Encyclopedia of Irish & World Art: 2010
The No 1 Guide To Visual Arts in Ireland and Around the World (2 million BCE - Present)

• AT-A-GLANCE • Sitemap 1 Art in Ireland • Sitemap 2 Irish Painters/Sculptors • Sitemap 3 WORLD ART

PAINT COLOURS
For details about the
colour wheel, colour
mixing theory, colour
pigments and palettes:
Colour in Painting.

Irish Art: Origins and Development
We trace the 10 stages in the History of Irish art, including the Stone Age engravings at Newgrange; the evolution of La Tene and Hallstatt styles of Celtic art, as well as exquisite Celtic-style metalwork exemplified by treasures like the Ardagh Chalice, Broighter Gold Torc, Petrie Crown, and Tara Brooch, noted for their decorative techniques of cloisonne and enamelling; early Christian artworks including illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, the Cathach of Columba (Colmcille), the Book of Durrow, the Lichfield and the Lindisfarne Gospels, as well as Celtic-style High Cross sculpture; the formation of more modern cultural institutions which fostered the growth of Irish painting and sculpture, such as the Dublin Society, the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Read about the architectural heritage and historical legacy of Munster, Connacht, Leinster and Ulster, plus the artists associated with each of the 32 counties, including Dublin. We profile major Irish art organizations, like the Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaion), Culture Ireland (Cultur Na hEireann), the Crafts Council of Ireland (CCoI), the National Sculpture Factory, plus artist groups like Aosdana and Cork Printmakers. We look at auction houses in Dublin and Belfast (Adams, Whytes, deVeres), and schools like NCAD and the Crawford College of Design. For more about the cultural heritage of the rebel county, see Cork Art.

IRISH ART PRICES
For the top-priced
works from Ireland,
see: Most Expensive
Irish Paintings.

GLOBAL ART PRICES
For the top-priced
canvases in the world,
see: Most Expensive
Paintings: Top 10.

Who's Who in Irish Art
The names of the Irish artists who decorated the megalithic tombs of Brugh na Boinne at Knowth and Dowth, Co Meath, are unknown to us, as are the Celtic metalworkers of the Iron Age, and the sculptors and illustrators of the Middle Ages. Our list of over 300 biographical profiles of famous Irish artists starts with Garret Morphy and Susanna Drury of the 17th century, and continues up until the 21st century. We look at a range of Famous Irish artists involved in traditional fine art, as well as decorative arts like ceramics, stained glass and tapestry, as well as contemporary forms of expression like conceptualism, photography, installation and video. Read biographies of painters working in oils, watercolours, gouache, acrylics, or pastels, like the expressionist Jack Butler Yeats, the academic portraitist William Orpen, the surrealist Francis Bacon, the still life master William Scott, and Louis le Brocquy. We cover the great names from the 17th, 18th and 19th century - like the portraitist James Latham, history painters James Barry, and Daniel Maclise, Impressionist exponents of plein-air painting like Frank O'Meara, John Lavery, Roderic O'Conor, and Walter Osborne - plus 20th century artists like: Paul Henry, Sean Keating, Tony O'Malley, Gerard Dillon, Brian Ballard, Basil Blackshaw, Hughie O'Donoghue, Graham Knuttel, Donald Teskey, John Shinnors and many more! We briefly review Irish portrait artists, as well as Irish genre painters and landscape artists. For a personal view of the best living painters, see: Best Irish Artists.

TOUGH QUESTIONS
What on earth is
postmodernist art?
For the answer, see:
Postmodernism Guide

Art News and Comment...

What is The Meaning of "Avant-Garde"?
In fine art, the adjective "avant-garde" is commonly used to describe any artist, group or style, which is considered to be ahead of the majority in its technique or subject matter. It was supposedly first applied to art in the early 19th century by the French political writer Henri de Saint-Simon, who declared that artists served as the avant-garde in the general movement of social progress, ahead of scientists and other classes. However, since the beginning of the 20th century, the term has retained a connotation of radicalism, and carries the implication that for artists to be truly avant-garde they must challenge the artistic status quo - that is, its aesthetic values, its intellectual or artistic conventions, or its methods of production - to the point of being almost subversive. Using this interpretation, Dada is probably the ultimate example of avant-garde visual art, since it challenged most of the fundamentals of Western civilization. The most intellectual avant-garde art movement is probably Cubism, which rocked the arts academies of Europe when it first appeared in 1908. Alternatively, if innovative colour schemes can be considered avant-garde, then Fauvism (1905-7) wins hands down. Then again, for sheer chutzpah, the Young British Artists (YBAs) movement of the 1980s and 90s - with its controversial installations, scandalous video art, and shocking use of new materials (elephant dung, maggots, dead shark, human blood) - looks to be an eminently subversive candidate. But which artist was most ahead of his time? Here are my top candidates. JMW Turner (an expressionist who was perhaps 50 years ahead of his contemporaries); Caspar David Friedrich (a romantic who made landscape truly emotional); Claude Monet (the first revolutionary of modern painting); Ilya Repin (the first painter to capture the authentic detail of life in Russia); Picasso (for his mastery of figurative and abstract art in almost all media); Marcel Duchamp (the pioneer of Dada and Object Art, from which Conceptual Art emerged); Andy Warhol (the first and arguably greatest postmodernist); and Damien Hirst (art's greatest self-publicist).

For more news of famous painters and sculptors, auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's, major shows and exhibitions, as well as news of important cultural events, see: Irish Art News. For specific news and information about art in Ireland, see our guide to the Irish Art Market.

EXPENSIVE ART
Most Expensive
Paintings: Top 20.

The World's Greatest Old Masters (c.1300-1800)
For biographical details along with masterpieces by the great European Old Masters such as the pre-Renaissance Cimabue, Duccio di Buoninsegna, and Giotto; Northern Renaissance painters Van Eyck, Roger Van Der Weyden, Mathis Grunewald, Hieronymus Bosch, and Albrecht Durer; the Florentine Renaissance artists Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Michelangelo; the Venetians Giorgione and Titian; Mannerists like El Greco, and Caravaggio; Baroque masters including Rubens, Jose Ribera, Velazquez and Murillo, Dutch Realists like Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer; plus 18th century painters like Canaletto and Francesco Guardi - famous for their landscapes of Venice (vedute) - and Tiepolo, noted for his Wurzburg Palace frescos, as well as the more light-hearted Rococo and the serious Neoclassical artists, see: Old Masters. For a list of the finest works, see also: Greatest Paintings Ever (1300-present). For an explanation of the greatest painters, see: Best Artists of All Time.

WORLD'S TOP ARTISTS
ACROSS THE GENRES
Best History Painters
Best Portrait Artists
Best Genre Painters
Best Landscape Artists
Best Still Life Painters.

AWESOME ARTISTS!
For a list of the top
painters/sculptors see:
Visual Artists, Greatest

The Best Modern Artists (c.1700-present)
We begin with the English Figurative and Landscape Painting Schools of the 18th century. We profile influential artists like William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake, and Thomas Girtin. We also cover the 18th century American School, exemplified by the likes of Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and Gilbert Stuart.

Our coverage of the 19th century includes the landscape genius JMW Turner; Impressionists Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas; Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac; Post-Impressionists Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne. Of the American School, we feature the wilderness landscape painters Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, and Frederic Edwin Church; the realists Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins; the Impressionistic James McNeil Whistler and the great society portraitist John Singer Sargent. We also provide biographies of 20th century modernists such as the expressionists Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Modigliani, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka and Otto Dix; the Viennese Sezession painter Gustav Klimt; the Cubists Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Georges Braque; the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, the Surrealist Rene Magritte, the geometric painter Piet Mondrian; the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning; the painter and screen-printer Andy Warhol, the avant-garde Damien Hirst, and many, many more. See: Famous Painters.

For the era of famous
sculptors like: Phidias,
Myron, Polykleitos,
Callimachus, Skopas,
Lysippos, Praxiteles,
and Leochares, see:
Greek Sculpture.

Who's Who in Irish and World Sculpture
For information about the works of the best sculptors from Ireland, working in bronze, stone, clay, porcelain, wood, as well as steel and fibre glass, such as the Anglo-Irish sculptor John Foley, the neo-classical John Hogan, the Nationalist Oliver Sheppard, the 'Gaelic' sculptor Albert Power, the Cork realist Seamus Murphy, the Surrealist FE McWilliam, the figurative sculptor Rowan Gillespie, the semi-abstract Edward Delaney, and many others, see: Irish Sculpture.

For the evolution of Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greek sculpture, Roman narrative reliefs, column statues from the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, sculptures by Renaissance artists like Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, and Andrea del Verrocchio, as well as marbles and bronzes by masters like Giambologna, Bernini and Auguste Rodin, plus the amazing Chinese terracotta army, see Sculpture Art. For the origins and chronological development of the plastic arts, see Sculpture History. For a list of the finest 3-D artworks, see: Greatest Sculptures Ever (33,000 BCE-present).

CHRONOLOGY OF ART
For a list of important
dates in the evolution
of creativity, see:
Visual Arts Timeline

Origins and History of Western Art
We cover the oldest art from across the globe, beginning with the petroglyphs, cupules and rock carvings of Paleolithic prehistoric art, the strange "Venus" figurines, the cave paintings at Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira, Greek art, the sculpture and frescos of Classical Antiquity, as well as African, Tribal, Oceanic, Japanese and Chinese art. From 450 CE, we cover the mosaics and religious icons of the Byzantine era, followed by Medieval, Romanesque, and Gothic architecture. We also trace the origins of printmaking and oil painting, investigate Renaissance art, and profile artists from the Mannerist, Baroque, Rococo and Neoclassical eras. Our coverage of modern art explains the difference between Expressionism and Impressionism, and offers a guide to Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. We profile modern art movements like Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, plus contemporary art movements like Postmodernism, embracing conceptualism, installation, and video. For more information see "contemporary art".

OILS ON CANVAS
History and technical
development, see:
Oil Painting History.

The Meaning of Art
What's the difference between fine, visual and applied arts? What's the difference between arts and crafts? What are aesthetics? What is tempera and how does it compare with encaustic paint? How did colour pigments evolve? For answers to these and all your questions about different types of art, like: Animation, Assemblage, Calligraphy, Collage, Drawing, Ink-and-Wash, Installations, Life-Drawing, Mixed-media, Performance or Happenings, Mosaics, Photography, Tapestry, Stained Glass or Video artworks, as well as information about printmaking techniques such as woodcuts, relief/intaglio processes, aquatint, mezzotint, etching, dry-point, engraving, and lithography, see: Definition and Meaning of Art. For a list of terms used in fine arts, see: Art Glossary of Terms.

ART FROM RUSSIA
For information on prehistoric sculpture
and the history of
painting 30,000 BCE
to 1920, see:
Russian Art.

Galleries & Museums
For information about the top public museums, such as the National Gallery of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland, the Chester Beatty Library and the Hugh Lane Gallery, as well a wide range of private galleries and the artists they represent, see: Irish Art Galleries. For current art shows in Ireland, see: Irish Art Exhibitions. We also profile the greatest museums worldwide, including the Louvre, Musee d'Orsay, and the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Uffizi Gallery Florence, Vatican Museums (including the awesome religious art in the Sistine Chapel), Prado Madrid, the British Royal Art Collection, the Tate Collection, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, Tretyakov Gallery Moscow, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Pinakothek Munich. For more about the permanent collections of these museums, plus details of American galleries like the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Samuel R Guggenheim New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art Washington DC, the Phillips Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Detroit Institute of Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, J Paul Getty Museum Los Angeles and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, see the Best Art Museums.

ORIENTAL ART
For jade ware,
ceramics, porcelain,
bronzes, terracotta
sculptures, wash-
painting and also
calligraphy. See:
Chinese Art.
For a brief guide to
Buddhist Temple art,
Zen ink-painting,
Yamato-e, and
Ukiyo-e painting,
see: Japanese Art.

PAINTING GENRES
For narrative works,
see: History Painting.
For portraiture,
see: Portrait Art.
For scenic views, see:
Landscape Paintings
For everyday scenes,
see: Genre-Painting.
For Flower Pieces,
or Vanitas works,
see: Still Life.

Feedback... What information you want
Looking for biographical details of modern sculptors like Constantin Brancusi, Umberto Boccioni, or Marcel Duchamp; or American 3-D artists like Daniel Chester French, James Earle Fraser, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Louise Nevelson, Alexander Calder or David Smith? Would you like to read more about the various types of painting genres? Do you have an interest in red-figure/black-figure Greek Pottery vases, or Chinese Pottery? Want to know about "Japonisme", "Art Brut" or "Outsider Art"? Or are you interested in reading more about Giclée prints? Are you curious about the great patrons of the Italian Renaissance like the Gonzaga, Borghese and Medici families? Would you like more articles about creativity around the world such as: Islamic art? Would you like more details of contemporary photographers, such as Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, or Nan Goldin; or video artists like Nam June Paik? Want to read more about 20th century installation artists, like Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili, or Anish Kapoor, or newer forms of creativity such as "junk art", "ice-sculpture" or "text art"? Are you interested in design movements such as Art Nouveau, Art Deco, or Bauhaus? Would you like more details of animation cartoons, or caricatures? Want a comprehensive guide to American art, or more examples of drawing? Or would you prefer to read more about specific media like frescoes, murals, or decorative arts like goldsmithery, tapestry, or lacquerwork? Do you enjoy abstract art? How about more information on masterpieces of architecture like the Greek Parthenon, the Mughal Taj Mahal, or the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens, Reims, Cologne and Westminster Abbey?

Whether you're a professional artist, a critic, teacher, museum curator, collector, or simply someone who likes beautiful things, feel free to contact us with your views!

SEARCH FOR INFORMATION
For quick access to a wealth of resources on all aspects of the visual arts:
• Sitemap 1: Art in Ireland
• Sitemap 1: Irish Painters/Sculptors
• Sitemap 1: WORLD ART

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