Belfast in Irish Art: Cave Hill, City Hall, the Lagan and the Painters Belfast Produced

Belfast has never been the city Irish painting reached for first. Dublin had the academies and the Georgian squares; the West had the light. Belfast had linen mills, a shipyard and a lough full of weather, and for a long time artists treated it as a place to be from rather than a place to paint. Look again, though, and the city turns up everywhere: in watercolours from the hills above it, in the painters it produced and sent out into the world, and in a newer generation of prints that take its buildings seriously as subjects.

This guide walks through Belfast in Irish art: the views, the people, and the prints worth hanging if the city means something to you.

The view from the hills: Cave Hill and the Lagan valley

Before Belfast was an industrial city it was a town in a bowl, ringed by hills, and the early painters came at it from above. The long flat back of Cave Hill, the basalt ridge to the north, became the shorthand for "Belfast" in a landscape. You can find it closing the view in picture after picture.

Andrew Nicholl (1804–1886) is the painter to start with. Born in Belfast, he served an apprenticeship as a printer and worked as a compositor on the Northern Whig before a patron, Sir James Emerson Tennent, helped him get to London to train. He went on to become a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, spent three years teaching landscape drawing in Colombo, and came home painting with a brighter palette. The Ulster Museum now holds hundreds of his watercolours. His view of Newtownbreda Church, Belfast and Cave Hill is a quiet one: a single wind-bent pine, a girl in a red shawl on the path, and far off the spire and the ridge that tell you exactly where you are.

The painters Belfast sent out

The city's biggest contribution to Irish art may be the people it produced. John Lavery was born in Belfast in 1856, orphaned young and raised largely in Scotland, and went on to become one of the most fashionable portrait painters in London, the man who painted the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations and the portrait of his wife Hazel that appeared on Irish banknotes for decades. His work rarely shows Belfast itself, but the city claims him, and the Ulster Museum holds a strong group of his paintings. Our John Lavery artist page tells the full story, and the John Lavery collection gathers his prints in one place.

James Humbert Craig (1877–1944), born on Brougham Street in Belfast and almost entirely self-taught, is the other name worth knowing. He left the Belfast School of Art after a single term and spent his life painting the Glens of Antrim, Donegal and Connemara, keeping a studio at Cushendun; he was elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1928. Paul Henry, whose western cottages and cloud-heavy skies became the image of Ireland on railway posters, was also Belfast-born, as was the painter of the city's working streets, William Conor. Both are still in copyright, so we do not print them, but they belong in any account of where Irish art came from.

Learning, music and print: Queen's and the Harp Festival

Belfast's cultural history is not only painted. Queen's University was founded in 1845 as one of three Queen's Colleges in Ireland, and Charles Lanyon's red-brick front on University Road is the building most graduates carry around in their heads. A print of Queen's University Belfast makes an easy gift for anyone who studied there and moved away.

Older still is the Belfast Harp Festival of July 1792, when a teenage organist named Edward Bunting was hired to write down the tunes played by some of the last of the travelling Irish harpers. Without that commission a great deal of the old harp repertoire would simply have been lost. His portrait, the Edward Bunting print, sits naturally beside the music prints in a study or a room where people play.

The industrial city: cranes over the Lagan

For most of the twentieth century Belfast meant ships. The Harland & Wolff yard built the Titanic and her sisters, and the two great yellow gantry cranes, Samson and Goliath, went up in 1969 and 1974, more than half a century after the Titanic years. They were never the cranes that built her, but they have become the city's skyline signature anyway, visible from almost anywhere on the lough shore.

A Harland & Wolff cranes print works well in a kitchen, a hallway or an office: bold shapes, one colour doing the work, and a story everyone from the city already knows.

City Hall in colour

Belfast City Hall, finished in 1906 in Portland stone, is the building the whole city navigates by. Every protest, Christmas market and ordinary Saturday passes through Donegall Square. Most pictures of it are grey. Barra Ó Maoláin's Belfast City Hall print paints it in colour instead, closer to how it feels to walk past than how it photographs, and it hangs as comfortably above a sofa as above a desk.

His wider body of work, from the Antrim coast to Dublin, is on the Barra Ó Maoláin artist page.

Choosing a Belfast print

If you are buying for someone who left the city, a building they walked past every day usually lands better than a view they only ever saw on postcards: City Hall, Queen's, the cranes. For someone who loves older art, Nicholl's watercolour gives you Belfast before the mills, and pairs well with the Glens and the north coast. Our guide to the Glens of Antrim in Irish art picks up the story beyond the city, and the Irish landscape and seascape collection covers the rest of the island.

Or start broad and browse the full range of Irish art prints, every one printed to order on archival paper and shipped free worldwide.