Complete set of prints featuring all 42 individual portraits from the book 1916 Portraits and Lives. The portraits include: Augustine Birrell, Winifred Carney, Roger Casement, Éamonn Ceannt, Tom Clarke, Con Colbert, Michael Collins, John Bowen-Colthurst, James Connolly, Sean Connolly, Éamon de Valera, Edward Daly, Helen Gifford (Donnelly), Ivor Guest, Seán Heuston, Bulmer Hobson, Walter Edgeworth-Johnstone, Thomas Kent, Kathleen Lynn, John MacBride, Seán MacDiarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Eoin MacNeill, Michael Mallin, Peadar Macken, Constance Markievicz, John Maxwell, Helena Molony, Matthew Nathan, Richard O’Carroll, Elizabeth O’Farrell, Michael O’Hanrahan, Michael J. ‘The’ O’Rahilly, Patrick Pearse, Willie Pearse, Mary Perolz, Joseph Mary Plunkett, John Redmond, Desmond Ryan, Francis Shaw, Francis Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Skinnider.. The scenes include a scene of Dublin street vendors with Nelson’s pillar in the background, a scene of the printing of the proclamation and a scene of Patrick Pearse reading the proclamation in front of the GPO.
Each portrait is a lithograph printed onto 500x500mm (image area 280x270mm) cuts of uncoated Munken Lynx rough paper (170 g/m2), signed and numbered by David Rooney and limited to just 100 pressings.
Background to this print:
The Easter Rising was an armed insurrection that took place in Ireland during Easter Week, 1916. The Rising was mounted by Irish republicans, who aimed to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic while the United Kingdom was heavily engaged in World War I. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798. The '1916 Portraits and Lives' project looks at a variety of people - men and women, British and Irish, belligerents and pacifists - involved in the events of Easter week one-hundred years ago.
The Royal Irish Academy decided to publish a book of biographies of the people whose lives were, in one way or another, deeply involved in the Easter Rising: 1916 Portraits and Lives. The biographies were extracted from the Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography project. Artist David Rooney was commissioned by the Office of Public Works to illustrate the book, and the RIA team worked with David providing him with the research to inspire him to create new and original scraperboard portraits of each of the subjects and three larger scenes. The scraperboard portraits were acquired for the state collections.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography online currently contains almost 11,000 ‘lives’ of prominent men and women born in Ireland, and the noteworthy Irish careers of those born outside Ireland.
