Oscar Wilde & Amy Brown

- L'arte non esprime mai altro che se stessa.
- Il pensiero e il linguaggio sono per l'artista gli strumenti della sua arte.
- L'arte è una passione.
- E' solo il battitore d'asta che può ammirare egualmente e imparzialmente tutte le scuole d'Arte.
- Esistono due modi per non apprezzare l'arte. Il primo consiste nel non apprezzarla. Il secondo nell'apprezzarla con razionalità.

Phoebe Anna Traquair | Arts and Crafts Movement painter

Inspired and visionary woman of her time, Phoebe Anna Traquair spent eight years of her life creating the herculean works which earned Mansfield Traquair the title of “Edinburgh’s Sistine Chapel”.
Her vivid, striking and truly beautiful murals interpret religious scenes, inspired by Blake and Renaissance, and reflect her status as an eminent figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Born in Dublin, Phoebe Anna Moss (1852-1936) married Scots palaeontologist Dr Ramsay Traquair in 1873, and moved to Edinburgh the following year.

Vincenzo Cardarelli / Jimmy Lawlor | I gabbiani /Seagulls

Non so dove i gabbiani abbiano il nido,
ove trovino pace.
Io son come loro
in perpetuo volo.
La vita la sfioro
com'essi l'acqua ad acciuffare il cibo.

Jimmy Lawlor, 1967 | Surrealist painter

Lorraine Christie, 1967 | My complex heart

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lorraine Christie - Irish painter, is a classically trained artist, who prefers to say that she is self taught as it has taken her years of living to develop her constantly evolving art. Has been a professional painter since 1990. Noted for her still-life paintings in luscious oils, Christie’s success started in her native Ireland and has spread world-wide, with her works included in many private and corporate collections in Europe, the U.S., Japan and the Republic of South Africa.

William Harnett | Trompe-l'œil still lifes painter

William Michael Harnett (1848-1892) was an Irish-American painter**, known for his trompe l'oeil still lifes of ordinary objects.

Harnett painted musical instruments, hanging game, and tankards, but also painted the unconventional Golden Horseshoe 1886, a single rusted horseshoe shown nailed to a board.

Francis Sevitt, 1942

Sevitt born in 1942 in Dublin, Ireland. Sevitt Francis art works are predominately women, not associated with any particular time or place -although Renaissance and Moorish influences are evident, writing alone or reading in groups of two mounting golden staircases, holding bouquets of lilies, or meditating near a vase of roses by a open window. The artist's studies of life and ambiance long gone are filled with gentle passion and sensuality. Through intricate details and rich, lustrous, yet somehow muted colors, each canvas conveys a personal imagination that suffuses everything it beholds - and represents - with quiet magic. Sevitt Francis work has been the feature of many exhibitions throughout Europe, Israel, Canada and the United States.

Ken Hamilton

The oil paintings seen on these pages are a characteristic sample of the work of the Irish artist Ken Hamilton. Born in Nigeria, West Africa, he returned to Ireland at the age of eleven where he eventually went to Art College in Belfast. Rejecting the trends of so-called contemporary art, he has sought to restore some of the ancient values of painting now discarded by so many.

His paintings do not openly deal with the angst of the artist's own soul or with the 'human condition' but rather seem to be a celebration of the visual pleasures of the world in which we live. By pointing towards these pleasures he is also reminding us of their fleeting nature, not to create in us a sense of despair but so that we may savour the moment and enrich our lives by taking our time and drawing our attention to them.