Since the Irish Literary Revival of the 1880s, Ireland has become world-famous for its writers, but Irish art has been slower to establish a national identity. Does it even exist as a cultural entity? Ireland has produced its share of famous artists, but their reputations have been made abroad. William Orpen left for the Slade in 1897 to become Edwardian England’s most fashionable portraitist; Francis Bacon left for bohemian Soho in 1926 to become one of the twentieth century’s iconic painters; and the leading contemporary abstract artist, Sean Scully, twice nominated for the Turner Prize, is based in New York. The one artist associated with the Gaelic revival who is known outside Ireland, at least by name, is Jack Butler Yeats, the poet’s brother – an expressionis