Revisiting an artist who captured the Famine’s zeitgeist

St John’s Day Eve by Daniel MacDonald

Daniel MacDonald is remembered as the only Irish artist to directly confront the Famine. When shown at his London debut exhibition, his 1847 painting An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of Their Store was received with stunned silence.

At the Gorry Gallery, a recently discovered cache of earlier drawings reveals him as an acute observer of ...