Light from the West; Irish Art after 1870

Our 'Light from the West' exhibition has had a refresh and is now on display at Ulster Museum. 

Irish Art lies at the heart of the Ulster Museum collections. In the years following 1870, a number of ambitious Irish artists travelled to France and Belgium to study painting. Often termed 'Irish Impressionists', these talented artists painted in the open air and brought a new spirit of naturalism to Irish painting. 

In the early 1900s, Irish artists spent long periods in the West of Ireland, drawn by the wild remoteness of the landscape, and the brilliant purity of Atlantic light. It was there they encountered a traditional way of life that was quickly disappearing. Painters like Jack Yeats, Paul and Grace Henry, William Orpen and Seán Keating grew fascinated by the majestic landscapes of the West, and the hard, resilient lives of its people. Other Irish artists took to more cosmopolitan settings, such as Lavery and his paintings of Morocco and the private world of his London studio. This exhibition now features Renoir, who would have influenced many Irish artists.  

Visit this beautiful exhibition for free. No booking necessary. 

Renoir’s L’allée au bois 

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Renoir’s L’allée au bois is the first French Impressionist painting to enter a public collection in Northern Ireland and represents an outstandingly important acquisition for the Ulster Museum. It fills an important gap in the collection, and will enable a deeper understanding of the work of the ‘Irish Impressionists’ such as Roderic O’Conor, John Lavery and Paul Henry, who travelled to France to study the achievements of Impressionism in the years after 1870. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of the leading figures of Impressionism in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s. Throughout these years Impressionist painters created an entirely new style of painting, using only loose, fragmented brush strokes to evoke the changing colours and myriad qualities of light.

Born in Limoges, Renoir moved to Paris as a child. There he met Claude Monet with whom he developed the ideas and techniques of Impressionism and made painting trips to the forest of Fontainebleau and at La Grenouillère, a boating resort on the River Seine not far from Paris. L’allée au bois’ was painted between 1874 and 1880 in a wood near Paris, although the precise location is unknown. The small light-filled woodland scene is a purely Impressionist work giving the viewer the sense of entering a forest glade where a light breeze gently rustles leaves and grasses in the heat and dappled shade of a late afternoon summer’s day.

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