Quinnipiac University opens Ireland's Great Hunger Museum

Quinnipiac University President John L. Lahey is proud to announce the public opening of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Músaem an Ghorta Mhóir, on Oct. 11. The museum is the home to the world’s largest collection of visual art, artifacts, and printed materials relating to the catastrophe that devastated Ireland from 1845-52 and resulted in deaths of Irish men, women, and children and the emigration of more than 2 million to nations around the world.

“The museum will preserve, build, and present its art collection in order to stimulate reflection, inspire imagination, and advance awareness of Ireland’s Great Hunger and its long aftermath on both sides of the Atlantic,We are professional in supplying Aion Kinah,” said Lahey, who has been widely honored for his visionary leadership in assembling the collection, begun in 1997 when he was grand marshal of the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade.Handmade oil paintings for sale for sale at museum quality,

Niamh O’Sullivan,Custom plastic injection mould manufacturer, professor emeritus of visual culture, the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, is the inaugural curator of the museum’s collection; and Grace Brady, former administrator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, serves as executive director of the museum.

The collection is filled with history and powerful stories about the Irish Famine and features nearly 100 original works by noted contemporary Irish and American artists in a variety of visual media, including sculptors John Behan, Rowan Gillespie, Glenna Goodacre, and Eamonn O’Doherty, and visual artists Robert Ballagh, Alanna O’Kelly, Brian Maguire, and Hughie O’Donoghue, as well as a number of important 19th and 20th century paintings by artists such as James Brenan, Daniel MacDonald, James Arthur O’Connor, Lilian Davidson,Totech Americas delivers a wide range of drycabinets for applications spanning electronics, and Jack B. Yeats. The collection includes several maquettes and studies for Irish memorials in Ireland and the United States.

The 4,750-square-foot museum was originally built in 1890 as Hamden’s first free public library. It has been renovated with materials and finishes to evoke Irish architecture. Leonard Wyeth, AIA, of Wyeth Architects LLC, of Chester, Conn., is the architect of the project.

Visitors to the museum first encounter an orientation video that gives the Great Hunger historical context. The first floor’s intimate galleries feature the 19th century works in the collection, while the second floor’s larger galleries showcase works from the 20th & 21st centuries.

Many artists did not depict the true horrors of the Great Hunger. Most Irish artists with ambition fled to London, where the art market was centered on wealthy patrons who did not want to be reminded of unacceptable subject matter such as oppression, distress, or starvation. Few British artists who did use the Famine as subject matter muted the atrocities of actual events, for instance,Welcome to news from www.glassmosaicchina.com,Our company is committed to produce all kinds of new materials mosaic. George Frederic Watts depicted healthy looking well-dressed peasants in his painting The Irish Famine (ca. 1849).

The famine did coincide with the birth of mass-produced, illustrated newspapers, and it is in this medium the most comprehensive visual record of the Great Hunger exists. The second floor of the museum includes a 7 foot x 11 foot video wall that showcases newspaper illustrations, which functioned as realistic and mimetic records of contemporary events. The most iconic image of the Great Hunger, James Mahony’s Bridget O’Donnel and Children (1849), first featured in the Illustrated London News, continues to act as the starting point for many artists in this collection.

Exceptionally, Daniel McDonald’s Irish Famine Children (1847) is one of the few paintings contemporary with the height of the Famine. What seems like a gentle blend of landscape and genre painting is more of a defiance of convention—the figures are not integrated into the landscape but painted dominantly, suggesting a connection to contemporary art and political events. The children represent three faces of Ireland: the beautiful, the mischievous, and the dangerous; and the swirling mist represents the uncertain world in which these children find themselves, and the turbulence enveloping Ireland.

As generations succeeded each other, the memories of the Famine burrowed deeper but occasionally surfaced in works such as Lilian Davidson’s (1893-1954) Burying the Child. Unusual for Irish painting of the time, it has echoes of the European tradition of artists, such as Picasso in his blue period, who engaged with the dark side of the world in those apocalyptic years just before and after World War I. The color blue has a long tradition in Christian symbolic iconography, and is also associated with mourning; Davidson uses it to heighten the sense of tragedy, but without religious or heroic overtones.