After the Bombardment — Easter Rising 1916 Fine Art Print

After the Bombardment — Easter Rising 1916 Fine Art Print

On the morning of Friday 28 April 1916, Dublin's greatest thoroughfare lay in ruins. This extraordinary painting by Archibald McGoogan captures Sackville Street — now O'Connell Street — in the immediate aftermath of British artillery shelling during the Easter Rising. Working from his own photographs and on-the-spot sketches, McGoogan created an image that is part eyewitness document, part elegy for a city transformed overnight.

About the Painting

After the Bombardment (1916) focuses on the ruined corner of Sackville Street and Bachelor's Walk, where Kelly's gunpowder shop has been reduced to rubble. Along the mid-ground, only fragments remain of what was once Dublin's premier commercial street — the facade of Clery's drapery warehouse, the outer walls of the Hibernian Bank, the shell of the D.B.C. premises. A dark, smoke-filled sky hangs over the scene. Almost hidden in the gloom, British marksmen fire across the street, while a machine-gunner operates from an improvised armoured car on O'Connell Bridge — Dublin-built vehicles that prefigured the tanks soon to appear on the Western Front.

McGoogan exhibited the work at Combridge's gallery in Dublin in January 1917, within a year of the Rising. A widely circulated print of the painting carried the caption "The Holocaust of Ireland's Greatest Thoroughfare, Easter Week, 1916" — and it helped fix this image of a shattered Dublin in the Irish public imagination for generations.

The original oil on canvas (61.2 × 91.8 cm) is held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Ireland

About the Artist

Archibald McGoogan (1866–1931) was an Irish painter, designer, and illustrator known for his documentary approach to significant historical subjects. His ability to combine on-the-ground observation with carefully composed atmospheric painting gave After the Bombardment an immediacy that purely photographic records of the period could not match.

Cultural & Historical Significance

The Easter Rising of 1916 was the defining moment in Ireland's path to independence. In 2026, we mark the 110th anniversary of that week — and McGoogan's painting remains one of the most powerful visual records of what it cost. This fine art print brings a piece of that history into your home, reproduced to the highest archival standard from the National Gallery of Ireland's collection.

Print Details

• Open edition fine art print
• Printed on 250gsm premium fine art paper
  
• Landscape format — maintains the proportions of the original painting
• Unframed, shipped flat in protective packaging
• Free shipping worldwide