Irish Artists Abroad: Art History Reframed - Spring 2026

Art Historian Dr Matthew Whyte offers a new lecture series, which takes the audience on an art-filled journey through the often beautiful, sometimes scandalous, and always fascinating moments in the development of Western civilisation.

The lectures can be attended as a series, but are also designed as standalone talks, which can be attended individually.

Dr Whyte has lectured in Art History in University College Cork since 2014, where he completed his PhD in the art and culture of Renaissance Italy.

Week 4: Irish Artists Abroad

This lecture examines Irish art in the early stages of modernity, focusing on how travel and sustained encounters with European modern art helped shape a distinctly Irish artistic response. As artists studied, lived, and exhibited abroad, they absorbed new approaches to form, colour, and subject matter emerging from centres such as Paris and London, while also negotiating questions of national identity and cultural independence. The lecture explores how these influences were adapted rather than simply adopted, resulting in work that balanced international modernist ideas with local experience, landscape, and social realities. Attention will be given to the tensions between tradition and innovation, and to the ways Irish artists forged individual paths within wider European movements. By tracing these exchanges and transformations, the lecture highlights how early Irish modernism emerged through dialogue, mobility, and creative reinterpretation.

1. Tues 20 Jan
Monastic Ireland

2. Tues 27 Jan
Ireland and the Academy

3. Tues 3 Feb
Irish Art in the Age of Enlightenment

4. Tues 10 Feb
Irish Artists Abroad

5. Tues 17 Feb
The National Collection in Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery

6. Tues 24 Feb
Irish Contemporary Art