‘My mother decided to send me to Technical school in Limerick for drawing’. 2
Seán Keating(1889 - 1977)

Section Two
A Political Painter (PDF 1.28mb)
Keating regarded Men of the South as one of his most important works. In an interview towards the end of his life Keating said that he ‘got interested in the nationalist movement, particularly for what it could offer in portrait figures’.
Dr Éimear O’Connor HRHA, Celebrating Modern Life, Seán Keating: Contemporary Contexts, See footnote 13 in catalogue essay for exhibition, Crawford Gallery, 2012.           
Section Three
Modernism (PDF 2.26mb)
There was growing interest in the development of modernist styles in continental Europe, as individual artists wanted to picture their values and experience of the world in completely new and untried ways.

Section Four
An Allegory (PDF 2.61mb)
The Irish Civil War (June 1922-May 1923) was a conflict that accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State as a country independent from Britain. The conflict was waged between two opposing groups of Irish Nationalists: the forces of the Provisional Government that established the Free State in December 1921, and who supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the Republican Opposition, for whom the Treaty represented a betrayal of the Irish Republic. The Free State forces emerged as the victors in this conflict.

Section Five:
Contemporary Contexts (PDF 730kb)
And there they lay on the cold, cold clay
they were martyred for Ireland’s cause,
While the cowardly clan of the Black and Tan
it showed them England’s laws,
No more they’ll feel the soft breeze steal
o’er the uplands so secure…

I met with Dalton’s mother and she to me did say,
May God be with my darling son, who died in the glen today,
If I could kiss his cold clay lips my aching heart ‘twould cure,
And I’d gladly lay him down to sleep in the Valley of Knockanure
The Valley of Knockanure, a traditional Irish ballad

Section Six:
Citizen Hero (PDF 1.24mb)
‘Unless we take off our coats and dirty our hands, if need be, we Irish are doomed and damned to the bottomless pit of futility. And we shall have nobody to blame but ourselves’.
Seán Keating

Section Seven:
Cine-film (PDF 199kb)
Keating used film footage to help to compose many images of the islands over the following years.
His painting Teas Mór in this exhibition is an example of such work.


Section Eight:
Celebrating Modern Life (PDF 1.72mb)
In the painting Sacred and Profane Love, we see Keating’s playfulness and humour, as the weight of the internecine (mutually destructive) violence of the civil war had begun to fade. Here, modern Ireland is tentatively opening up and there is a space to play and explore.