VISUALISING HIBERNIA
FROM THE 17TH CENTURY TO TODAY
AN ONLINE EXHIBITION EXPLORING VISUAL DEPICTIONS OF HIBERNIA, THE FEMALE PERSONIFICATION OF IRELAND
For centuries, Ireland has been personified as a goddess-like figure embodying the land and its people. While this figure has been known by different names, when her earliest visual depictions emerged in the seventeenth century, she was identified using the Latin name for Ireland, Hibernia.
During the eighteenth century, Hibernia evolved into a distinct and recognisable figure, heavily influenced by ancient Greek and Roman representations of goddess and allegorical personifications. She was much reproduced across art forms and visual media through the both eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from paintings and sculptures to newspaper mastheads and political prints, and she continues to be used as a visual symbol for Ireland today. Read more.
Funded by the EU, this exhibition forms part of Dr Ciarán Rua O’Neill’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) project ‘Visualising Hibernia, c.1770-c.1930’. Curated by Dr Ciarán Rua O’Neill.
“Cease not ye gen’rous and protecting few; To guard Hibernia and her rights pursue”
Anon., The Patriot Soldier; or, Irish Volunteer. A Poem (1789)
HIBERNIA IN THE 17TH CENTURY
HIBERNIA IN THE 18TH CENTURY
HIBERNIA IN THE 19TH CENTURY
HIBERNIA FROM THE 20TH CENTURY TO TODAY
‘The heroine, as such, was utterly passive. She was Ireland or Hibernia. She was stamped, as a rubbed-away mark, on silver or gold; a compromised regal figure on a throne. Or she was a nineteenth-century image of girlhood, or a frontispiece of in a book of engravings’
Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995)