Five Irish Prints That Bring Ireland Home
A print does a job a photograph cannot. It puts a specific painting, made by a specific person in a specific year, on a wall you walk past every day — and after a few weeks you stop noticing it, and after a few months you notice it again differently.
These five are the ones that leave here most often. Each is printed with pigment inks on 250gsm archival matte paper, acid-free and uncoated, and can be framed in solid oak, ash, black or white, or left unframed for your own framer.
1. The Meeting on the Turret Stairs — Frederic William Burton, 1864
A knight catches a woman's hand on a spiral stair and presses his mouth to her forearm. She does not look at him. In a moment she will keep climbing, and they will not meet again.
In 2012 the Irish public voted it the country's favourite painting. It hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, where gouache on paper is fragile enough that it comes out of its light-protective cabinet for two hours a week. Most people who love it have never stood in front of it.
See the print · read the story behind it
2. Achill Horses — Mainie Jellett, 1941
Jellett brought cubism back from Paris in the 1920s and spent twenty years being told Ireland did not want it. When she showed abstract work in Dublin in 1923, the Irish Times printed a photograph of it beside its critic's verdict: "to me they presented an insoluble puzzle."
By 1941 she was turning the method on Irish subjects. Achill Horses is what happens when the rotating geometry she learned under Albert Gleizes is pointed at the west of Ireland — structure and rhythm, but unmistakably a place.
3. Cliffs of Moher
Roughly 214 metres of unbroken rock facing straight into the weather that made it. The cliffs are the most photographed thing in Ireland and most of those photographs are the same photograph; this one holds the scale, which is the only thing worth holding.
It is the most-visited page in this shop, and the large format is what people choose when they have a wall that can carry it.
4. The Song of the Mad Prince — Harry Clarke, 1917
Clarke was a stained-glass man first, and it shows in everything he drew for books: the density, the black, the way a small area of colour is made to do the work of a window.
He died in 1931 at forty-one, which is why this can be printed at all — his work has been in the public domain in Ireland and across the EU since 1 January 2002.
See it on canvas · the full Harry Clarke collection
5. Shades of Evening — Mildred Anne Butler
Butler painted the same garden at Kilmurry in Kilkenny for most of her life — doves, beeches, weather, the light going. She was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society and then largely forgotten for decades, which happened to a great many Irish women who painted.
This is the quiet one of the five. It suits a hallway or a room you sit in rather than pass through.
What you actually get
- 250gsm archival matte paper — acid-free, uncoated, FSC-certified
- Pigment inks, rated to hold their colour for a century out of direct sun
- Solid wood frames in oak, ash, black or white, with shatterproof glazing and a hanging kit — or unframed for your own framer
- Made to order, packed with corner protectors and internal bracing
- Free worldwide shipping
Every print is open edition. There is no numbered run, no artificial limit, and no reason to hurry.