Although a well-established subject in the history of art, depictions of the city or urban environment have long been overlooked in Ireland in favour of the rural and pastoral. Drawing on her publication, ‘Painting Dublin, 1886 – 1949: Visualising a Changing City’, in this lecture Dr Kathryn Milligan will explore the representation of Ireland’s capital city through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looking, for example, at works by Rose Barton, Walter Osborne, Harry Kernoff, and Jack B. Yeats.

Dr. Kathryn Milligan is an art historian specialising in nineteenth and twentieth century Irish art. A graduate of UCD and TCD, Kathryn was the inaugural ESB Fellow at the ESB Centre for the Study of Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland, and an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy, UCD.

Her first monograph, ‘Painting Dublin, 1886 – 1949: Visualising a Changing City’, was published by Manchester University Press in 2020.

This talk is presented by the OPW as part of the 2024 cultural programme at Farmleigh House.