Tombs of a Departed Race

the long version

The subject matter of real human suffering did not lend itself easily to art. Ireland's Great Hunger--the worst demographic catastrophe of the nineteenth century--coincided with the invention of new mass-market periodicals. This essay considers the aesthetic, historical, technical and contextual roles of British newspaper illustration in interpreting the story of the Famine. Hiamh O'Sullivan examines how academically trained artists who had little experience of looking at unfiltered or distanced atrocity, became pictorial journalists and found new ways to image a trauma of unprecedented scale and horror.--back cover.