Potterton Homan Boeken

Offers a brief history of the museum, and shows examples from its collection of Renaissance and sixteenth- through nineteenth-century European paintings

Set in 1950s rural Ireland, Rathcormick is the engaging and beautifully written tale of a large and happy Protestant farming family: a stern and domineering Papa, a warm and practical Mama, their two daughters and six sons. For Homan, the youngest, life is a free-spirited awakening in a world of old-fashioned virtue and frugality. But no boyhood lasts forever, and an abrupt turn of events signals an end to the idyll. Exploring the values and mores of an almost lost part of Irish society Rathcormick is an unforgettable memoir: funny, compelling and original.

Ireland stood at the forefront of Westem European artistic culture in antiquity, when great passage graves were built; during the 7th and 8th centuries AD, when the Irish produced masterpieces of metalwork and manuscript illumination; and during the 18th century, an age of classical elegance. The achievements of these periods and others survive largely intact. This survey describes the whole sequence of Irish art and architecture.