VISUALISING HIBERNIA
AN ONLINE EXHIBITION EXPLORING VISUAL DEPICTIONS OF HIBERNIA, THE FEMININE 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 eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, from paintings and sculptures to coins and political ephemera, and she continues to be used as a visual symbol for Ireland today.
WEBSITE UNDER DEVELOPMENT
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’.
“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 18TH CENTURY
HIBERNIA IN THE 19TH CENTURY
HIBERNIA IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
‘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)