The subject matter of real human suffering does not lend itself easily to art. Ireland's Great Hunger -- the worst demographic catastrophe of the nineteenth century - coincided with the invention of new mass-market periodicals. Niamh O'Sullivan considers the aesthetic, historical, technical and contextual roles of British newspaper illustration in interpreting the story of the Famine. The booklet examines how academically trained artists who had little experience of looking at unfiltered or distanced atrocity became pictorial journalists and found new ways to image a trauma of unprecedented...

In 1847, in the British Institution, there hung a harrowing painting 'An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store', the first and the last known contemporaneous painting of the Great Irish Famine. The painter was Daniel Macdonald (1820-1853), a young Irish artist recently arrived in London.



Niamh O'Sullivan's fascinating book reveals compelling new subtexts to the work of Macdonald and re-establishes him as a painter of national importance; it also sheds original light on the social and visual culture of Ireland in the years leading up to and including...