep in Brian Maguire’s The World is Full of Murder (cat. 25, facing page) is shown in the splayed, foreshortened and fragmented body parts. Death from hunger, in a world with excess food supplies is nothing short of murder, argues Maguire. This painting emanates violence; the pigment is visceral; the gesturing is aggressive. Equally, William Crozier insists on the power of art to express political, social, and humanitarian views.
Another strand addresses causes, consequences, and apportionment, resulting in some striking polemical visualizations. Any self-defence by the peasantry was seen as criminality, leading to the depiction of the Irish as anarchic, as well as drunken, and stupid, as often depicted by Nicol –an interpretation that met with little resistance in the salons of Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. Contrastingly, Michael Farrell’s massive Black ‘47 uses a raking light to project Charles Trevelyan in the dock (where he never was), testified against by a jury of the dead who sprout from the grave to bear witness to his mismanagement of the Famine on behalf of the British establishment. As Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, saw it, “[t]he judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. … The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”13
A number of things make this collection exceptional. It is founded on interdisciplinary principles, informed not just by art history, naturally, but by contemporary history, cultural theory, philosophy, political economy, literature, and music, underpinned by publications breaking new ground in Famine research.14 The collection works top down and bottom up, resulting in an intermingling of art and wider visual culture.
13 Quoted in Jennifer Hart, ‘Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury’, English Historical Review lxxv, no. 294 (1960): 99.
14 Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum has published 16 Famine Folios, a unique interdisciplinary resource for students, scholars and researchers.
Cats. 36-37
Dished up on a weekly basis by the satirical magazine Punch, vicious attitudes towards Ireland hardened the hearts of British people to the lives of the Irish.
Hunger and eviction, disease and death, emigration and resistance may not have lent themselves to fine art treatment, but they did find pictorial outlet in some remarkable images in the pictorial press of the day (available through the Museum’s unique database).15 But as a largely invisible trauma, finding appropriate expressions of both the gaps and interconnections in Irish and Diasporic history, culture, and memory was, and remains, a challenge. By augmenting the collection through interactive programmes, important themes to do with poverty, dispossession, displacement, alienation, violence, loss of language, as well as issues of class, gender, and identity, are explored. The difficult subject prompts myriad responses – sadness, guilt, anger, and discomfort – from often emotional visitors, who feel they are meeting their history for the first time.
Poverty and hunger, disease, and death are very difficult to represent.16 In the face of mass “social suffering,” Primo Levi suggests that it is normal that there be a “decanting” of experience whereby “historical events acquire their chiaroscuro and perspective only some decades after their conclusion.”17 It is in this context that the art produced over the last fifty years contributes to our understanding of the tragic events one hundred and eighty years ago. This collection thus carries not just the weight of history but an obligation to address the injustices that persist in our world today.
~
Niamh O’Sullivan
Professor Emerita of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Ireland Founding Curator of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum
15 See Niamh O’Sullivan, The Tombs of a Departed Race: Illustrations of Ireland’s Great Hunger (Hamden, CT, 2014).
16 Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh,’I mBéal an Bháis’: The Great Famine & the Language Shift in nineteenth-century Ireland (Hamden, CT, 2015)
17 Primo Levi (1986), The Drowned and the Saved (New York, 1989).
Cat. 25
Cat. 1
Exhibition Checklist
Unless otherwise noted, all works are courtesy of Quinnipiac University and the Irish Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield Exhibit.
1 James Arthur O’Connor (Irish, 1792-1841)
Scene in Connemara, 1825
Oil on canvas
12 x 14 inches
2. Irish School
The Connemara Spinner, ca. 1840
Oil on canvas
25 x 29 ½ inches
3. Francis William Topham (English, 1808-1877)
Pilgrims to Clonmacnoise Cross, County Offaly, ca. 1845
Watercolor on paper
11 x 18 ½ inches
4. Alfred Downing Fripp (English, 1822-1895)
Galway Family Preparing Food in a Cottage, n.d.
Watercolor on paper
12 ½ x 16 ¼ inches
Lent by Karen O’Keefe
5. Alfred Downing Fripp (English, 1822-1895)
Irish Mendicants, 1845
Watercolor on paper
21 ¼ x 27 ¼ inches
Lent by Karen O’Keefe
6. Daniel Macdonald (Irish, 1820-1853)
Irish Peasant Children, 1846
Oil on canvas
24 x 20 inches
7. Henry Mark Anthony (English, 1817-1886)
Sunset or View of the Rock of Cashel from the Village, ca. 1847
Oil on canvas
45 x 45 inches
8. Francis William Topham (English, 1808-1877)
Feeding Chickens, 1848
Watercolor on paper
11 3/8 x 15 ¾ inches
9. Alfred Downing Fripp (English, 1822-1895)
An Irish Peasant and Her Child, ca. 1848
Oil on canvas
12 ½ x 9 ¾ inches
10. Francis William Topham (English, 1808-1877)
The Vigil, n.d.
Watercolor and graphite on paper
15 x 21 inches
11. Erskine Nicol (Scottish, 1825-1904)
A Knotty Point, 1853
Oil on canvas
11 x 14 ½ inches
12. Alexander Williams, RHA (Irish, 1846-1930)
Cottage, Achill Island, ca. 1873
Oil on canvas
24 x 42 inches
13. William Magrath (American, 1838-1918)
At the Cottage Door, 1875
Watercolor on paper
14 ½ x 11 inches
14. William Magrath (American, 1838-1918)
The Farewell, n.d.
Oil on canvas
11 ¼ x 13 ¼ inches
15. James Brenan (Irish, 1837-1907)
Finishing Touch, 1876
Oil on canvas
24 ½ x 29 ½ inches
16. Irish School
Lest We Forget, ca. 1880
Oil on canvas
25 x 34 inches
17. Sir Thomas Alfred Jones (Irish, 1823-1893)
Connemara Girls, ca. 1880
Oil on canvas
56 x 44 inches
18. Jack B. Yeats (Irish, 1871-1957)
A Young Man’s Troubles, 1900
Watercolor, pastel, and pencil on paper
6 x 18 inches
19. Grace Henry (Scottish, 1868-1953)
Lady of the West, ca. 1912-1919
Oil on canvas
14 x 16 ½ inches
20. Jack B. Yeats (Irish, 1871-1957)
Derrynane, 1927
Oil on canvas
24 x 36 inches
21. Paul Henry (Irish, 1876-1958)
Cottages, West of Ireland, 1928-1930
Oil on canvas
22 x 26 inches
22. Lilian Lucy Davidson (Irish, 1879-1954)
Gorta (Previously Burying the Child), 1946
Oil on canvas
27 ½ x 35 ½ inches
23. Seán O’Sullivan (Irish, 1906-1964)
Connemara Woman with Red Skirt, 1952
Oil on board
16 ½ x 13 inches
24. William Crozier (Irish, 1930-2011)
Rainbow’s End, 1970
Oil on canvas
71 ¾ x 47 7/8 inches
25. Brian Maguire (Irish, born 1951)
The World is Full of Murder, 1985
Acrylic on canvas
53 x 87 inches
26. Hughie O’Donoghue (British, born 1953)
On Our Knees, 1996-1997
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 60 inches
27. Pádraic Reaney (Irish, born 1952)
The Last Visit I, n.d.
Oil on board
30 x 24 inches
28. Michael Farrell (Irish, 1940-2000)
The Wounded Wonder, 1997-1998
Hillier’s medium and acrylic on canvas
55 x 62 inches
29. Rowan Gillespie (Irish, born 1953)
The Victim, 1997
Bronze
9 ½ x 8 x 7 inches
30. Glenna Goodacre (American, 1939-2020)
Famine, 1998
Bronze
14 x 9 x 14 inches
31. John Behan (Irish, born 1938)
Famine Ship, 2000
Bronze
30 x 8 x 26 inches
32. Margaret Lyster Chamberlain (American, born 1954)
The Leave-Taking, 2000
Bronze
35 ¼ x 15 x 25 inches
33. John Coll (Irish, born 1956)
Famine Funeral, 2002
Welded bronze and brass
12 ½ x 2 ½ x 11 inches
34. Glenna Goodacre (American, 1939-2020)
Anguish, 2002
Bronze
17 x 13 x 12 inches
35. Kieran Tuohy (Irish, born 1953)
Thank You to the Choctaw, 2005
Bog oak
52 ½ x 9 ½ x 12 inches
36. Rowan Gillespie (Irish, born 1953)
Statistic I, 2010
Bronze
49 x 19 x 19 inches
37. Rowan Gillespie (Irish, born 1953)
Statistic II, 2010
Bronze
49 x 13 x 13 inches
38. Robert Ballagh (Irish, born 1943)
Roimh-after, 2017
Oil on canvas
19 5/8 x 15 ¾ inches
Exhibition Programs
Events listed below with a location are live, in-person programs. When possible, those events will also be live streamed and the recordings posted to the Museum’s YouTube channel.
Register at: fuam.eventbrite.com
Thursday, April 10, 5:30 p.m.
Opening Lecture: Historical Origins of the Great Hunger
William Abbott, PhD, Associate Professor, History and Irish Studies
Quick Center for the Arts, Kelley Theatre, and streaming
Thursday, April 10, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Reception: An Gorta Mór: Selections from Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum
Quick Center for the Arts, Walsh Gallery and Lobby
Saturday, April 12, 12:30-2 p.m. and 2:30-4 p.m. (2 sessions)
Family Day: The Luck of the Irish Quick Center Lobby & Walsh Gallery
Space is limited and registration is required
fairfield.edu/museum/great-hunger
Cover image: Cat. 17
Inside front and back cover image: Cat. 21 (detail)
Tuesday, April 15, 6 p.m.
Lecture: The History of the Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum Collection
Niamh O’Sullivan, PhD, Professor Emerita of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Ireland
Barone Campus Center, Dogwood Room and streaming
Thursday, May 8, 6 p.m.
Performance: Songs of Ireland and Irish Americans Catfeather Duo
Walsh Gallery
Space is limited and registration is required
Thank You!
The Fairfield University Art Museum is deeply grateful to the following corporations, foundations, and government agencies for their generous support of this year’s exhibitions and programs. We also acknowledge the generosity of the Museum’s 2010 Society members, together with the many individual donors who are keeping our excellent exhibitions and programs free and accessible to all and who support our efforts to build and diversify our permanent collection.
Arts Institute
The John and Barbara Hazeltine Trust
