Young Ireland – Grace Gifford | William Orpen Print

Irish Museum of Modern Art Collection.

Orpen painted Grace Gifford in 1907, when she was nineteen and his most gifted student at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. He called her Young Ireland — a title that turned out to be more accurate than he could have known.

Nine years later, on the night of 3 May 1916, Grace married the poet and 1916 leader Joseph Plunkett in the chapel at Kilmainham Gaol. He had been sentenced to death for his part in the Easter Rising. They were allowed ten minutes together before he was taken out and shot.

Orpen was in France by then, painting portraits for the British establishment. His commanding officer on the Western Front was the man who had arranged Plunkett's execution. Orpen spent only a single day in Ireland between 1915 and his death in 1931. Whether he knew about Grace's marriage, her arrest during the Civil War, her internment in the same Kilmainham Gaol where she had been a bride — there is no record of what he thought.

This is the painting he made of her before any of it happened — a young woman looking directly out of the canvas, the confidence of a generation that was about to change everything.

This archival giclée print is made on heavyweight fine art paper with fade-resistant inks, built to last.

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