Visual culture, and particularly painting, played relatively little part, compared to literary culture, in the development of nationalist sentiment in Ireland during this period, despite occasional calls for a distinctive “national art”. Ireland’s art, like its literature and politics, was essentially colonial, and thus reflective of a hybrid culture, involving for the most part Irish versions of dominant metropolitan norms. Even before the Union of 1800, a successful career in London was the aim of the best Irish artists, and most perceived their identity in British rather than simply Irish terms. This was particularly clear in the case of Daniel Maclise (1806–1870), whose important series of murals, commissioned for the new Houses of Parliament in Westminster, was part of the construction of a new sense of British identity. His well-known The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife (1854) was originally designed to be part of that series, and only the accident of the addition of the preparatory oil study to the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland many years later made it possible to view it as a nationalist rather that an imperialist painting.

Not surprisingly, given the nature and importance of art patronage, politically themed painting played a great role in the elite Patriot movement of the late 18th century. As the Gaelic world receded as a threat, it became a focus of elite interest, with the golden age of early Christian Ireland claimed as a common heritage by Protestants and Catholics. The cult of St Patrick, for example, became a symbol of opposition in the all-Protestant Irish Parliament, as shown by the purchase by two MPs of a large history painting by the young James Barry, The baptism of the King of Cashel by St Patrick (1763), which they installed in the Irish House of Commons. A more radical assertion of the rights of the Irish Parliament from the mid-1770s was celebrated in large group portraits of politicians and activists, essentially contemporary “history” paintings, by the English artist Francis Wheatley (1747–1801). Antiquarian enthusiasm was reflected in the topographical drawings and landscape art commissioned by Irish landlords. This early flowering of patriotic art culminated in a pamphlet by antiquarian Joseph Cooper Walker (1790), which called for a distinctly Irish art at a time when “our national character was forming”.

Intermittent and initially short-lived efforts to promote art in Ireland can be seen in a succession of societies from the 1760s, culminating in the Royal Hibernian Academy (1823). Its annual exhibition lists, and those of more ephemeral societies, reveal a steady, though small, output of history paintings, many featuring subjects from English and imperial history, or royal visits, but also patriotic Irish themes, especially in the 1840s and 1850s. This reflected the influence of a new popular press, especially The Nation, the newspaper of “Young Ireland”, whose chief ideologue, Thomas Davis, called for “a recognized national art” in Ireland, only to be disappointed in his hopes in the talented Frederick William Burton (1816–1900). He proved to be no nationalist, and soon left for London, having warned Davis prophetically that “the nationalizing of Irish art” could only follow the success of a wider, literature-based nationalist revolution.

The painter who came closest to Davis’s ideal was the watercolourist George Petrie, whose topographical studies of major Celtic and ecclesiastical sites were Romantic and celebratory, and presented a positive, patriotic image of the Irish poor as heirs to a great aristocratic Gaelic tradition. The Catholic bourgeoisie who now dominated politics had little tradition of art patronage, and much of the patriotic art that emerged focused on their leader and Davis’s nemesis, Daniel O’Connell. A portrait by Joseph Patrick Haverty (1794–1864), for example, showed “The Liberator” against a background of Romantic scenery, and accompanied by an Irish wolfhound. However, the art that best captured the nationalist elements of O’Connell’s politics was not painting but public sculpture, especially by leading neoclassical sculptor John Hogan (1800–1858), a prominent supporter of O’Connell, who produced a number of works featuring such key Romantic symbols as Hibernia and the Harp.

A distinctively Irish landscape art did develop, but it was one that for much of this period reflected the colonial stereotype of Irish inferiority and featured wild places, primitive people and the ruins of past greatness. Following the great 1845-48 famine, however, this stereotypical Irish landscape became the locus for sympathetic portrayals of peasant suffering and landlord oppression, as political realities shifted in both England and Ireland. Sentimental portrayals of evictions by Irish painters like Daniel MacDonald (1821–1853) and Robert George Kelly (1822–1910) were shown in London, and such scenes were given dramatic popular force in images of the Famine by James Mahoney (1810–1879), and of the Land War by Aloysius O’Kelly (1853–1936), in commissions for the Illustrated London news. By the end of the century this wild landscape, mainly associated with the west and long romanticized in literature, became emblematic of Irish identity, most notably in the work of Paul Henry (1877–1958). Thus, what began as a colonial stereotype was slowly transformed into a patriotic paradigm.

When at the end of the 19th century a new and more vibrant phase of cultural, especially literary nationalism, developed, the focus of Irish painters was switching from England to France and a multi-faceted modernism was making any connection between painting and politics more opaque. When a National Gallery was established in 1864, its focus was on European art, as were the later efforts of Hugh Lane to establish a gallery of modern art in Dublin, though he was keen to exhibit some works by Irish artists, if not “Irish Art” – a concept that even now had failed to acquire either significant support or an agreed meaning. Some sympathy for the new revolutionary nationalism was apparent in the titles of occasional paintings by Jack B. Yeats, but this rarely took visual form. Only in the academic studies of young revolutionaries by Sean Keating (1889–1977) in the 1920s was a clear commitment to nationalism evident.

Public sculpture, with its democratic patronage, continued to offer a striking contrast to painting. John Henry Foley (1818–1874), already established in London, and best known for his imperialist depiction of “Asia” on the Albert Memorial, was chosen to create the major monument to Daniel O’Connell, unveiled in 1882, during a period of nationalistic fervour, crises and political Home Rule campaigns. The latter invoked the “Patriot” tradition of 1782, already commemorated by Foley in a statue to the 18th-century Patriot leader Henry Grattan (1876). The centenary of the 1798 rebellion also gave a boost to sculpture paid for by public subscription. The most significant examples were by Oliver Sheppard (1865–1941), whose heroic pike-man urged on by a priest in the centre of Enniscorthy (1908) vividly captured the dominant Catholic nationalist sense of the rebellion. But Sheppard also produced Symbolist works on pagan mythological themes, made popular by the writings of the Celtic Revival, including The death of Cúchulainn (1911-12), later placed in the General Post Office in Dublin and adopted as the official symbol of the 1916 rising by the Irish government.

A different view of “national art” to that promoted by Davis was based on Gaelic Ireland’s artistic heritage of medieval high crosses and illuminated manuscripts and was articulated by Henry O’Neill in The fine arts and civilization of Ireland (1863). It achieved striking public expression in the 1916 opening of the Honan Chapel in University College Cork, with its pastiche of medieval church architecture and use of Celtic motifs in its mosaics, ornate metal work and vestments. But it also featured, in the stained glass windows of the young Harry Clarke, a modernist take on such traditional forms. While there was undoubtedly a patriotic element to such art, it was essentially religious and conservative in nature. Indeed, the exposure of most Irish people to art came in the form of the imported, mass-produced religious artefacts that adorned the new Catholic churches. “High”, or “Fine” art was never more than a minority interest, and unlike literature, which had an intense political focus and wide readership throughout the century, was not able to develop an influential Irish form distinctive from the metropolitan, and thus to exert significant political influence.