Rags and Rushes: Art and the Irish Artefact, c. 1900

This paper examines aspects of the lives and material culture of the Irish peasantry between 1880 and 1920. Within an interdisciplinary framework, based on a foundation of work on Irish vernacular furniture, it combines a variety of sources from art history, photography, ethnography and travel writing to postcards and poetry. The relative reliability of evidence from foreign visitors versus the native Irish is assessed. Areas of social and material culture, such as the 'stage Irishman', racism, why women didn't wear shoes, why boys were dressed as girls and the pre-arrangement of rural marriage, become touchstones for the analysis of myths and realities perpetuated through contemporary sources.