RTÉ Player has launched a new on-demand Culture collection, featuring an eclectic mix of documentaries and performances from the worlds of Music, Arts, Film & TV and Literature. Each week, the RTÉ Player team suggest a ‘must-watch’ from the Culture collection. This week, the focus is on Soul of Ireland – The Landscape Painter.
The documentary, Soul of Ireland – The Landscape Painter, tells the story of the evolution and development of landscape painting in Ireland through the experience of six living artists: Sean McSweeney, Barrie Cooke, James O’Connor, Mary Lohan, Martin Gale and Dorothy Cross.
Land is at the heart of Irish history and society, and landscape painting is central to Irish art and by extension Irish identity. Embodying the spirit and soul of Ireland, landscape painters form a cornerstone of the visual art of Ireland.
The landscape painting tradition has its roots in the West of Ireland. From Sligo and Achill Island to the coasts of Connemara and Donegal, we need only recite the names – Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry, Sean Keating, Maurice McGonigal, Patrick Collins – and we bear witness to those iconic, timeless images of the Irish landscape. This splendid generation of painters, each gifted in an individual way, helped forge a visual identity for a newly independent Ireland.
Irish landscape painters have tended to display an acute emotional involvement with their subject, at times romantic and sometimes idealistic. This landscape tradition, and its relevance to art and to Irish society, inspired later artists of quality, principally Sean McSweeney, to a vocational commitment to the artistic life.
The painters and their tradition form the bedrock of this acclaimed documentary, originally produced in 2007 and directed by Sean Ó Mórdha.
Watch Soul of Ireland – The Landscape Painter now on RTÉ Player.
