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“As our national character is now forming”: Improvement, the Fine Arts, and Protestant Identity in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Supervised by Dr Kyle Leyden and Dr Esther Chadwick

Funded by AHRC/CHASE

My research explores the ways in which images by Irish artists made claims for the benefits of Protestant stewardship of Ireland’s land and people in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Motivated by a philosophy of improvement through which Protestant landowners aimed to civilise and ennoble the nation, images sought to naturalise control of the Irish landscape by the Protestant landed classes. Landscape paintings, antiquarian drawings and topographical surveys extolled the virtues of their management of estates, agriculture and commerce, and created for this class, many of whom derived from families recently arrived in Ireland, a heritage which lent legitimacy to their efforts at cultivation. This, I argue, reached its most potent expression in history paintings which depicted scenes from Ireland’s past. I examine antiquarian images, landscapes, and history paintings produced ca. 1760-1820 by artists including Gabriel Beranger, Jonathan Fisher, James Barry and Vincent Waldré, analysing the role of the visual in the construction of a Protestant Irish identity shaped by improvement, and informed by pseudo-histories of a heroic ancient Irish past.

Through this thematic analysis of a range of visual sources, I also investigate the relationship between technologies of representation and the production of knowledge in eighteenth-century antiquarianism, visual culture and fine art.