Claire Ó Nualláin

“As our national character is now forming”: Antiquarianism, 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 considers the role of antiquarianism in the construction of a pseudo-history of ancient Ireland by the Protestant landowning classes in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the latter half of the century, this group strove to elevate perceptions of the Irish nation, fashioning a Protestant Irish identity through the construction and appropriation of an heroic ancient Irish past, and seeking to improve and ennoble the nation that they had come to understand as their own.

This thesis interrogates the significance of this imagined former state of civic perfection in the progress from patriotism, to radicalism and rebellion, and eventually, to union with Britain, examining antiquarian watercolours, prints, landscape paintings and history paintings produced ca. 1760-1850.

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.