After the Bombardment, Archibald McGoogan's 1916 painting of the ruined Sackville Street, Dublin, after the Easter Rising

The 1916 Easter Rising in Art: Ruined Streets, Portraits and the Proclamation

Few weeks in Irish history are as well documented in words as Easter Week 1916. In pictures, the record of the ruins made on the spot is slimmer. The works that were made, and the portraits of people who had been painted before any of it happened, are what this guide is about.

A week, briefly

On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, Patrick Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the General Post Office on Sackville Street, the thoroughfare renamed O'Connell Street in 1924. The week that followed brought artillery, fire and street fighting to the centre of Dublin. The seven signatories of the Proclamation were executed at Kilmainham Gaol in May. The city centre they left behind was a field of ruins, and that is what the first artists drew.

The street as it was

To see what was lost, it helps to look at the street before. Samuel Frederick Brocas drew the GPO beside Nelson's Pillar, and Henry Brocas the Younger engraved it: a broad Georgian boulevard of carriages and strollers. The GPO was completed in 1818 and the Pillar went up in 1809 (it was demolished in 1966). The print, from the National Gallery of Ireland collection, is a calm baseline against which everything else in this guide reads more sharply.

Print of the General Post Office and Nelson's Pillar on Sackville Street, Dublin, drawn by Samuel Frederick Brocas
The GPO and Nelson's Pillar, Sackville Street, drawn by Samuel Frederick Brocas.

Two eyewitness views of the ruins

Archibald McGoogan (1866-1931) worked from his own photographs and on-the-spot sketches to paint After the Bombardment. It shows the corner of Sackville Street and Bachelor's Walk, with the shell of Clery's, the Hibernian Bank and the wreck of Kelly's gunpowder shop under a smoke-dark sky. Look closely and you can find British marksmen in the gloom and a machine-gunner working from an improvised armoured car on O'Connell Bridge. He exhibited it at Combridge's gallery in Dublin in January 1917, and a widely circulated print of it fixed the image of a shattered Dublin in public memory. The original oil is in the National Gallery of Ireland.

After the Bombardment by Archibald McGoogan, a painting of the burnt-out ruins of Sackville Street, Dublin, in 1916
Archibald McGoogan, After the Bombardment.

The second record is much smaller. Edmond Delrenne, a Belgian artist active in Dublin around 1915-1918, drew the burnt-out street in charcoal and watercolour with white highlights. The sheet measures just 17.1 by 26 cm and is catalogued as NGI.18486. Its modest scale is part of its force: it reads like a sketchbook page made by someone standing in the debris.

Framed print of Edmond Delrenne's 1916 drawing The Ruins of O'Connell Street, showing the burnt-out buildings near the GPO
Edmond Delrenne, The Ruins of O'Connell Street, in a wood frame.

The people before the history

Some of the most affecting 1916 images were painted years earlier. In 1907 William Orpen painted his student Grace Gifford and called the portrait Young Ireland, after the 1840s political and cultural movement. On the night of 3 May 1916 she married the poet Joseph Plunkett in the chapel at Kilmainham Gaol, hours before his execution. The painting, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, shows none of that. It is a young woman looking straight out, and the gap between the picture and the history is exactly why it stays with you.

Framed print of William Orpen's 1907 portrait Young Ireland, of Grace Gifford
William Orpen, Young Ireland (Grace Gifford, 1907).

For a commemorative piece rather than a period one, the store also carries The Seven Signatories, an original work by Ó Maoláin portraying Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, Mac Diarmada, MacDonagh, Ceannt and Plunkett, made for the 110th anniversary.

Hanging it well

The ruins prints are strongest in a hallway, study or stairwell where they can be looked at slowly, and the landscape format of McGoogan suits a wide wall. Portraits such as Orpen's work as a counterpoint beside them. If you are building a wider wall around Irish history, the full 1916 Easter Rising collection and the broader Irish historical prints are good places to continue, and everything sits within the Irish art prints hub.

Back to blog