17.07.2018, 13:00 P.M.

The nude is a contested genre in Irish art. As recently as 2010 Mick O’Dea, President of the Royal Hibernian Academy, could write: ‘even fundamentalist cultures have produced more nudes than we have’. This talk by William Laffan, co-curator of the exhibition Naked Truth, the Nude in Irish Art, which opens in the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork in mid-July, shows that there has in fact been a distinguished tradition of painting the nude going back to exhibits at the Society of Artists in the 1760s. The talk features the work of eighteenth-century artists such as James Barry, Hugh Douglas Hamilton and Robert Fagan and exciting contemporary practitioners who explore the unclothed body in their art including Amanda Coogan, Dorothy Cross and Kathy Prendergast.

William Laffan is an art historian and author, and former editor of Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, the Journal of the Irish Georgian Society.

Image: Cupid and Venus, Henry Tresham (1751-1814). Private Collection.