Connemara and the West in Irish Art
Connemara has no single edge. Ask where it begins and you get different answers — west of Lough Corrib, west of Galway city, north of Galway Bay — but every answer agrees on the ground itself: bogland running out to a coast of peninsulas and small islands, lakes in every hollow, and a line of quartzite mountains standing over all of it. The name comes from Conmhaicne Mara, the Conmaicne "of the sea".
We have already walked the whole island of landscape painting in From the Burren to Connemara. This guide stays in one place. It follows the painters who went west, the pictures they brought back, and the ones you can hang.
Why painters went west
The National Gallery of Ireland's teaching resource on west of Ireland painting gives the plain reason: traditional customs and ways of life "were visible there long after they had disappeared elsewhere", and artists were drawn by "the wildness of the remote unfamiliar landscape". The place looked like the past, and it looked like weather.
The ground supplies the rest. The Twelve Bens — also called the Twelve Pins — are sharp-peaked quartzite summits, the highest of them, Benbaun, rising to 729 metres. Quartzite is weather-resistant rock, and it keeps its outline against a moving sky. Below it lies the bog, and below the bog the water. A painter had almost nothing to invent: mountain, lake and cloud arrive already composed.
If you want that composition stripped to its outline, the flat colour of Twelve Bens, Connemara National Park does it in one plane of blue and green, and it hangs well beside the painted views below.
Bartholomew Colles Watkins and the fjord
Bartholomew Colles Watkins (1833–1891) is the painter of the west in this catalogue who kept going back. The National Gallery of Ireland records that he painted Connemara repeatedly between 1875 and 1891, and the picture the Gallery holds — A View of the Killaries, from Leenane — shows why it held him.
Killary Harbour is the long inlet that divides County Galway from County Mayo. The Gallery describes the scene as an eight-mile fjord ringed by mountains, with fishing boats and nets being loaded, and it singles out "the subtle effects of light on the landscape" — the mountains doubled in still water. On the northern shore stands Mweelrea, at 814 metres the highest mountain in Connacht. The painting is oil on canvas, 32 by 50 centimetres, and reached the Gallery by bequest in 1909 (NGI.636).
It is a small picture, and it does not shout. The boats work; the water waits; the mountains take the rest of the room. You will find more of his work in the Bartholomew Colles Watkins collection.
James Humbert Craig at Leenane
James Humbert Craig was born in Belfast in 1877 and kept a studio at Cushendun, on the Antrim coast, but the west drew him back. His favourite subjects, in Wikipedia's summary of his career, were Donegal, Connemara and the Glens of Antrim. He was largely self-taught: he attended the Belfast School of Art for a term and left.
The Connemara work went beyond canvases. In 1943 he collaborated with Richard Hayward on The Corrib Country, and Galway County Council's account of the book notes that his thirty-eight wash drawings included the Maumturk Mountains, bogs, turf cutters, farmers and fishermen at work. Leenane, Co. Galway is among the titles recorded for his work.
The Harbour, Leenane shows the harbour at Leenane, the village at the head of Killary Harbour on the Galway–Mayo border. Hang it beside the Watkins and the same stretch of water reads twice: once from the heights, once from the quay.
Walter Osborne: the west as an Irish Brittany
Walter Osborne (1859–1903) was a Dublin painter trained in Antwerp, who had worked in Brittany in the early 1880s. According to the National Gallery of Ireland he visited Connemara between 1892 and 1899, and found there "an Irish version of the simple Breton rural lifestyle."
His A Galway Cottage belongs to those visits. The Gallery dates it to about 1893 and holds it as an oil on panel, 30 by 38 centimetres, purchased in 1903, the year he died (NGI.554). It is an interior, not a view: elderly figures in a dark room, set against the daylight at the door. The west here is a house and the people in it. Two more of his western scenes are in the catalogue: Life in Connemara, A Market Day and Women on a Galway Quayside.
Burton, before the famous picture
Frederic William Burton is best known for a ballad scene in watercolour, but in about 1840 he was drawing the west itself. The Gallery holds In Joyce Country (Connemara, County Galway), a watercolour of cottages at the edge of Lough Corrib with mountains behind, 25.3 by 36 centimetres, bequeathed in 1904 (NGI.6034). Its resource describes his Connemara studies as "considered some of the finest ever produced of the Western landscape", and notes his sensitivity to colour, particularly the sky.
He was not alone on the islands. George Petrie, the Gallery says, was one of the first artists to paint on the Aran Islands, in 1821, and Burton's The Aran Fisherman's Drowned Child (1841) grew from more than fifty studies. Burton's prints, including his view of the upper end of Lough Corrib, are gathered under Frederic William Burton.
North to Achill
The twentieth century pushed the same idea further along the coast. Paul Henry lived on Achill from the summer of 1910 to 1919, and the Gallery says his work there became "emblematic of the West of Ireland". The American painter Robert Henri first came to the island in 1913 and returned until 1928. And in 1936 Mainie Jellett visited, and five years later painted Achill Horses, now in the National Gallery of Ireland: horses, sea and sky broken into rhythm, the west turned modern.
Choosing a print of the west
Start with the wall. The Watkins and Craig views are horizontal pictures and quiet ones, and they suit a hall, a landing or the long space above a sideboard. The Osborne interior is nearer to square, which suits a narrower wall or a reading corner. Larger sizes give the mountains their weight; smaller ones read as a window.
Each print comes framed or unframed. Framed pieces arrive ready to hang in solid oak or ash, in black, white or natural wood; unframed prints let you choose your own frame. Sizes differ by picture, so check the options on each page. If you are unsure, the room photographs on each page show how the frames sit on a wall, and our full Irish landscape and seascape prints collection places them among the coast and the mountains of the rest of the country.
Every print here is open edition and made to order.
Sources: National Gallery of Ireland, West of Ireland Paintings resource (Watkins NGI.636; Osborne NGI.554; Burton NGI.6034; Petrie, Jellett, Henry); Wikipedia entries on Connemara, Twelve Bens, Killary Harbour and James Humbert Craig; Galway County Council, Westward Ho, A Ramble Through Galway 1840–1950; mayo-ireland.ie tourism pages on Achill; Museum of Childhood Ireland on Robert Henri.